The Black Panther: Marvel teaches us something about healthy narcissism.

Marvel's Black Panther is a film I have seen twice in the theater, something I rarely do and also something I was initially reluctant to do with this one; but I was ultimately glad that I did.  I first saw it with the reluctant son while visiting him at college.  It was a father/son weekend, so the reluctant wife did not go along.  In between, I watched Infinity Wars and also dialed up Captain America – Civil War on the home video front just so that I could more deeply immerse myself in the Marvel universe.  Why not?  It seems that most of the world has done this – and that an entire army of CGI specialists are being employed and having their moment on the screen as the theater stays full waiting for the enigmatic teaser at the tail end of the credits after each “episode”.  Something this enthralling to so many of us must have something to say about us, n’est pas?

Well, the Black Panther turns out, I think, to have a lot to say about us, and stands in a very interesting relationship to the predominantly white and male universe that Marvel has rolled out to this point.  And one of the things that it has to say has to do with the importance of women, something that I was so unused to looking for in this type of film, but perhaps in films generally (OK, if I want to heap more concern on it, maybe I overlook women’s roles outside of the movie theater, too), that I didn’t pay enough attention to the women the first time I saw the film and did not notice the different roles that the women around the Black Panther played in helping him be the character that he so nobly portrays.

The Black Panther is T’Challa (played by Chadwick Boseman), the leader of an (imaginary) African nation Wakanda that has existed in secret for hundreds of years.  T’Challa’s father, T’Chaka (played by John Kani) was killed at the beginning of the Captain Marvel: Civil Wars film where the Black Panther first appeared.  In that film, the Black Panther does not take sides in the Civil War – he is consistently focused on finding the perpetrator of the crime that sets the action in motion and, because he is not caught up in the posturing and bickering and fighting, he gets the man who killed his father and brings him to justice.  He is the quiet superhero who gets the job done while everyone else is raging at each other.

He is also distinguished from the other superheroes because he is understated and self-effacing.  He does not call attention to himself in the vain, preening, OK, narcissistic ways that the other heroes do.  We are drawn, I think, to Iron Man, for instance, because he so clearly needs our approval.  The Black Panther is more like Bruce Banner, as played by Mark Ruffalo.  He is deferential, with a wry sense of humor, but also a wry sense of himself.  There is a kind of “how did I get here?” expression that pervades his character.

So I will talk about the complicated movie that gives the backstory on the Black Panther from the point of view of the women in the story – they, his connection with Africa, and perhaps the mysterious substance Vibranium – may distinguish the Black Panther, I think, from the other superheroes in this universe.  In the process of doing this, I may shed light on certain aspects of the movie, but will miss some of the important plot lines – lines that were clearer to me on first viewing.

Ramonda (played by Angela Bassett) was the female figure that I could distinguish on the first showing.  Wise and older, Ramonda is T’Challa’s mother and a regal queen who, as a mother, has a good handle on the strengths and weaknesses of her own children.  She knows them, she is proud and unquestioningly supportive of them; she also very quickly moves from being Queen to being a refugee when T’Challa is presumed dead.  And, as important as she may be, she stood out to me as kind of a stock character. 

The problem I had was with distinguishing between the other three women who supported and protected T’Challa.  I think I had this problem for multiple reasons.  Probably the first reason was because of my male chauvinism, which is intimately bound up with focusing on the male hero – not on those who are supporting him.  This was aided and abetted, however, by the cool irreverence with which each of the three treated him – irreverence that bordered on disdain – and it could be read as that except that they were also clearly deferential.  Each was attached to him, in her own way, and each was ultimately caring for him, concerned for him and supportive of him, but also cool to him.  They were, none of them, subservient even though each was ruled by him.  These similarities in their relatedness to T’Challa served to group them, in my mind, into a sort of female archetype that hid the differences in their characters and in their relationship to T’Challa.

I remember once lounging at the pool with three of my women friends around me.  A male friend swam over from the other side of the pool where he had been observing us.  He commented that seeing me from across the pool allowed him to imagine that the interactions between us were much lovelier than it felt when he joined us – where he experienced the women – in relation to him and to me – much more like the many sisters he grew up with than whatever it was that he was imagining – and envying – from afar. 

The first woman of the troika in the movie that we are introduced to is Okoye (played by Danai Gurira).  She is the general of the royal army.  She is striking for her shaved head and laser like focus on threats and how to address them.  Her irreverence/disdain is expressed towards T’Challa in the opening scene when she predicts that he will freeze when he comes face to face with his former lover whom they are bringing her back from her work as a spy.  Okoye, the head of the Wakandan special forces and T’Challa’s chief body guard, is deeply loyal- but it turns out that this loyalty is to Wakanda and not primarily to T’Challa, despite the fact that she is very personally attached to him.  When he has been apparently overthrown, she, in spite of herself and her personal loyalties, pledges her support to the usurper and to the continuity of Wakanda.   

The second woman, Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong’o), is the ex-girlfriend whom T’Challa “rescues” from her undercover mission of protecting women who are being enslaved in Nigeria.  In fact, she doesn’t need rescuing, but he needs her to be present at his coronation.  She has the power both to freeze T’Challa – he stumbles to be coherent when first seeing her again, almost costing them their lives - but also to encourage him, especially if he wants to win her back, to reconsider the non-interference policy that Wakanda has practiced for centuries, hiding their technological superiority from the western world.  As his potential queen, she holds considerable power – but she is in no hurry to utilize it – if he does not agree with what she proposes, she will go back to doing what she loves – and, though she will be disappointed that he did not see the light, she is not dependent on his doing that nor does she “need” him.

  

Finally, Shuri (played by Letitia Wright) is T’Challa’s kid sister who is brighter than T’Challa, sassy, and plays Q to his James Bond, providing him with gadgets, including his suit.  Shuri makes fun of T’Challa, checking whether he froze and delighting in the fact that he did, but also suckering him into a prat fall and disparaging his forever bringing in broken white boys for her to fix.  She is also the one of this troika that is most able to express the ways in which she idolizes him and is most open about how attached she is to him and fearful of losing him.

In so far as comic book characters are shaped by their relationships, including their early relationships with other comic book characters – so in so far as this is a work that expresses something true about human relationships and human development, T’Challa’s character is different from the other superheroes, I believe, because of the relationships with these four women.  And the particular way in which his character is different is that he is a narcissistically healthy individual.  His powers are more thoroughly and complexly woven into who it is that he essentially is rather than being add-ons or unwanted intrusions or the result of some traumatic transformation.  He is thoughtful about his powers in ways that the other superheroes are not, and he is grounded in his sense of himself in ways that he will use them in ways that they are not.

Now, as I write this, I realize that only Thor has grown up in a culture where his powers are an expected part of who it is that he is.  But Thor’s royal family does not provide the kind of nurturance that T’Challa’s does.  Of course, T’Challa’s family includes the shameful secret of T’Chaka’s murder of his brother for telling the secrets of the culture – and the subsequent abandonment of T’Chaka’s brother’s son, T’Challa’s cousin – the usurper who comes home to challenge and apparently successfully overthrow T’Challa - N'Jadaka or, by his American name, Erik "Killmonger" Stevens (played by Michael B. Jordan).  But let me return to that later.

Narcissism, or self-love, is, I think, a necessary and central component of every single person’s development. In successful narcissistic development, self-esteem is woven seamlessly into who it is that the person is – so much so that the issue does not seem to emerge.  Adjectives like self-confident, easy to be with, centered, psychologically healthy, and, apparently paradoxically, selfless - characterize these people.  So the last thing that we are likely to think about is their narcissism.  Narcissism has a bad connotation.  The narcissist all but screams “Look at me!” partly as a result of fearing that if we don’t do that – if we don’t admire them – they will cease to exist – it is only in other’s eyes and minds that they feel alive because they haven’t been able to internalize a stable sense of themselves as valuable that allows them to navigate the most painful moments in life – the moments of narcissistic injury.  But I think the narcissistically “healthy” individuals have not somehow been able to bypass the painful process of narcissistic development and facing moments of narcissistic injury, but they have actually engaged in integrating self-confidence into their core selves as a result of experiencing and surviving these moments – more or less intact.

T’Challa, as narcissistically competent as he is, is vulnerable to narcissistic crises.  The “freezing” that occurs is at the moment when the object of his love – the person he admires, but also the person whom he most wants to be admired by – is in his sights.  He questions whether she will admire him.  Now, he may also, perhaps, be swept away by her beauty and being in her presence, but all three women emphasize and don’t let him not know that they know that he froze.  That he asked himself, “Am I worthy?”  And he knows that he cannot answer this question, it must be answered by others – by her.  That is, his value is ultimately not internally determined, but determined by others.

When Barry Larkin, the gifted shortstop for the Cincinnati Reds, was inducted into the baseball hall of fame, he related the following story.  When it was apparent that he was not just going to be a professional ballplayer but a star, an older star had him lie on his back at second base in the one the large baseball parks.  The other player asked him how he felt.  Larkin responded that he felt small.  The other ballplayer remarked, “Good.  Remember that feeling.  Baseball is big.  You are small.  Baseball is bigger than you.” 

T’Challa is reminded by these women who love and adore him that, as important as he is, he has limits, that he does not know it all, and that it is the tribe, not the individual; it is the country, not the person, that matters.  T’Challa is selfless not because he is not narcissistic, but because he is deeply narcissistic and deeply narcissistically loved, but also known by others and because he knows himself that he has limits and that he is loved not in spite of those limits – but partly because of them.  Despite his becoming the king, it is the country that he is king of that is important, and he should be working to be worthy of the honor of his crown, and the country is there to be served by him, not the other way around.

I think it is far from accidental that the most comfortable and human of the Marvel Superheroes is African and that he radiates not the external powers that we might envy, but the internal power that we hold most dear, but that is very hard for us to achieve.  James Cone, in his theological position that the cross and the lynching tree are equivalent,  articulates the ways that being the one who is “done to”, which is the basis of the Christian religion, is an easier position from which to consolidate a character of integrity than from the position of the one who is “doing to”.   In so far as T’Challa is a thinly veiled African American character, but also a representative of an entire continent that has been “done to”, I think he is being used to represent how this development can perhaps best take place from a position of apparent disempowerment.

Of course, the story of his cousin, N'Jadaka, is the cautionary tale that clarifies that just being done do does not make one noble.  In fact,  N'Jadaka is ultimately depicted as terminally wounded and unsavable, even with all the Wakandan resources, and his wounds lead him to destroy many lives and nearly the country of Wakanda.  He represents the taking on of a false version – a comic book version, if you will - of the white power approach to the world – the approach that the only way to power is to subdue others – to subjugate them and to exploit them – to become colonizers who are better at it than the white man.  This is a failed narcissistic path that is all too common. This is not T’Challa’s path.

I think that T’Challa, determined by the dynamically complex relationships he maintains with the four female characters, proposes that narcissistic fulfillment does not come as N’Jadaka proposes from taking what was not given to you by using the full measure of your powers (as the colonizers do – taking home their booty and then protecting it to essentially prove their worth), but it comes from continuing to live – openly and constantly -- in tension with those around you who are constantly evaluating you and from whom you are therefore in constant danger of narcissistic failure – but these selfsame people are the  those who love him most deeply and part of that love is to both support but also help keep his self-love in check.  Another way of saying that is that narcissistic health is not some goal that is achieved, but a constant state of self-regulation that occurs in the context of our relationships with people who (when all is going well) love you.  In T’Challa’s case, though he has the resources to move ahead, he is constantly in danger of losing them, and the women around him continually remind him of that so that he does not forget that and lose their esteem and value that he ultimately depends on.  

What is endearing about T'Challa's character is that he wears the mantel of this complex set of interactions lightly.  He knows that the judgment, critical though it may be, comes from a place of love and caring.  That those around him are not saying, “You have to live up to this standard or I won’t love you,” which is the kind of message that creates problematic narcissistic development, nor are they saying, “Whatever you do is fine with me because I love you,” which is a promise that is very hard for people to keep.  Instead they offer a reality based and orienting message, “We hold you to a high but we believe achievable standard based on who you we know you to be.”  And he says, in effect, “Yeah, I am that guy – or I’m trying to be.  Sometimes I will fail.  Sometimes I will disagree.  We will talk about it when that happens and work something out.”

Now, wouldn't it be nice if we all had a network of at least four people who were working with us at all times to help us maintain our internal equilibrium?  In the real world, this kind of attuned connection, ideally, takes place early in our development.  We carry forward the expectation that some form of it will be available through the connections that we have with others.  Narcissistic issues - problems with managing interpersonal relationships - emerge when there hasn't been enough early attunement for us to reasonably expect it later - so we withdraw from the world at the slightest hint of rejection - or we parade our accomplishments before others as if that would make up for what is missing.  An important part of long term treatment of narcissism is providing the kind of reparative attunement that will afford people the opportunity to join in the network of sustaining interactions, that include survivable narcissistic injuries, in the course of everyday living.

I watched the movie 42, another Chadwick Boseman film, as part of the process of grieving his loss.  I have written also written about The Avengers End Game, Captain Marvel, Age of Ultron and, in the DC Universe, the movie Wonder Woman.

Of course, I have written about many other things as well - to access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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Jeremy Safran - A remembrance of a clinician/researcher.

Dr. Jeremy Safran, a psychoanalyst and clinical researcher, died this week in a random act of violence.  He was killed by an intruder in his home in Brooklyn.  The piece below was written about three years ago based on my one and only meeting with him, when I interviewed him to write a brief biography about him for a professional publication.  The discussion ended up being about the relationship between clinical practice and research.  It was wonderful to spend time with him and to get to know him.  I regret not having spent more time with him since then – something that now can’t be changed.

     The intended focus of the conversation was the relationship between research and clinical practice.  Dr. Safran talked about becoming a therapist more generally and then on how engaging in the process of research informed his clinical practice, on many different levels.  The most fascinating aspect of this, to me, was that he talked about learning how to do therapy from listening in his role of student and then as researcher to the work of other clinicians.  He said, in essence, that he “borrowed” interventions – not necessarily particular words, though it could be that, but relational attitudes toward patients in particular situations where these had been modeled to have a particular effect.  In some sense, then, Dr. Safran’s development as a clinician has been the result less of having incorporated edicts derived from his or other’s work, and more from being exposed to the clinical thinking and functioning of others and integrating that into his own idiosyncratic approach to the treatment process.  Dr. Safran seems to be saying that you should make your own therapeutic mélange of whatever you are exposed to – whether that is research, supervision, or observing others interact.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Dr. Safran began the interview by introducing himself and talking about his development as a clinician and as a researcher.

    If you had asked Dr. Safran in high school what he was going to be, he would have said that he was going to be a journalist.  “I like writing,” he said.  When he first went to college, he enrolled in a liberal arts curriculum, did not major in psychology, but he was reading a lot of Freud, Erich Fromm, and other “popular” writers on psychology.  He dropped out of college in the middle of his first year, leaving school for a couple of years and moving from Calgary to Vancouver to live with his cousins.  He reflected that he did not have a plan – his 17 year old daughter thinks about what she is doing, while at her age, he did not.  He went on a long and winding trip from Vancouver to Mexico that included a stop in New York where he picked up more books on psychology.  He began to develop a notion that he would like to be a therapist someday.  His father had died when he was twelve years old.  “I’d been through something painful.  There was a sense that I had grappled with things… I think I betrayed a precocious wisdom; my friends picked up on that and turned to me for advice.  I felt older.”

     Safran eventually enrolled in college again in Vancouver and this time he majored in psychology.  He read widely – about experimental psychology, but also clinical work, including R.D. Laing whose humanistic treatment of schizophrenics led him to read Sullivan, whom he found fascinating.  At about the same time he became interested in Buddhism and compared the Sullivanian self-system with the Zen Buddhist system.  Safran recalls “There wasn’t much in the way of psychoanalysis in Canada.  The little exposure I had had to do with Ego Psychology which I read and which I didn’t find particularly engaging or interesting – I was more taken by existential thinking – the whole theme of people being able to communicate with each other through intersubjective relatedness…  I got interested in strategic interventions; Bateson, Jay Haley, Milton Erikson.  I was interested in using hypnotism and strategic interventions.”  He had an image of the therapist not just as a helper, but as a wizard – so he thinks now that there must have been some sort of power motivation in there.  He was not particularly focused on going to graduate school and was a “middling” student, skipping classes, but reading broadly.  He notes that he was at a liberal arts college and got away with murder, but also learned a great deal on his own terms.  He applied to a few programs, was initially rejected by all of them, but eventually gained admission when another student did not follow through on the position offered. 

     Safran recalled, “It was a behavioral program.  I had nothing but critical feelings about behaviorism...  I got accepted knowing that I didn’t belong there.  I was at the bottom of my class.  The courses were terrible.  There was no clinical training.  It was absurd really.  I basically thought I wanted to learn therapy, so I volunteered at a suicide prevention place.”  He went to the homes of two suicidal people, and realized that he had nothing helpful to offer individuals who were truly suffering.  But there was a new faculty member in counseling education, Les Greenberg, and someone told Safran “This guy is good, you should get to know him.”  He sat in on a course that Greenberg taught, “Theories of Psychotherapy. “ Greenberg was a psychotherapy researcher, and “he had me thinking about how to do research which is meaningful for a clinician.”  He was also trained as a Gestalt therapist. “He and I collaborated.  I found I had an interest in theory and I had an ability to write. How I ended up in academia when I had no interest in academia was because we had this relationship and were writing these things, and struggling with concepts that were not straightforward.”  He wrote with Greenberg about theories but did not join him in doing psychotherapy process based research.  At that time, cognitive therapy was just beginning to emerge and, “with all my interests in psychoanalysis and existential psychology, at least the cognitive folks were interested in the mind… [I realized that] one of the ways I could contribute was to learn cognitive psychology.”  He went on to write articles with Les Greenberg on refining cognitive therapy theory by bringing in ideas from cognitive psychology and emotion theory.  And then, based on a seminar with Jerry Wiggins, he wrote about refining cognitive therapy theory with ideas from interpersonal theory.

    Academically, Safran’s dissertation was not in psychotherapy at all, but rather in social cognition, which was an emerging area at the time.  It was well received, but as a friend asked him, “Isn’t this something that we already know?”  “Yes,” he responded, “but we still have to demonstrate it.”  Despite his public defense, privately he had limited belief in research and believes it possible that he could easily have not done research.  “I was pretty cynical about research… I’m not sure I was a true believer in research.  I’m not sure I am one now.  I wanted to do something meaningful.”  This is where Les Greenberg enters the picture again.  Greenberg worked with Safran to identify, in videotaped psychotherapies, ruptures in the alliance, and then to listen to how they got repaired.  Safran worked to develop a qualitative model, which in many ways has been the core of his empirical research program since then.   

     So, how did he learn to do therapy?  “The cognitive therapy and behavioral therapy I was learning, I just couldn’t use it, I couldn’t see how it would be helpful to anybody.  I wasn’t learning anything from my professors.  I was in a couple of Gestalt Therapy training groups with Les Greenberg.  I thought he was a pretty skilled therapist, I watched him.  I saw what he was doing.  I watched carefully.  I saw what seemed to be helpful and what wasn’t.   I was reading widely – I’d started to read Merton Gill and Heinz Kohut, a little bit of Kernberg.  I did not have any clinical supervision that I found helpful.  None.  I don’t think I’m a very good candidate for clinical supervision.“ 

     Safran moved to Toronto and joined a Gestalt therapy group with Les Greenberg’s mentor.  “I was watching what he was doing.  He had some sort of brilliance about him.  He had this finely attuned sense of what was happening in the moment.  He could really track it.  This keen, intense ability to see something that was happening and pick up on it just as it was emerging.  The incredible laser-like quality of his attention was phenomenal.”  In addition, Safran was seeing a lot of patients, reading a lot, observing himself, and writing, which allowed him to put it all together.  “In many ways I was doing therapy that was consistent with the contemporary relational psychoanalytic sensibility, but heavily influenced by the experiential sensibility and focusing on unpacking what’s happening in the here and now; very process oriented; very light on interpretations.  It had much more of a kind of exploratory quality to it.  And I was writing, and my writing helped inform – helped me think – about what I was doing.”

     The other thing that Safran sees as critical is that while Greenberg is a theorist, the other therapist that he had seen in action was not a theorist – he demonstrated an implicit knowledge of what he was doing.  In terms of his research, Safran was interested in articulating the implicit knowledge of the skilled therapist; working from what the therapist “knew” how to do to describing this knowledge in a way that was transferable to others whose intuitions were not yet as keenly developed.  The process of turning that implicit functioning into another language, something that is communicable, is something that he has tried to do in his research program.  And the process of doing this helped Safran, himself, learn how to do therapy.  He believes that not a lot of psychotherapy research does that well, including , often, his own, but that is where the real gold is.

     In 1990, Safran moved to New York and took a teaching position at the Derner Institute.  He was a cognitive therapist by formal training, but he felt that he needed analytic terms to be understood in the heavily analytic environment of New York.  He had never seen a psychoanalyst, but was now interacting with analysts all the time. He started analytic training, and began translating his work more and more explicitly into analytic terms, and at some point psychoanalysis moved from being a second language to being his own.  He was mentored and supervised by many people, but again found this to be less helpful than he would have hoped.  He enjoyed supervision with Steve Mitchell.  “We would have fun – we were playing with ideas.  I had a number of other supervisors, well known in the field.  They weren’t paying attention to me or what I needed.  They were spouting their theories.  I could read their books to find out about that.  I had read their books.  They weren’t speaking to my needs with this specific patient right now.”

     Dr. Safran, then, is someone who has developed as a clinician less as the result of having emulated others in a passive way, through a process, for instance, like imitation, but he has been able to incorporate the ideas of others into his own unique perspective by actively including them in his writing as he has struggled to articulate what it is that is taking place in successful psychotherapeutic and ultimately psychoanalytic interactions – his own and those that he observes in his research. 

     When I met with him, Dr. Safran was teaching and supervising and he stated that people find his supervision helpful.  People vary, and he saw that he was on the far end of needing to do his own work.  Students of his would use his words – he saw them as not yet being themselves in the moment, so that they would say what they have learned in supervision or say explicitly, “As Dr. So and So would say…”  On the other hand, there was the Gestalt therapist in Toronto whom he emulated, and Dr. Safran would hear the interventions of this therapist coming out in his own practice for years and he would think, “Wait a minute, that’s not me.”  There was this embodied sense of taking on the work of this other person.  He recognized within himself the importance of modelling – of learning from what others say and do, that helped him grow as a therapist.  While this occurred in watching this particular therapist, it happened most frequently in the process of doing his research.

     The value of research to Dr. Safran, as I hinted at the beginning of this post, was doing the research.  It allowed him to think about things and to see things from a different perspective.  Doing clinical research, watching tapes, thinking about what is going on in the consulting room, thinking about how to operationalize concepts; all of this helped him to get a clearer understanding of what should take place in a therapy that is likely to have a good outcome.  When he surveyed researchers, they actually rank reading research pretty low in terms of the impact of that on their own clinical practice, while doing research helped them, from their perspective, become better clinicians.

     Dr. Safran was not influenced by outcome research.  He believed it to be necessary.  He thought that we need it to show other people that psychotherapy works.  But it is not likely, from his perspective, to help us do our work.  But, in general, outcome research, beyond making a case to others of the impact of our work, does not, in his mind, help us become better clinicians.

      On the other hand, Safran said, if you have a research team and you have students or colleagues looking at the same tape, thinking about the same phenomena, and not just theorizing, but actually looking at the tapes and talking about it – the process of studying with others adds a layer of understanding of the psychotherapeutic/psychoanalytic process that you can’t achieve with theory alone.  There is a richness that comes out of that.  Unfortunately this richness is not generally shared with the world at large – the process of doing research can get lost in the process of reporting the results of the research. 

     When we listen to actual tapes of treatment, Dr. Safran believed, we become charitable about the work.  Every now and then someone does a brilliant thing, but for the most part the work is more blue collar.  When I met with him, he was going through an archive of cases with brief relational therapy – a 30 session protocol that was being taught and recorded fifteen years ago.  Based on outcome measures, the treatments were broken into good outcome and bad outcome cases.  He was watching the good outcome cases with his research team and the students were saying that it is terrible work.  And he agreed that the work is not what we might do from the vantage point of the contemporary observer but something of value is happening between the therapist and the patient.  So the challenge to the raters is to understand what it is that is occurring, and also to realize that there is a much broader spectrum of what is useful than we might believe from one theoretical or even empirically informed perspective.  Good treatment can look quite different from what we might expect it to.  And if clinicians were able to access other’s work, they might become much more charitable about their own work.

     So, one of the things that came out of his work is that the biggest  barrier to doing good work is the idea that therapy needs to be done in this or that particular way.  This can inhibit therapists and prevent them from doing their best work.  Because, in fact, when we listen to effective psychotherapy, we find that there is enormous variance in what people do, and this should empower clinicians to work more broadly rather than more narrowly.  Ironically, then, manualized treatments, when they offer limited or very narrow treatment options (which not all do) may be offering something that is contradictory to Dr. Safran’s empirical experience and, while the treatments may end up being empirically supported, they may not be teaching good clinical practice that will, in the long run, have the best empirical support. 

     There are also restrictions on seeing and hearing therapists doing therapy.  Clinicians can be inhibited about recording their work and privacy concerns also interfere with collecting and disseminating examples of good therapeutic work.  Safran noted that APA has built a massive video archive of therapists working with patients.  As someone who has done a one therapy and a six therapy taped segment for the series, he is concerned about the generalizability of these sessions to other work that therapists have done.  He notes that there are four camera people in the room, and though something can be done of value, it is much harder to do the work when it is being observed in this intrusive way.  Yet it does allow students to see the work that therapists actually do – and some of the warts, as well as brilliant moments, do come through.  

     Of course, another impediment is finding the time to watch the tapes.  In research, such time is built into the process, but actually creating space to do this as part of a training process is difficult.  Further, finding the time to watch the tapes with others to be able to discuss them can be difficult.  It would have to compete with time spent reading theory, discussing current work in supervision and other places, and time spent in more traditional pedagogical pursuits.  It occurs to me that the flipped classroom might be a good way to approach this – in the flipped classroom, students prepare for class by watching videotaped lectures, which they then discuss in class.  In this case, students could prepare by watching videotaped sessions and then processing them in class.

     For more seasoned clinicians, taping their own sessions to listen to in consultation groups – or having senior clinicians present recorded hours as part of their training - might be helpful.  It would also be possible to build a library of clinical hours – easier with audio than with video recording – where the identifying material, such as names and place names, is changed.  In any case, the surprising, at least to me, message from Jeremy Safran could be summarized as something like this;  "Clinicians are good at what they do.  And what they do is not perfect, nor does it need to be.  Listening to, thinking about, and making sense of the work that clinicians do helps researchers, and could help the rest of us, learn to be better clinicians."  

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The Death of Stalin

The opening sequence of this film, The Death of Stalin, illustrates the power and the terror of a dictator.  Stalin rules all of Russian with an iron fist.  He calls the symphony house to request a recording of the program that has been broadcast this evening on state radio.  They made no recording.  The manager of the symphony house is panicked.  If he cannot produce the recording, he will lose his life.  So he prevents the players and as many of the audience members as he can from leaving, he recruits replacement audience members off the streets, and, because the conductor has taken ill, he sends for another conductor to lead the orchestra and the gifted pianist who has played and will play again a beautiful piano concerto.  The replacement conductor is roused from sleep just as Stalin’s goons are knocking on people’s doors to take away the nightly haul of fodder for the Gulag and he says what he believes may be his final good bye to his wife only to discover, to his great relief, that he is being called in to conduct, in his pajamas, a concerto.  The ruse is pulled off, the record made and delivered – a bit late – but it contains within it a note from the pianist telling Stalin what a pig he is for having murdered members of her family without cause.  Stalin reads the note and then has some kind of stroke, leaving him incapacitated and he eventually dies.

What would happen if the three stooges were running one of the most powerful nations on earth?  That ends up being the question The Death of Stalin asks, with hilarious but sobering results – and with very obvious intent to comment on the current state of leadership in various parts of the world – though the United States certainly seems to fit the bill most closely.  The presence of Michael Palin in the cast - the old cast member and writer for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, poignantly playing the role of Molotov, lets us know that we are involved in a send up that will leave us laughing but also thinking.  Other commentators have noted that this is not an historically accurate film – and it is hard to imagine that it is.  It includes too much slapstick.  But it may, therefore, as Hamilton does, get at essential truths by altering the facts – it may highlight veins of the functioning of states and of people that might be too uncomfortable to look at if we didn’t see them through a lens that distorts and therefore clarifies.

As an example of this, commentators are concerned that the portrayal of Lavrenty Beria (Simon Russell Beale) includes his being much more hands on in the killing and deporting of dissidents – and having sex with young girls – than he, in fact, was.  The point is that, as with Hitler’s operators, there was a kind of bureaucratic efficiency – Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil – that was operating.  Well, that is all well and good, and we need to understand that an apparatus can kill and protect people from knowing that they are killing – but we also need to know that people were brutally murdered and were brutally murdered on orders from the Politburo and that Beria was the ax man for Stalin.  Changing the facts allows us to see with clarity what Beria and Stalin may or may not have seen with clarity – that this was a brutal regime. 

So the movie distorts facts to make things more chilling – including distorting time lines so that events in the past are presented as occurring contiguously with Stalin’s death.  These are the tricks that dreams play, changing facts and timelines to fit the intent of the dreaming mechanism to help us address, but also to hide from us things that we can’t face.  And the underlying mechanism of the dream, according to Freud, is the intent to keep us asleep, just as the underlying intent of the film is to entertain us.  And humor is the primary vehicle this film uses to entertain us, while not so subtly carrying out an agenda of clarifying how the chaos of dictatorships is cancerous to the functioning of the leadership of countries and therefore to the functioning of the country as a whole and threatens the lives and well beings who live in countries ruled by them.  

It is the thesis of this film that Stalin’s iron fisted – and very paranoid – rule of the USSR turned the ruling group of men into a simpering group who toadied to Stalin, and then became a circus of idiots grabbing for power in the wake of his death.  The “leader” who first emerged – Stalin’s anointed - Georgy Malenkov (played with some of the gender ambiguity by Jeffrey Tambor that he portrays more directly as a transgender parent in Transparent) tries to maintain Stalin’s stated principle of consensual rule that Stalin’s behavior completely undermined and that the politburo’s machinations, to which Malenkov turns an intentionally blind eye, proves the mockery that Stalin's rules were.  Malenkov, blinded by ideology, remains above the fray, but also so completely out of touch that we know he will never be effective. 

Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), whom we know will emerge out of the pack as the next dictator based on name recognition, has been so caught up in toadying that he seems all but incapable of thinking autonomously and his efforts to advance his own cause are consistently thwarted by Beria, the brutal secret service chief who appears to be the only one used to acting.  But Beria is also dogged by his brutal past.  One of his first acts is to get the goods on all the other actors, so that he can bring them to ruin if he needs to.  This act clarifies his own guilt and feelings of vulnerability to others – vulnerabilities that do, ultimately, get exploited.

It is sobering and scary to realize that the development of nuclear weapons – and guarding against their use – was entrusted to this group of nincompoops (and terrorists).  And when we see the people who are currently responsible for such safekeeping, we realize what the “entertainment” of the dream – the humor – is supposed to protect us from and also to make us aware of – living in a world where those who are in charge represent not the best aspects of ourselves, but in many ways the worst ones.

This semester I co-taught a class on reading Freud to our undergraduates.  In it, I was impressed with Freud’s admonition to the communists in the 1920s.  He wondered what the communists would do when they had eliminated the bourgeoisie – the educated middle class.  This film hilariously plays that out when Stalin, hovering on the edge of death, needs a physician.  The politburo is mortified.  “All the good Doctors in Moscow are dead.”  Well, then, Stalin is treated by the “best” doctors in Moscow – those who were too incompetent or scared of their shadows to have shown up on his radar screen.  And he dies.

I think there may be an unintended morality play here.  The educated middle class – and the working middle class as well – those of us who lead relatively circumscribed lives focused on raising our families and doing a good job of doing what we do – those of us who dream of greatness, but vicariously live those dreams through sports or literary or political heroes – may end up being made of different stuff than those who glimpse and grasp for a greatness beyond that.  We may be constrained, hemmed in, and defined by invisible and yet unimaginably strong boundaries that we chafe and even rage against, but ultimately feel soothed and contained by.  We are drawn to and report on those – petty thieves, murderers, and politicians – who are unbound by our restraints – because they need to be watched, with fear and fascination, as they create worlds that we uncomfortably live in – and as we envy and admire the freedoms that they enact.  But these worlds, especially as we move closer to vortices of power, are increasingly vulnerable to destabilizing forces that can tip us away from the kinds of societies that we banded together to create – the kinds of societies that would protect us from the dangers “out there.”

Last fall, I visited the reluctant son in Chicago, and we went to the Art Institute.  It had a temporary exhibition on the Soviet Union.  It was 2017 – the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the great communist experiment.  I was nonplussed about the exhibit, but the reluctant son insisted and so we went – and I’m very glad we did.

The exhibit was organized into five or seven or eight aspects of communist life; something as big as the culture of a country like Russia (or ours) cannot be contained in a single narrative.  But the unifying thread was something that at first felt very American – the intent of the Leninist revolution was to have all people be equal.  Isn’t that our foundation?  But the radical revision of a country where 70% of the population in 1917 was illiterate and one in which ownership of anything was restricted to a very small percentage of the population to one in which all are equal overnight created strains – to say the least.  One of the strains was communicating with the populace.  Visual art and artists became very important figures in the propaganda of the new state because so many of the people couldn’t read (In Nicaragua, a similarproblem in the middle of the century was addressed through education).  I am curious, in the wake of this movie, about the ways in which the country moved from its idealistic roots to the crisis depicted (in condensed form) here.

But I am also curious about what outcome our country will have in the wake of a tempestuous leader who is using the reins of power – those he appears to be capriciously picking up when it suits him, while leaving others untended so that multiple mini- dictatorships may emerge in areas of the bureaucracy – and how we will weather this storm.  Does the alliance of our bourgeoisie values – and the size of our bourgeoisie class – in concert with our rule of law tradition – have the capacity to help us reinstate “rational” leadership – or do we swing towards the kind of chaos depicted here?

The final image in this film is a return to the beginning.  We are back in the symphony hall, but now Khrushchev is in power and is sitting in the front of the balcony.  The camera pans back to reveal Brezhnev hovering over his shoulder – waiting to wrest Khrushchev’s hardwon power.  We, too, have our own lurkers, waiting to assume the mantel of power.  They used to be within the governmental frame, but we are now entertaining all comers: Oprah Winfrey anyone? 

When I was in Nicaragua and talking with Dora Maria Tellez, a revolutionary who fought alongside Daniel Ortega to bring democracy to the country, only to have Ortega be voted out of power, voted back into power and then seize control as dictator – I asked her if she was disappointed by Ortega’s becoming a dictator.  She said that she was not.  People who are drawn to power want to retain it.  It is the rare figure – the George Washingtons and the Nelson Mandelas of this world – who think beyond themselves and really think of the good of the country and realize that succession is not something to be feared, but something to be fostered.  That caring for a country, like caring for a family, involves transmitting values that will guide us and help us manage the seemingly unmanageable aspects of being human and living with each other.

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The Founder: Ray Kroc’s self-hatred is an American mirror.

In our efforts to catch up with recent movies, we ordered The Founder through Netflix and watched it last night.  I had forgotten what it was about, and was intrigued when we popped it in the DVD player to find out more about the emergence of the McDonald’s empire.  What could me more all-American and apple pie-like than McDonald’s?  Even though McDonald’s has promoted a fast food culture that has had an insidious impact on our health, has contributed to a generation interested in drive through convenience for everything from banking to health care, and has had questionable hiring and employment practices, there was, in my mind, something solid and positive in my mind about McDonald’s and those golden arches – just as there is something wonderful and wholesome about Coca-Cola.  How can Coca-Cola be wonderful and wholesome?  In France the King always drank better wine than the ordinary people.  In the United States, we all drink the same thing – and it is lovely – an elixir; and we eat the same thing too; especially our current president who is rumored to dine on McDonald’s on a regular basis.

Despite the title, Ray Kroc did not start McDonald’s.  The opening scenes depict him, as played by Michael Keaton, roaming the Midwest trying to sell a milkshake mixer that will make six milkshakes simultaneously – telling every owner of every drive-in that if you increase supply demand will follow – and they all seem to be slamming the door in his face.  Now I have to say – every man on both sides of my family in the generations before me was a salesman of one sort or another.  I worked summers in college cold-calling manufacturers to set up appointments for my father to meet them to sell them machines that would improve the productivity of their factories.  The scene with Kroc at a phone booth with a stack of nickels making calls harked back to stories my father would tell of going into Manhattan with rolls of dimes and making cold calls from phone booths to try to get time to tell people about the latest wonder that would revolutionize their industry.

Kroc, like my father, sold a bunch of stuff before the milkshake machines – fold out beds to fit in the kitchen and other doo-dads that the members of his country club – and the men at the bank when he is trying to finance McDonald’s – laugh at him about.  He also, like my father, listened to (and later plagiarized) self-help materials which lauded persistence.  Michael Keaton has a certain every-man charisma – he is like Tom Hanks without the self-assurance – Keaton needs us to like him.  And we do.  Despite the fact that he is on the road all the time, despite the fact that he drinks too much, his first wife, played dolefully by Laura Dern, teams up with him to sell McDonald’s franchises – first to the guys at the Country Club, who don’t appreciate what they’ve been given, and then to the Jewish Bible salesman types – the guys trying to make a buck – who will work hard and hire people to work hard to make a product that other people will buy and enjoy.

But I am getting ahead of the story.  Kroc discovers McDonald’s when the McDonald brothers order six of the shake machines that make six shakes simultaneously.  He impulsively drives from the Midwest to San Bernardino California – taking route 66 – this is the time before interstates – to see what kind of set-up they have.  The two brothers – Dick, played by NickOfferman with the same charisma he brought to the role of Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation and John Carroll Lynch as Maurice – are the engineer (Dick) and the nice guy (Maurice) who have teamed to create an entirely new creation – a marvel of ingenuity and American Know-How that produces hamburgers as efficiently and effectively as Henry Ford produced Model-Ts.   Their restaurant is efficient – the hamburger is in the customer’s hands in 15 seconds – unlike the half hour wait for the wrong order that Ray routinely runs into at drive-ins – there is little overhead – they give no utensils or ceramic ware – people’s burgers are wrapped in paper, their fries and milkshakes are in paper cups - and there is no wait staff, people just walk up to the window and walk away to eat where they will.

This part of the movie is sweet.  These two brothers – very different people – clearly love each other, they love the restaurant they have created and the people who work in it, and they love the customers that they serve.  There is a warmth between all of them – including Kroc – that is quite delightful.  But the McDonalds are not primarily interested in profit – they are interested in something more ephemeral – something almost aesthetic – they are interested in pursuing perfection in the provision of convenient hamburger service.  And Dick is really quite driven by an obsessive passion to do this.  He also has a dream that this could be replicated from coast to coast and that people everywhere could eat a McDonald’s hamburger, but their first attempt to create franchises failed – both because people didn’t emulate the efficient home store – they lost control of the product – and because Maurice was too stressed out by trying to manage things at a distance.  Kroc’s maniacal interest in achievement and his recognition of the virtues of the system lead him to agree to the terms that the McDonald’s dictate without hesitation.  He is the guy who is going to realize Dick’s dream.

But this dream of Dick’s turns sour.  As Kroc takes it on and we are excited at his capacity to get it going – so is he.  Frustrated by the constraints of the McDonald brothers and convinced of his own brilliance, he begins to become shadier and shadier, outwitting the McDonalds and stealing the wife of one of his franchisees, the woman, Joan, who will later own the San Diego Padres.  And while we all know the ending of the story, what we don’t know is that achieving this ending – becoming the person that he has wanted to be – will rob Kroc of all that made him endearing and will emphasize all that concerned us in the beginning – our concern will turn to dismay and finally disgust.  When a clip rolls after the end of the movie about Ray Kroc talking about beauty of the name of McDonald’s – a name that we now know he has essentially stolen from the McDonalds brothers – we don’t see a charismatic man who has built an empire but a petty thief who is a small but very wealthy person.  How did this dream become such a nightmare?

The movie proposes that it is the name that is the key to this transition.  Ray Kroc.  Who wants to buy a burger at Kroc’s?  Kroc talks about his Slavic name as something that instills distaste, not desire, in others.  The persistence that he displays selling wares that others snicker at him for is partly driven by a powerful belief that this is work that befits him.  Life is supposed to be hard for a guy like him.  And he needs to persist in order to become successful.  One of the quotes attributed to him is that it is not a dog eat dog world but a rat eat rat world.  He is a rat, and so are the other people in it.  He can admire them – but not love them.  They have what he wants – but doesn’t deserve.  There is a very deep sense of self-loathing that drives him forward.  This is closely related to self-love – it is a kind of narcissism –meaning that it – like the self-love of narcissism - binds the person together – giving them a sense of themselves as having an integrity – a consistency – and a purpose – and this purpose makes him into a generative person.  But, while the McDonalds brothers generate love, he generates stuff.  And he figures out how to get more and more of it as if it will make up for or transform his loathing into love.  The tragedy – if there is a tragedy here – is that it does not.  Yes, he gets the girl.  Yes he gets the stuff and the accolades and he is king of the world, but he doesn’t become the person he would want to be – he becomes a more and more twisted version of the worst aspects of himself.

This film resonates on many levels, then, with our current political landscape (and is a staple of Hollywood - see Citizen Kane, for example).  We admire people like Ray Kroc and we want to emulate them.  The film notes that, on a daily basis, McDonald’s feeds one per cent of the world’s population.  This is an amazing statistic.  Who among us has not eaten at McDonald’s?  Who doesn’t secretly look forward to road trips with the kids who will be clamoring to stop at a McDonald’s, which we will reluctantly do and then relish in the taste that is so familiar?  When we are doing this, I think that we are connecting to two very different dreams – the dream of the McDonald brothers and that of Mr. Kroc.  We are hoping that this delightful stuff – this easily accessible, cheap and quick and, admit it, delicious stuff will prove to be nourishing and sustaining.  But is it?  Does it?  Has it been good for us to chase after quick and easy solutions rather than doing the hard work that is necessary to achieve something lasting?  Of course the irony is that Ray Kroc did, indeed, work very hard, as did my father and uncles and grandfathers.  None of them were as successful as he – and fortunately none of them failed as miserably as he did.  But we all seem, to some extent, to have been tarred by the brush that caught him.  We are a nation of immigrants – in the words of Hamilton – immigrants get the job done – but sometimes coming to grips with the darker parts of our immigrant – or familial or just plain human - legacy – costs us a great deal in order to achieve what we do.  We work to distance ourselves from whence we came - we try to become something new - and in the process we discover that we have only become more thoroughly ourselves.



Postscript:  A friend of mine read this post and commented that she casually knew Ray Kroc way back when he opened the first "franchise" McDonald's in Des Plaines and he was truly a nice guy.  She was concerned that the movie, which she has not seen, did violence to Kroc.  I was pleased to hear that she experienced him as a nice guy.  As portrayed by Keaton, Kroc genuinely seemed to be a nice guy - he reminded me of a favorite uncle who was, I believe, a genuinely nice guy.  The clips of the real Kroc at the end of the movie that are shown support the more problematic Kroc.  The question that arises - if the real person in the world made a transition like that depicted in the movie - is what extent that transition - or transformation - is caused by the wealth and power that he increasingly accrued - or whether his dogged pursuit and acquisition helped to expose something that was latently present in him, and I think to some extent in all of us, from the beginning.  

    

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The Crown: Edward the VIII Season 2, Episode 6

Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson at the Waldorf

Edward the VIII’s abdication is something that I have been vaguely aware of for as long as I can remember.  It was a romantic, but, in my moral set, a tainted romantic decision – he chose to marry a divorced woman (when I was eight years old and first heard of this, divorce had a tone of scandal) and he gave up the throne for love.  It sets in motion the action in The Crown – but also in the King’s Speech – a movie that must have come out before I started blogging because I can’t believe that, to this point, I haven’t posted about it.  My personal connection with Edward is that his portrait – dancing with his wife, Wallis Simpson, used to adorn the walls of the Waldorf Astoria where, until last year when the Waldorf was sold to be turned into condos, the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association was held.  Edward and Simpson looked perfectly matched, and seemed to signify all that was royal and regal about the Waldorf Astoria back “in the day”.

And that fairy tale – tainted slightly further when it was hinted that Wallis Simpson was, in addition to being a divorcee, having affairs during the time that she and Edward were consorting - was largely sustained in both the King’s speech and in the first season and a half of The Crown.  So I was unprepared for the sixth episode of season 2 of The Crown.  If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want spoilers, stop reading.  In his appearances before episode 6, Edward is a slightly sleazy, slightly creepy character who is full of himself in a way that is more than a little off putting.  Handsome and aware of that, he believes he would have been a better king than “Bertie”, his brother and Elizabeth’s father, but if we have seen the King’s speech, we admire the pluck of the King George VI that Bertie became – and we know that his father prayed that Bertie and not Edward would become King.  Edward seems to be a self-indulgent fop and Wallis seems to have him wrapped around her little finger in the Crown.  He has nasty nicknames for everyone in the royal family, but then Elizabeth reaches out to him as an advisor, and there is a sense that he can be useful as she tries to navigate touchy family relationships.  Meanwhile, the dour old secretary, Alan Lascelles, who was intimately acquainted with Edward’s entire adult life as he had been his secretary when he was king and had watched him afterwards was incredibly opposed to him as a person – and by extension to Elizabeth’s sister Margaret who was displaying the same self-idolatry that he feared would cause her to rot from the inside out as Edward had rotted.  The language of rot was quite strong and it stood out.  When Lascelles used it, I experienced it as coming out of left field and being more of an old fuddy-duddy’s critical looking down his nose at the royals – but I should have listened to Mister Down-at-the-Mouth to be better prepared for episode six.

So the episode begins with the trading of secret Nazi documents at the end of the Second World War – documents that implicate Edward in a plot devised by Hitler to reinstate him as King of England should Germany have occupied England.  These documents are being reviewed by historians in the 1950s just as Edward is trying to figure out how to worm his way back into having some kind of role in public life in England – something that his brother George VI had worked very hard to prevent, but something Edward feels hopeful of achieving now that his relationship with Elizabeth is moving forward.   Meanwhile, to complicate things a bit, Billy Graham, of all people, played by the same actor who played the sleazy writer in House of Cards, is visiting Britain and Elizabeth has a chat with him.  She is taken by him, but, as the titular head of the Church of England, she can’t publicly support him and it is not clear that she would want to.

I think it is important – and the show does not emphasize this but we all know it in our bones – that England, under the leadership of Churchill and with the help of “Bertie” as King George VI survived the most harrowing of sea and air attacks during the Second World War.  During this time, in order to limit the mayhem that he might cause, Edward was installed as the protector of the Bahamas – a position that he used to look with disdain at the people of the Bahamas – especially the people of color (he was a class A racist who was not in the least discrete about it through the course of his life).  Now the British Empire as a whole was racist and was responsible for racially based atrocities including the slave trade with the United States (and slaving that brought Africans to England and the rest of Europe as well).  Being the titular head of the whitest nation on earth – whether you are Edward or George or Elizabeth – requires a fair amount of comfort with exploiting people whose skin is of a different color (and many of the same skin tone).  Elizabeth’s engagement with subjects of color is interesting – and certainly far more advanced than that of Edward’s, but it seems to fall into the “noblesse oblige” category, not the let’s hang out and chat category.

The first bombshell about Edward that is dropped is Hitler’s plan to instate Edward as the King of England after Hitler defeats Britain.  It is not clear that Edward is in on this, but he and Wallis tour Germany before the war and they are very taken with the treatment of them as royals – and especially the acknowledgement of Wallis as a royal – something the Brits never do – and something that has long infuriated both Edward and Wallis.  Edward’s plan was to marry Wallis as soon as she became divorced for the second time in a civil ceremony and remain King, but he was forced, by the intention of the entire government to resign if he did that, into abdication.  He did not weigh the investment of the government and the people in the propriety of the office.  His relationship with Wallis outweighed his obligation to The Crown.  Indeed, he appeared to be disdainful of the people and the office – there were fears that he was not protecting the documents that he was seeing as head of state from people – like Wallis – who were not cleared to see them.  Meanwhile, she was apparently, in addition to working on her second divorce, sleeping with a high Nazi official – von Ribbentrop – while also having her affair with Edward. 

But the bigger bombshell was the allegation, made by Lascelles when Elizabeth asked for it, that Edward sent information to the Nazi’s about the French defenses (he was originally a major-general in France responsible for British operations there) allowing Hitler to skirt the defenses as he drove to Paris and occupied it.  Should this have been the case, and I think there is enough evidence to suggest that his character would have supported it, Edward was every bit as nasty as Shakespeare’s Richard III who kept plotting and plotting to become king, regardless of who would have to die for him to accomplish it.  Edward’s character then is a particular kind of narcissist – one who is so full of himself and what he needs that he has no regard for what the impact of getting what he needs will have on others.  His subjects are not people with whom he identifies, but people whom he disdains because they don’t adequately love him.  The send up in the musical Hamilton of George III who reigned when we rebelled against Britain begins to get at the level of self-importance that Edward experienced.

Elizabeth’s dilemma at the end of the episode is that she cannot forgive Edward for what he has done, and this creates a moral crisis for her.  She consults with Billy Graham, who is encouraging her quite strongly to forgive as a Christian thing to do.  She desperately wants to do this but simply cannot – and we get why – but we also fear that Graham’s strident encouragement to forgive as that is the Christian thing to do will create a rift between he and Elizabeth, but then he saves her by suggesting that she can pray for forgiveness for the inability to forgive.  A nice trick – and one that allows her – as we see throughout the first two seasons – to retain the integrity of The Crown – to act in ways that are consistent with the needs of the country despite her own wishes and desires – demonstrating her capacity to do exactly what it is that Edward could not – to put her people and her country first, and, in so doing, to more fully inhabit herself.

To read a post on the Crown focused on Elizabeth, click here.

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The Crown: Governance as a lesson for our time.

My connection to Queen Elizabeth stems from my identification as a member of the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Church of England), where the minister once characterized us as the “frozen chosen”.  She has always appeared to me to exemplify what it means to have a stiff upper lip.  And a stiff lower lip.  She has seemed almost inhuman.  I was first introduced to her on screen when she was portrayed as a child in the movie The King’s Speech.  I think I next ran into her onscreen – or the royal family as a whole – in Love Actually, where the loser sandwich delivery guy imagines himself in America as Prince Harry without the weird family.  Oh, sure, I have seen her on TV and in People magazine.  Elizabeth is the mother of Charles who married Lady Di – and she has never turned over the throne to him – but I am not an anglophile, so am just now learning about the history of the monarchy from the new Netflix series, The Crown, which really seems to flow almost seamlessly out of The King’s Speech (by way of Dunkirk).

Claire Foy plays the queen – and she does this with all the humanity that my brief views of Elizabeth in People and News Clips lack.  What Foy is particularly good at – and what the show seems to centrally focus on – is portraying the experience of what it takes – the internal mettle – to cross a boundary.  It is as if you can see Elizabeth, over and over, making a decision – and each one involves leaving behind a little piece of her humanity to more fully assume the role of Queen – to become The Crown – and this transition, far from being a cold or mechanical one – paradoxically makes her become more and more delightfully and painfully human. Foy as Elizabeth invites us to empathically connect with what it takes to be the adult when all those around her are being children – to determine how to confront her prime minister or her husband – not because she wants to, but because it must be done – and, across the course of time and much against her will, we see her becoming the Queen and more fully and weirdly, herself.

Elizabeth is portrayed as believing herself to be poorly suited to being Queen.  The abdication of Edward the VIII is a truly awful moment for her – it is the moment when her father, George VI, becomes King and she becomes the heir.  She had wanted to lead a quiet life of leisure – to be a royal housewife at some kind of English Manor House in which she could raise children and horses and go hunting out of the limelight and off the party circuit, entertaining, and being entertained by a few close friends.  This is the life that she and Phillip fantasized about leading until she, rather late in life, would be called on to become Queen.  Unfortunately her father’s health precluded that – his death from lung cancer thrust her into a role that she had been trained for but felt quite ill-suited to.    Her sister Margaret (played stunningly by Vanessa Kirby) seems more suited to the role of Royal – outgoing, vivacious and beautiful, she would have wowed not just the Brits, but the world.  Instead it is the dowdy and inwardly drawn Elizabeth who, based on birth order, assumes the throne.

Now, wouldn’t we all, in some measure, want this thrust upon us?  Wouldn’t we all want to be Queen?  Well, it turns out that it’s not just a title but a role.  The Crown is an integral part of the functioning of a constitutional monarchy.  And governmental oversight (or more precisely in the role of the Crown – oversight of the government) it turns out – despite our current president’s position that abdicating oversight is a reasonable way to govern – is an essential function for a country by its titular governor.  We first get a flavor of this when Elizabeth’s father, who knows he is terminally ill but has not yet told Elizabeth or the family, introduces Elizabeth to The Red Box.  This is the leather bound box in which the notifications about the functioning of the government arrive.  What does he state that he does with it?  He turns it over before opening it.  The things they want him to see are on top.  The details – the boring, but also the essential stuff, is hidden in the bottom.  He says to her, in effect, turn it (and metaphorically everything else that is handed to you on a platter or in a box) over and work your way up from the details to the formalities.

Across the course of the first two seasons (the third has not been released at this writing), this is what she does – she turns things over, looks at them from underneath, and works her way towards functioning as The Crown.  She is doing this during a period in time when the British Empire, which quite recently had counted one fifth of the world’s population as its subjects, has fallen on hard times and is struggling to keep its head above water as a world power and even, at times, to feed its own people.  She works to define herself (choosing, for instance, to marry Phillip, someone whom no one from the royal family was in favor of) but also to define her role and her country during this time of huge transition.  And she does this living in palaces and castles that, for all their monstrous size, when they don’t look like the lobby of some kind of convention hotel, look more like tawdry middle class homes filled with old knick-knacks and souvenirs from a bygone era, as well as huge television sets with tiny screens that look chintzy, regularly fritz out, and are, appallingly, rented. 

The series is quite conscious of the tension between the Royal Family as perceived/ presented and the grimmer grittier reality of running a family business.  Margaret notes in one of the annual family portraits that the job of the royals is to support the fairy tale experience for the public.  All that glitters is not gold, though (Trump and family beware) and this series demonstrates that in engaging detail.  I think that its appeal to me is both on the level of curiosity about what has happened behind closed gates – we have since Shakespeare’s days been fascinated by the lives of the Royals – but also the story of the development of a person who has power thrust upon her – and I think that is both an historically interesting development – she is, for instance, a woman in power during a time that women are gaining power – but also a personally relevant one – she grows into herself on screen in ways that mirror how I have grown in my own life (at my best moments), and as I have watched my children, my students and my patients grow.  Becoming who it is that we are in the process of becoming is, I believe, a fascinating process.

In my Freud class for honors’ students that I am teaching this spring, we have just finished reading two of Freud’s papers that describe something about the governing of one’s own mind – Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Uncanny.  Both of these papers wrestle with something that Freud calls the repetition compulsion – the ways in which we seem to repeat what has happened before in our lives in novel situations and with new actors.  This is not, he notes, just a replaying of pleasurable interactions – that would be understandable – but we replay things that are truly awful – he was treating what we now call PTSD and was wondering about why soldiers would keep revisiting terribly traumatic events they had survived, but he also noted that we seem to set up – and dream about – and re-enact - the most embarrassing and shameful moments in our lives – moments that are simply awful to live through.  Freud is perplexed by this and ends up proposing a drive to explain this – a drive deeper than the drive for pleasure – the death drive.  Now, I think this is a crazy idea and it has never held up.  To his credit, Freud did not seem entirely convinced of it either, but the question remains – why do we keep doing things the same way despite the fact that we know what the outcome of that will be – and how can we help people figure out how to do things differently?

I think that one of the compelling things about this series is that Elizabeth, in those moments when she steels herself, is engaging – over and over – in novel ways of being with others.  She takes as a given the role that has been thrust upon her – her role is to govern and she does that – but she does not do it by rote – but seemingly invents herself and the ways that she will express The Crown in new and completely different ways in episode after episode.  She is coming up against the repetition compulsion – and figuring out how to master it – how to ignore the signals that channel us into familiar ways of functioning – sometimes aided and abetted by pride or anger or a sense of entitlement or injustice.  Elizabeth – not always, but more often than not - is able to elude the grasp of the obvious.  She is able to achieve novel solutions to situations that seem intractable.  Because she, almost at times in spite of herself, cares deeply about the life that has been thrust upon her, she engages deeply and creatively in living that life – circumscribed though it is by tradition and rules which she must and chooses to follow – but she figures out how to do that in novel and exciting ways.  And this, I think, is what people who are awake and engaged do – they live lives that are complicated and fascinating.

As an example, in season 2, episode 8, after having been shown up terribly by the Kennedys – particularly by Jackie when she was a guest – Elizabeth decides to act as an ambassador in a time of great turmoil in Africa.  The communists are successfully wooing former colonies away from Western Influence.  She flies to The Congo and meets with the President there and successfully woos him back, something her advisors and her husband have warned her is a high risk venture with little chance of success.  This account feels prosaic in my telling – you really should watch the episode – and more importantly the series to observe the development of this intriguing – if frozen on the outside – person. 

By the way, I don’t mean to be suggesting that Elizabeth walks on water nor that becoming The Crown is always a good thing.  There are numerous deals with the devil that have terrible consequences in the immediate and long run.  Would that it were possible as a leader or a ruler to be prescient; she is not portrayed in this manner nor can anyone in the real world function in this manner.  But she does struggle with becoming the Crown and the impingement that makes on her being Elizabeth – something that we all struggle with in our own way.

This post has gone on too long, so I will post a separate description of her alter ego, Edward the VIII, and particularly of the Season 2, episode 6 description of his being not what he appears, but instead a worthy subject for Shakespeare…. And someone who does not appreciate what it means to be or become The Crown.

To read a post on The Crown focused on Edward the VIII as Elizabeth's alter ego, click here.

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