The Medici Season Three: Lorenzo the Magnificent and Morality

 

Lorenzo the Magnificent

The Reluctant Wife and I watched the first two seasons of the Netflix Medici series out of curiosity after discovering Florence last year when we visited the Reluctant Daughter as she spent a semester abroad (something that, in the days of COVID-19 seems a very long time ago, and related to a world very far away, indeed).  While there we discovered, much to my surprise, the dawning of the renaissance.  This intimate, walled city was home to a myriad of figures who moved us from the middle ages to the age of reason – Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci at the head of the parade in the arts, but Da Vinci joining Copernicus in Science and Machiavelli in Political Science.  But as we wandered the streets of this town, the force that had clearly held these minds in place was plastered above the door of every prominent church and building in town – it was the crest of the Medici – the powerful family that was the political leader of this place symbolized by both Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s sculpture of David – the small powerful kid with a sling who downed the giant (nearby Rome) to rule the world.

Michelangelo's David

 So we watched the Netflix series first two seasons and were mildly disappointed.  The drama that we expected seemed to be mostly wasted, especially in the second season, on the intrigue of marriages and family alliances within a small town – one that had not yet hit the big time, but contained all of the drama of a daytime soap opera.  We learned a great deal (especially as we fact checked) about the origins of the Medici dynasty, but we didn’t get the sweep of history that we were really hungry for.  So we were pleasantly surprised when the third season dropped and ours hopes for a history of the place and the renaissance itself were realized.  Lorenzo the Magnificent (Daniel Sharman) was, indeed, magnificent – and, at least in this tale which I am certain has been varnished, also quite maleficent.  He is both a figure of great good and great evil.

So I was surprised, when I was teaching a class this week on the very modern term of self-esteem, to find Lorenzo coming to mind.  It seemed almost an insult to his greatness – a reduction to the arc of his tremendous life – to use a term as simple and prosaic – and so modern – as self-esteem to understand the psychology of this great and terrible man, but there it was.

Self-esteem catapulted to the top of the things that parents should care about supporting for their children in the last half of the twentieth century.  As Nancy McWilliams points out in her book “Case Formulation”, this is related to many factors, including our becoming, especially for the upper middle class, an increasingly mobile society, both in terms of moving to get jobs, but also in terms of being able to pursue professions that had to do with our own interests and aptitudes and not with the family business.  When our neighborhood, our parent’s occupation (which was now ours) and a familiar family role no longer defined us, we began to ask ourselves about out our identity – and looked to define our worth in novel ways.  This was an important thread in our culture’s movement towards wrestling with narcissistic issues more centrally than neurotic ones.  Where before we had been neurotically inhibiting ourselves to fit into prescribed roles, we were now worried that the roles we had defined for ourselves – and that therefore defined ourselves – were lacking.

Now Lorenzo is not a modern kid who was raised to believe that every little thing he did was great and should be enshrined on a bulletin board of blue and red and yellow ribbons.  Well, OK, he was woven into a tapestry with gold thread that showed him leading the family into the future.  But he was primarily neurotic, not narcissistic, in the sense that he had to bend his life to fit the mold of what the family had in mind for him.  He married the woman that his father chose as his political mate despite his various passionate wishes.  He became the leader of the family reluctantly – that was his role as eldest child.  And yet he took to it like a duck to water.

 

Now, you may think that the man who had a vision of himself as the unifier of Italy, the person who made Florence the beating heart of a new Europe, and the person who had no empathy for any enemy who crossed his path would qualify as a narcissist.  And I think the third season of the show suggests that he went off the tracks and became not just narcissistic but psychopathic.  And I certainly think we could look through that lens.  But we might look through a different lens – that of self-esteem – a construct that is central to narcissism, to discover that his character his really neurotic, and thus learn something about our own narcissistic age.

 

What was most surprising to me about reading about narcissism and teaching the material is how central morality becomes to self-esteem and thus to identity.  That which we value – that which we hold as an ideal – our moral compass – becomes a powerful motivator for our behavior.  If we value being highly esteemed – as the narcissist does – we will work very, very hard to receive kudos from others.  Psychoanalytically, the superego – the part of our mind that begins to develop at a very early age and that is built in part on incorporating the perceived values of parental figures – has a hand in determining many of our actions.  We say, “I will do this versus that,” because this is consistent with my values – this is consistent with who I am – and these kinds of actions are, therefore, what I will build my life around.

 

Lorenzo’s moral compass was built concentrically around valuing family first, then Florence.  And these two frequently became one in his mind – Florence was an extension of his family.  He also valued art and science and saw Florence and the family as a means towards achieving a world that had greater beauty and was built on scientific principles.  But he was raised by his mother to have a different moral compass than the family had always relied on – his great-grandfather’s motto was: “To achieve a good end, it is sometimes necessary to engage in bad deeds”.  His mother would substitute “Good deeds can secure good ends.” Of course, Machiavelli, who appears in the third season but whom we didn’t recognize until the reveal at the end (even though we were looking for him), summarizes his great-grandfather’s position succinctly as: “the end justifies the means”.  This is the hallmark of psychopathic functioning and it was based in no small part on Machiavelli’s observations from quite close at hand of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s functioning.  How can I maintain that Lorenzo was neurotic and not psychopathic (and thus narcissistic)?

The difference between Lorenzo’s functioning and that of, say, the Tiger King, the Howard Ratner character played by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems, or the current President of the United States, is  that Lorenzo’s basic values are clear to him and are not primarily about himself as a lone wolf – as a an individual in a world of individuals who are either out to get him (though that is manifestly the case for Lorenzo) or able to give him what he wants, but rather that he is so deeply and powerfully connected with his family and with his city that they are foundational to his values, and he sees himself as serving those entities, not acting as a free agent.

O.K., the last paragraph is, I think, true, and highlights the central difference between neurosis and narcissism that I will return to in a moment, but it is not what I intended to point out.  The weird thing is that what orients Lorenzo throughout the film is what he thinks is in the best interests of the family and the city and these entities – as values – and organizing his actions around these values leads him to be able to think clearly and strategically when others who are focused simply on what will be self-aggrandizing, do not.  Those who are in it for themselves, when push comes to shove, take their eye off the ball of what the next best move is.  

Lorenzo has other core values.  He is also concerned about leaving the world to be a more beautiful place, and finally, but in a tertiary place, he wants to live up to his mother’s value of doing good in the world. 

In thinking about values and self-esteem, it becomes apparent how our values hold a central place in our behavioral identity.  It is what we hold dear that drives our behaviors.  We do what we think will allow us to achieve what we want to.  And this, in turn, highlights that, to make changes in our personality – to go through the personal transformations that are part and parcel of the analytic undertaking – we will shift our values.

When we shift our values, we are unstable.  We feel on shifting ground, even if we are moving from a position of having poorly articulated values to having “better” values (hopefully what happens in the analytic process).  The shift in values that provides the dramatic tension at the conclusion of this series is the loosening of the “by doing good” part of the moral imperative that Lorenzo received from his mother.  This is portrayed as being fueled by his “anti-therapist”, Bruno Bernardi (Johnny Harris), a person who presents himself as a clerk, but who turns out to be the brother of the ruler of Sarzana, a rival Italian town.  Bruno is called Lorenzo’s “shadow” by Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice (Synnøve Karlsen), and he functions to erode the peripheral values – those espoused by Lorenzo’s mother to do good to achieve good ends, while supporting the importance of the central values of family, Florence, and the achievement of a unified Italy that will support the arts.  Bruno does this by embodying clarity, subservience, but most importantly solidity.  He is the constant and trusted advisor who provides the feel of solid ground as Lorenzo slides towards a much more slippery spot.

I can find no evidence of this darker angel Bruno Bernardi as an historical figure in my quick internet search.  He functions much as previous bad guys allied with the Medici have in this series.  The bad guys do the dirty work so that the Medici can maintain plausible deniability – to the courts, to their consciences, but, I think for the writers and directors, in the minds of the audience.  The production wants us to be able to maintain our image of the Medici as the good guys in this complex saga – as if it were possible to be good and powerful in the midst of a system – both political and religious – that is rife with corruption.  But, if that was their motivation, I think it serves a nice psychoanalytic function.  It illustrates how the mind works.  We develop defenses to buffer us from actions that we find reprehensible.  This doesn’t just lead us to be able to deny that we did something, we can rationalize or use other means to come to believe that objectively reprehensible actions are, in fact, virtuous.  These defenses are a hallmark of neurotic functioning.

Lorenzo is a neurotic character because he continues to believe that what he is doing is just and virtuous, even as he murders not just his enemies, but his countrymen; even his best friend, and plots the murder of a priest.  He does not forget these deeds, nor does he lie about having done them – these would be the hallmark of the narcissist/psychopath.  A narcissist defends against the knowledge that he is not all that he imagines himself to be not by deluding himself, but by replacing those fears with evidence that he is good – or has done something estimable.  Janus faced, he looks away from the evil components of himself and part of his driven quality is the insatiable need to earn rewards from others – as if he could prove to himself and everyone around him that he actually is good.  Of course these attempts are doomed.  He is trying to escape a part of himself that disdains himself for being reprehensible – for not being deserving of those accolades.

The neurotic, on the other hand, chafes under the restrictions that lead him to be good.  And he remembers when he has done bad things and, instead of feeling shame about what he has done (shame is an inescapable and unwashable sense of being essentially bad), he feels guilty.  So when Lorenzo confesses to his wife and to his son that he has harmed them, he feels genuine remorse – a sense of having done harm to someone that he loves.  When he confesses to a priest, he acknowledges his sins – the actions he has done that are reprehensible – but he does not feel the least bit guilty about the accomplishments that his sins have allowed him – and Italy – and, indeed, the continent of Europe, to attain.  And his smirk is one that we share.  We know that there is glory in his accomplishments – and, by neurotically identifying with him – we either forgive him his sins, blame them on his darker angel, or acknowledge them and agree with him that, despite their gravity, on balance we live in a better world because of them.

When Lorenzo looks at the world that he has helped midwife, he does not take credit for the work of Michelangelo, he praises it.  He sees himself as the person who created the political climate, the intellectual climate, and the educational climate in which that genius could be recognized, supported, and flourish, but he does not see the work as his creation.  Despite the fact that Florence is littered with Medici crests, homes, art collections, and examples of what it means to have been rich and powerful, the story of Florence is the story of the Renaissance, and we go there to learn about the artists and thinkers who created it.  We have to come home to piece together the story – in whatever form we find it – of those who crafted the space in which it could happen.  

 

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Unorthodox (the movie): Disruption Comes at a Cost.

      

Those Hats!

Unorthodox on Netflix is a very brief series – just four episodes long – that chronicles the escape of Esty Shapiro (played by Shira Haas) from the clutches of the Satmar Hasidic Ultra-Orthodox Community (or Cult) in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.  This is a partially fictionalized and psychoanalytically interesting story based on the memoir of Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.  The title of the memoir captures something of the tension in the series.  Unlike a memoir like Tara Westover’s Educated, where the oppressive family’s culture is idiosyncratic first and we realize only later that it reflects cultural norms, here we have a repudiation of a culture that is internally consistent, depicted with care and even reverence, while simultaneously being questioned, both by the scandalous repudiation of an individual leaving it, but also by the public depiction of the rituals in a respectful manner that exposes the cracks in a system intended to be entirely self-contained.   

As the movie explains, the Satmar group formed in Williamsburg in the wake of the Shoah.   These Jews decided, in responding to unspeakable trauma, that turning away from connecting with a world they had assimilated to and that had betrayed them was the only meaningful way to survive.  They turned back to their roots and, in the process of doing this, looked to antiquated rules of living that predated a modern world.  In this they resemble, to my mind, the Amish who live near us here in the rural parts of Midwest, but might as well be living in another era.  The Satmar, on the other hand, are living in the middle of the most densely populated part of American.  And they are living apart – as if in their own country.

I have never been to the Satmar area of Williamsburg, but I have been to Chinatown.  One time, when I visited in the mid-1980s, it was reputed to be one of the lowest crime precincts in New York, largely because it was self-policing.  As my girlfriend at the time and I were approaching a Chinese restaurant, we, along with hundreds of others on the street, watched as a man was chased  up the street being beaten with sticks by four other men.  A silence fell over the street as everyone watched them corner the man they were beating in a store front across the street from us and continued beating him.  When my girlfriend, braver than I and versed in the bystander effect, shouted “Stop” (and then stepped behind me), they did, indeed, stop.  They ran off down the street, and the beaten man hobbled up the street in the other direction.

The isolation of one group from another – something that is currently much in vogue the world over in part as a response to the neo-liberal value of diversity – has been going on by the Satmar group at least since the Hungarian core of this group immigrated in 1946.  Esty, while privy to this history, is, like her arranged marriage husband, limited in her ability to compare and contrast this world with any other.  When first introduced to her husband, she hesitantly lets him know that she is “different”.  He believes he understands her when he takes it to mean that because her father, who is a drunk (a very rare and shame filled thing in Jewish culture generally) and her mother, who left the community, were unavailable to raise her and she was raised by her aunt and grandmother that she is – as her aunt and mother characterize her – an orphan.  This, in turn, implies that she is grateful to her future husband because she is damaged goods.

In fact, what Esty means is much more complicated and becomes clearer to us (and, I think, to Esty, as the series unfolds).  It means, I think, that Esty finds it, as she puts it, difficult for her to live up to what God has in mind for her.  She is aware of the constrictions that the Hasidic life is putting upon her in a way that she does not yet know is a life destroying constraint.  She is alive and capable in ways that her husband cannot know and does not see until the penultimate scene in the series.

This film, then, documents the cultural repression of women in a culture that is intentionally repressing all spontaneous engagement with the world as suspect and dangerous – so that the repression of women does not stand out, from within the culture, as particularly remarkable.  It is part of the package deal of repression.  The culture is, I think, bound by rules that prevent intimate relationships between that culture and the outside world, but therefore (and I'm not sure that it follows, but it is certainly also the case) between the members of that world, especially the men and women; the husbands and wives.  

As I learned this week from my reluctant co-teacher in a class on Freud, Eve Sedgwick had a lot to say about the repression of difference in the broader culture 30 years ago in a paper on masturbation and Jane Austen that she published in 1980.   In the paper, she proposed that masturbation was the first “queer” identity – and masturbators were universally vilified by all kinds of people – including Freud – for causing their own pathologies, by which Freud meant that broad and poorly defined pathology neurasthenia. 

Esty is then, in this reading, telling her husband, when she says that she is different, that she is queer.  And two distinct ironies grow from this as the series develops.  Esty is queer not because she is resistant to orthodoxy, but because she is so deeply invested in it that she enacts it in her symptoms.  She is not able to have sex with her husband – her basic and necessary duty as a wife that is needed to repopulate the world with the six million that were killed in the holocaust – because of vaginismus.   She cannot allow herself to open herself up enough to admit her husband just as the Hasidim will not open themselves up to let other cultures in.  She is rigidly and perfectly pure.

She and her husband successfully copulate only once – when, after a year of failure, she encourages him to press ahead no matter how much it hurts her.  He does – and experiences so much pleasure at his first climax that he is blind to the pain and isolation that she feels at having been violated.  But this is not new – it mirrors his failure to understand the pain she has felt as he has violated her confidence by continually informing his mother of their marital difficulties – and not working them out directly with her.

The tragic loss of intimacy between them gets finally enacted when Esty races home early from a Seder dinner to test her pregnancy, discovers joyously that they have been able to meet the dictates of the community, only to have her husband preempt her telling him that they are pregnant by announcing to her that he intends to divorce her because they have so consistently failed to be sexually intimate.  The psychological gulf of intimacy between them at this moment could not be greater, and this propels her to enact her scandalous separation from the community.  Though she does this (as the reluctant co-teacher pointed out) at a moment that is culturally significant - she is escaping from her own Egypt as her people are celebrating escaping slavery at the hands of Pharoah.

Now, I have to admit to no small sense of empathy for her husband.  He really is, I think, a nice and humble guy – sensitive to many things – everything it seems but Esty.  He is, I think, blinded to her by a culture that disregards the value of the subjective being of women, though also I think of men – and instead would dominate and control the subjectivities of all of the members of the group.  Ritual is used to contain and direct libido into serving the rules of God.  The little irony contained here is that the husband turns to his mother for guidance.  But my personal theory – not unrelated to others’ theories – is that it is the power of the maternal connection – the power of women to procreate – the power of women to decide whether they will let the man in or not – and our relative powerlessness in the face of all this power that has led us to dominate them.  To constrain and define women's power as subservient to our aims and to focus on helping them limit their field of operations to areas that are in our interest.  It is only recently, as we have felt less at the mercy of the natural world, that we have felt we don't need to control women as well as nature.  It would fit with this narrative that the Hasidim's fear of the greater culture, grounded as it is in trauma, leads them to revert to a greater need for control, which includes controlling women - and controlling our wish to connect with the world more generally rather than to do what we are driven by our libido to do - to connect indiscriminately.

The second big irony, of course, is that the Hasidim are the queers in the mainstream culture.  They, with their funny side curls and crazy black hats – and $6,000 mink hats on Sabbath (see the wedding picture of the groom) – are the bizarre ones who are aberrant and unnatural.  And I think that this represents an extreme version of Freud’s observations in Civilization and Its Discontents, outlined a bit in the paragraph above, that we need to limit our libidinal wishes in order to enjoy the advantages of being a member of civilization.  In the case of the Hasidim, we need to do that so severely that we become constricted, not only in terms of our relations with the outside world, but also in terms of our relationships with each other.  So the Hasidim become a queer mirror of the culture as a whole – or a looking glass into our past that may allow us to see the versions of our selves that persist into the present.

But the present that Esty discovers in Berlin couldn’t appear more different, on the surface, than the Williamsburg community that she left behind.  Welcoming and warm, embracing queerness of sexual orientation, and the queerness of Jews in Berlin, it is also hostile – warning Esty that she does not belong among the elites because her sheltered/repressive existence has prevented her from exploiting her natural talents to the extent that she has not practiced what it takes to belong with this exclusive group that is explicitly inclusive of queers.  Of course, because she is also different in yet another way, we see that this may not quite be the case – that this woman, this excluded and queer member of a queer culture has a voice that needs to be heard – thus creating a parallel between the imagined Esty and the actual Deborah Feldman, whose voice was her writing.

When the class was discussing the masturbation paper, it became clear to us that the transition from masturbation – from Freud’s narcissistic love to the love of objects – from, in this case, the cloistered and smothering love of Esty’s husband, with her (and their child, when he discovers that) as a narcissistic object – one who would fulfill his purpose of repopulating the world with people like him, to the love of Esty for a world that includes her queer mother, who turns out to be more whole than she or we could have imagined – is a transition that involves both opening up – allowing others in – but also narrowing our focus, not, in fact being in love with everything that crosses our horizon, because this is too distracting.  We need to focus – as the musicians do – to create the kind of beauty that humans are capable of producing both in art but also in relationships.  Freud’s acknowledgement of the tragic constraints that are part and parcel of being a member of civilization hold true.  And, while we cheer the choices that Esty makes, we also recognize that they are, indeed, scandalous.  They break the bonds that allow us to do as we were intended to do – so that we can, we hope, better serve a higher purpose and, in Esty's case, connect, on a deeper level, with her Jewish heritage of breaking free - living with self defined rather than other defined constraints.

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The Tiger King: Narcissism/Psychopathy on Netflix keeps us Entertained during Covid-19

The Tiger King is a documentary series that features the life, time, and crimes of Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage (neé Schreibvogel); better known by his stage name Joe Exotic or his self-proclaimed title, the Tiger King.  Currently in prison, Joe is a very interesting character – one that is psychodynamically and, I think, politically intriguing.  He is also sensationally displayed in this series – and my ability to make sense of him as a person is necessarily compromised by his depiction – by the filters that the director has placed between him and us in order to tell what is a very compelling story.

The Tiger King has become a streaming sensation during the time of COVID-19.  Sequestered at home, caged, if you will, like wild tigers, we have become intrigued by Joe Exotic and the other private or “for profit” zoo leaders and zoos depicted in this documentary series.  The reluctant son was the first to recommend it, but one of my students in my now online Freud class wondered about what we, as a class, thought of it, so I became intrigued and convinced the reluctant wife to watch it with me.

We were struck by the parallels of the depiction of Joe Exotic and that of the character played by Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems.  Both seem to be best understood as severely narcissistic characters who might qualify as psychopathic.  Both are depicted as spiraling towards a tragic ending – careening from one bad decision to a worse one as they attempt to keep their increasingly stretched worlds – worlds that are stretched by their need to sustain their self-esteem – afloat.

The keeper of our local zoo – one that has some national renown – lives in our neighborhood.  As the reluctant son and I were on our nightly walk, he jogged by and we asked him about The Tiger King.  He has not seen the series, but he knows of and/or knows many of the principle characters, including Terry Thompson, the private zookeeper who apparently killed himself near here after letting his exotic animals loose, resulting in their deaths when police killed them to prevent people being harmed.

The zookeeper has empathy for these individuals.  From his perspective, many of them took in injured wild animals and nursed them back to health.  Once they became known for this, when people would discover an injured animal, they would bring it over and, before you know it, they had a menagerie that was increasingly difficult to maintain. 

Though not detailed in the documentary, this seems not unlike the origin story of Joe Exotic’s zoo – with the initial acquisition of a few animals, and then an increasing fascination with them combined with a limited knowledge of how to care for them (there is early footage of Joe Exotic transporting a snow leopard in an un-air-conditioned van across Florida at the height of summer with no apparent knowledge of the stress involved), but with Joe, this became combined with the lure of showing the animals – using them to create a circus like show where we could star both at home, and on the road with a travelling version of the zoo that went to malls.

As Joe added to his collection of animals, he also needed to add to his staff in order to manage the animals.  So in addition to collecting animals, he began to collect people.  His favorite place to do this seems to have been on the streets in the seedier sections of town.  He would pick up folks who were just out of prison, or down on their luck for other reasons, and offer them a meal and a place to stay.  They, like the audience, became fascinated with the animals and began working – apparently with little or no pay. 

Feeding the animals (and the people) became quite an ordeal.  Road crews learned they could bring road kill to the zoo, horses that were too old to be ridden were brought in and summarily executed and fed to the tigers and other animals, and Wal-Mart was convinced to send along the meat products that had passed expiration dates, and these were used to feed the animals – but also, apparently, the staff (Full confession – as the person in my family who will eat anything, and who believes that expiration dates are simply guidelines, I did not find this as problematic as those with more squeamish attitudes towards food might have).

Part of the economic problem of the zoo was that it attracted people to the gate by giving them the opportunity to have up close and personal encounters with tigers.  Putting people in a cage with a full grown tiger is not something that even Joe Exotic would attempt.  So the money was in tiger cubs who, for about three or four months, are cute balls of fluff that can be handled by and photographed with visitors who are willing to pay an arm and a leg for a unique representation of them with a wild animal.  Bonanza!  But then, once the animal is four months old or so and begins to become a wild tiger, it has to be retired from the petting trade.  But now it will live for another few decades…  Only so many tiger cubs can be sold off – and many that are end up being returned – feeding and caring for a full grown tiger is complicated business.  One of the allegations is that Joe would shoot and bury old tigers.

When my cousin was a student in Chicago many years ago, she lived down the street from Muhammad Ali.  Ali, according to her report, had a lion roaming his yard, which I’m certain had a high wall.  I’m equally certain that the lion, probably given to Ali by an African leader when he was in Africa, perhaps at the Rumble in the Jungle, was a very good deterrent to theft, and, perhaps for him a cheap security system.  But for most of us, managing a wild beast is expensive and time consuming.

The Tiger King found it expensive and time consuming to care for the animals – but it also fueled his wish to be on stage – to be important – and to be in charge.  His wish to be in charge was expressed politically as well.  He made a somewhat comical run for president, but then made a more or less serious run for governor of Oklahoma. 

The less serious part is that he hired a campaign manager (whose previous job was to sell Joe guns at Wal-Mart) who put together a platform that Joe did not care about or understand.  He went around to rodeos, fairs, and parades and glad handed, promoting the zoo and himself.  This, it seemed, was a lark and maybe not bad for business.

The serious part is that, though he came in third in the election, he garnered twenty per cent of the vote.  One in five Oklahomans voted for a man who had no idea what he would do once he got into office.  In so far as they were voting on the issues, the platform that the former Wal-Mart employee put together for him (who was much more thoughtful than my demeaning comment makes him sound) was a libertarian one, arguing for reduction in government.  In so far as they were voting on character, they were voting for a person who treated the electoral process as a joke that was not to be taken seriously. 

I have written recently about our wish to evade the mandate of the founding fathers to self-govern and have perverted their message into one of revolting to produce no government, but, after recently reading a political science text of the reluctant son’s on the populist movement, I have become convinced that being governed by others is what we come to feel like when the government is run by “elites”.  The elites are the kids who did well in school and made us feel like idiots because we didn’t know the answer in class.  And to see someone like us running things helps us feel competent rather than looked down on (or, in the left leaning populism, over looked).

Narcissism has been called the common cold of personality disorders.  Part of the reason for this is that we all have narcissistic issues – we all struggle to manage our self-esteem.  And we are all vulnerable to narcissistic injury – when someone devalues us or makes fun of us, it hurts – frequently quite deeply.  Management of our self-esteem is an ongoing, lifelong undertaking.  And when it gets out of whack, we can react by turning to others for reassurance. 

But when we are never quite able to actually feel competent – when the taunts of the other kids have cut too deeply and there hasn’t been enough reassurance from those back home that we are, in fact, OK despite what those mean kids say – we can build a seemingly unfillable reservoir of self-doubt that leads us to more and more frantically work to pour good stuff into that reservoir.  This pushes us towards more extreme activities that we imagine will finally, once and for all, fill the void.

Of course, we are also angry about having to do so much work to achieve the recognition that our hard work clearly should have earned for us.  I say “of course” as if that were the rationale and logic of a mature, thoughtful person.  But when we are feeling narcissistically depleted, we don’t feel rational, logical or mature.  We feel like a little kid who, once again, is not getting what he wants. 

Joe Exotic's anger gets focused on Carole Baskin, who runs an animal “rescue” park that mirrors Joe’s park in almost every way – including the “volunteers” that she collects who end up working full time for no money to care for the animals.  Her sanctimonious attacks on Joe are met with amazingly unmeasured responses – and we are drawn more and more deeply into a cat fight that is embarrassingly interesting.  We are like the rubber-neckers who slow down traffic on the other lane of the highway so they can get a good look at the aftermath of an accident.

Why are we more and more deeply drawn into this series as it becomes more and more primitive?  I came across an idea about this from an unlikely quarter in the class about Freud this week.  My co-teacher recommended an article about masturbation and Jane Austen by Eve Sedgwick, and in it, Sedgwick demonstrates parallels between pornographic medical descriptions of masturbation in the 1800s and scenes in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.  One of the hidden things that she points out is that the motivation of the scientist/physician and that of the pornographic reader are very closely related.

I think it is not just that, on one level I fancy myself one of the elites – and am slumming in spending time with Joe Exotic – I think it is also that Joe Exotic and the life he is leading parallels aspects of my life.  And I think this happens in multiple ways.  Joe’s immaturity mirrors my own.  Joe’s immaturity mirrors that of our current President – and so it is a spectacle on a smaller scale that may help us understand the larger one.  But frankly, Joe’s social world mirror’s some of the politics at my University – and probably within my own family, in ways that I find fascinating – both on a conscious, but also on many unconscious levels.  There is an unvarnished quality to this slick production that suggests that we are getting a look at the essential nature of “Trump’s America”. 

I think we need to be careful about thinking that we are tourists in that America when we watch this spectacle devolve.  It is not just about those who would use tigers to prop up their self-esteem, it is about my use of petro-chemicals, and the engineering expertise of Detroit and the real estate business to have external evidence of how powerful I am.  It is about the ways that I use the classroom and the consulting room – hopefully only some of the time – to prop up my self-esteem rather than teach my students and help my patients.  It is about how hard we are driven to work and to achieve without thinking about the cost of this to our families, communities and the planet.

I think that Joe, based on this video, has a very limited ability to empathize with others – the tigers and other animals in his menagerie, the people who work for him, the people who come to his park, and the men that he has married.  He is generous to some of these people – and to strangers.  He prepared a Thanksgiving dinner for the poor public every year and appeared to be genuinely distraught when he lost a husband.  And one of Sedgwick’s most undermining critiques is that my diagnosis of “psychopathy” should carry no more weight than the identity of being a “masturbator”. 

As one of the mothers of queer theory, Sedgwick was, I think, arguing that we are all queer.  Which, in this context, means that we are all fluid, and that we move from identity to identity as we move from moment to moment.  One of the questions that this series asks is whether Joe Exotic deserves to be in jail.  We can ask whether he committed the crimes that landed him in jail, and the series explicitly focuses on that.  But implicitly it is asking a much more important question.  Are we guilty if our “identity” accounts for actions that can’t actually be proven?  In so far as prison is neither a place to rehabilitate nor to punish, but a place to protect us from those who cannot be trusted to live with us, the series is asking, “When are we no longer queerly related to our identity – when have we become so closely identified with that aspect of ourselves that cares only about ourselves that it is unacceptable for us to live among others?"  In other words, when do we deserve to be caged for the protection of others?

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The Boston Tea Party was About Self-Government, Not No-Government

In the United States, we had a Tea Party because we were objecting to a government that was taxing us without representation.  This began a battle that became a war that became a question – is self-government possible? 

Plato wrote about the City State in the Republic and suggested that the order of the citizens soul should be modeled on the organization of the ideal state, and the state, in turn, should be ruled by the citizen who most closely resembled the ideal State. 

Freud was much more realistic.  He, too, believed that civilization would mirror the person, but the people that he knew intimately were complicated critters who were driven by very basic biological needs that could, at best, be diverted to higher purposes.  When this happens, it is for the good of all, but the individual does not get all that he would, especially if he were strongest.

In order for the individual (or the state) to function optimally when working in a civilized context, it must divide against itself.  This is where Freud's ego versus the id emerges.  And it is where a governing body that "rules" over the population comes in.  When the ego simply capitulates to the id, or the governing body does not exercise restraint, chaos ensues.

We are blessed to have governor in Ohio who is pre-tea party Republican.  He believes, unlike our president, that the executive’s job is to govern.  Every day during this crisis, Mike DeWine takes the podium at 2:00.  In calm tones and with an interpreter for the deaf, he describes what steps have been taken by his government and by the people of his state to address the Corona Virus situation.

Today he noted the manufacturers that have been able to shift on relatively short notice to produce products that are needed in our state and elsewhere to address the pandemic.  He highlighted the start of production today of face masks that will be produced at the rate of 5,000 per day by a company that had been working to produce unrelated products.

He then went on to proclaim – in understated and sober terms – that we are doing much better than the predictions had suggested that we might.  He gave the credit for this to the people of the state of Ohio who have engaged much more aggressively in social distancing than those who came up with the models had expected that they would.  He cautioned us that we need to continue doing this for the foreseeable future, but he also let us know that his staff was beginning to work on plans for how we get from here to a state of normalcy when that can occur.

He spoke genuinely, forthrightly and from the heart.  He could have taken credit for how well have done.  In one poll, his leadership of Ohio led him to be rated the best governor in responding to the crisis.  But he genuinely thanked the people of Ohio for taking this situation seriously.  Later in day, the President read from a script thanking the American people, but his insincerity was tangible.

This Republican governor harks back to a time before the tea party hijacked the party.  He represents a politics as the act of governing – of slowing and modulating the energy of the state so that the state as a whole functions optimally.  This requires sacrifice on the part of individuals.  And, when this sacrifice is shared, there is a sense of shared ownership of the outcome.

It also relies on the individuals to police themselves.  In an earlier talk, the governor, when asked by a reporter whether police would pull people over to give them tickets for disobeying the law, the governor said that laws have always served an educative function.  They tell us what is right or wrong.  Thankfully we generally choose to obey the law.

Meanwhile, the President, as he often is, was late to deliver his daily address.  In his daily addresses, he has blamed others for his failings and provided false solace.  He has downplayed the threat rather than acknowledging it.  He has undermined the role of government in governing in this crisis and throughout his presidency.  He has actively worked to dismantle the agencies that would limit our functioning.

Our governor is justifiably proud of the citizens who have engaged in self-restraint.  I heard a French psychoanalysis express similar pride (and not a little disbelief) at the French self-restraint, noting this is not considered a national trait.  But it was Jacque Rousseau who called attention to the need for a social contract, and our founding fathers heeded that call.  We choose to be citizens.  And we restrain ourselves because it is in our best interests to work together – not at cross purposes. 

This president appeals to our darker angels.  He appeals to our belief that our unchecked actions will bring us greater reward.  This is true in the very short term.  And certainly if one has the levers of power at his disposal, one can use them to his own benefit.  But should those who have been promised they will be used for them experience themselves as being disenfranchised and not helped, they will not restrain themselves – and there will be hell to pay for anyone who has disillusioned them.  And this president has disillusioned those who have had faith in him. 

Trump, ironically, embodies the unconstrained Freudian human.  He acts out of self-interest alone.  Those who would also act without restraint – who would make the world according to their own desires – have identified with him and felt he was their champion. 

Freud maintained that following the rule of law was the first pre-requisite to civilization.  Trump’s ability to flout legislative law has emboldened him to believe that he can flout the laws of nature.  He disregards advice from those who have studied those laws. 

In flouting legislative law, Trump has been able to count on political power to keep the legislators from enforcing their own laws.  He imagines himself to be able to hold the same sway over natural law, but in this he is proving to be sadly mistaken.

Unfortunately we are all paying for his hubris.  This is in the process of becoming a national tragedy.   

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Bong's Parasite is a Rich Psychoanalytic Meal.

The Reluctant Co-Teacher and I chose Parasite for our Reading Freud class to watch together and discuss.  Actually, the class chose it from a short list we provided.  Few of them had seen it, and they were curious.   In our post-Covid-19 pandemic social isolation world with regular classes shut down, twenty one of us met by Zoom to discuss the film.  The students are writing a term paper due in two weeks that will be based on a work of literature or art of their choosing and the paper will require them to interpret that work from a psychoanalytic perspective.  Thus they were invested in seeing how our reading of Freud this semester would translate into interpreting this film.

The movie poster

We nominated Parasite because it is a timely film about the relationship between the rich (the 1%) and the poor.  While set in South Korea and steeped in the South Korean vernacular, it’s resonance transcends that particular place and speaks to us on the levels of Nations (e.g., the U.S. use of “parasitic” Asian, Latin American, and African nations to provide cheap labor), other cultures (e.g., the U.S. one per cent’s use of cheap domestic labor – labor that becomes essential during the era of Covid-19, raising the question, as this film does, of who is dependent on whom), but also, I think, of the individual – with questions about whether our conscious selves (the 1% of our functional selves) are the dominant or perhaps a parasitic outgrowth of our much larger (and ceaselessly working) unconscious selves.

I had seen the film earlier and was certain that the universality of the theme was part of what made this superbly written, acted and directed film the Oscar winner for best picture.  I also wondered whether its ability to humanize those who can be seen as inhuman was seen by the Academy as a feat worth recognizing.  The movie humanizes the servant class of South Korea who are inhuman to the 1% there – but it also humanizes the South Korean culture and the individuals in the film.  South Korea has one of many Asian cultures that are often indistinguishable and frequently denigrated individually and collectively by a U.S. audience.  The characters in this movie are deeply likeable, each in their own quirky approach to the world.

A word of orientation here before I describe the film.  In Korea, family names precede individual names.  This film is primarily about two families – the Kim family and the Park family.

The Kims folding pizza boxes.

The film begins with our hero, Kim Ki-Woo (Choi Woo- Shik), searching for a free Wi-Fi in the Kim’s half underground apartment.  The internet they have been stealing from a neighbor is now password protected.  He and his sister, Kim Ki-Jung (Park So-dam) discover an unprotected Wi-Fi above the toilet, which is near the ceiling and this allows them to discover that they can make some money by folding boxes for a local pizza delivery business.  They join their father, Kim Kai-Taek (Song Kang-ho) and mother, Park Chung Sook (Jang Hye-jin) in this business to earn enough cash to keep their family afloat.

The Kim Father inspects the Scholar's Rock

As the family is gathered for dinner, looking at the street at eye level, a drunken man in the street begins peeing and, as he staggers, he starts peeing into the Kim home.  The Kim mother restrains the Kim father who would confront the drunk, but just then, the Kim son’s friend Min-hyuk shows up, confronts the drunk – and the mother notes that he has vigor.  Min gives the son a scholar’s rock, which promises to bring wealth to the owner.  He then goes out for a drink of soda with the son and tells him that he is taking time to study abroad and so wants the son to tutor the daughter of a rich family that he has been tutoring.  Min thinks the Kim’s son is smarter than his friends at the University, plus he trusts that Ki-Woo won’t steal the girl away.  Min wants to woo her for himself when he returns from his time away. 

Ki-Woo wants this job, but is not qualified because he is not a University student.  Min reassures Ki-Woo that the mother is simple and there won’t be any problems.  Ki-Woo recruits his sister, who has artistic aptitude, to create University documents and he shows up at the Park’s house to apply to be the tutor.

The Park’s house could not be more different than the Kim home.  It is the house that an architect, Nangoong, designed for himself.  It is a modern architecture style home with very clean lines, lots of open space in the house, and the focal point of the home is a spacious private yard that backs up to a forest on the side of a mountain.  The contrast with the view from the basement window of the Kim’s could not be more stark.

The Park Parents

  

The Park family is, as one of the student’s in class pointed out, a double of the Kim family.  Nominally headed by a CEO of an large electronics firm, Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-Kyun); the household is, in fact under the management of the “simple” and quite anxious Choi Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), who is responsible for the educations of her high school aged daughter Park Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), and her rambunctious, spoiled and traumatized elementary aged son Park Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun).

Yeon-gyo hires Ki-Woo based largely on Min’s recommendation, decides to call him Kevin, but also lets him know that she is worried about her son and thinks he needs an art tutor.  Ki-Woo hatches a plan on the spot and recommends his cousin’s friend “Jessica”, in actuality his sister, to teach art to the son.  Yeon-gyo dutifully hires Jessica, who pretends not to know Ki-Woo/Kevin and both Kevin and Jessica boss their wards around, and, while Jessica bosses the Park mother around, Kevin begins to have an affair with the Park's daughter.

When the chauffeur drives Jessica home and tries to put the moves on her, Jessica intentionally leaves her panties in the car.  When the Park father discovers them, he fires the chauffeur assuming that he has had sex in the car with a wanton woman, and Jessica is able to recommend her father as a driver by pretending that he has been a chauffeur for a family that has moved to the US.  Once the father is hired, the family schemes together to get the housekeeper fired by exploiting her allergy to peaches and making her appear to have TB instead, and they get the Kim mother hired, through a sham high end placement agency they concoct, as the new housekeeper - all of them now pretending, on the job, not to know each other.

The old housekeeper and husband.

So, we now have two parallel families sharing the same austere space.  When the Parks head to a weekend holiday at a camp ground to celebrate their young son’s birthday, the Kim’s take over the house and have a wild and decadent party.  The party is interrupted by the return of the old housekeeper, who reveals a hidden subbasement that her husband, who has been hiding from loan sharks for a decade, lives in.  She is at the mercy of the new housekeeper, until she discovers that the new caretakers are all from the same family and have been scamming the Parks.  She threatens to send the Parks the incriminating video she has made on her phone, gaining power over the Kims, until the Parks call to say that they are returning from the camping trip because they have been rained out – and panic ensues as the Kims try to restore some semblance of order to the house and hide so that the Parks don’t know what has been going on.

When the Parks do return, the parents end up spending the night in the living room on the couch to keep an eye on their son, who has decided to camp out in the yard to finish his birthday camp out – meanwhile the Kims are hiding under the living room coffee table.  As the Parks get frisky on the couch, the Kims try to remain silent, though the Kim’s son is texting with the Parks daughter who is upstairs.

Somehow the Kims sneak out and walk through the continuing deluge down, down, down a series of stairs, beautifully filmed, to arrive at their home, which is flooded.  After saving their most important possessions, they end up in a shelter with their neighbors.  The father announces to the son that he has a plan – it is the son who has been planning all the hijinx to this point – and, when pressed, the father acknowledges that his plan is no plan because plans always fail.  Look around, he says to the son, did any of these people plan to be in this shelter tonight?

The next morning, the three Kims in the shelter are summoned to a replacement birthday party for the Park’s son which the Park’s mother is in the process of whipping up at the last minute.  This party allows the film to reach its climax.  The bedraggled Kims are each to play a role in the celebration, the old housekeeper’s father makes an appearance – violent chaos ensues – and then there is a quiet reflection on what has taken place.

The Reluctant Co-Teacher and I set the frame for the discussion of this film by noting that we both saw the economic distance between the two families as a central motif.  We also noted that the house itself, in addition to the many interesting human characters, played a central role in the film and deserved to be understood as a character in its own right. And we opened the class for discussion.

Hollywood Squares: Original Zoom.

If you have been in a Zoom space with twenty people, it is a tough place to have a conversation.  Some of us were outside, some inside.  We were probably in five or eight states.  People kept their mikes muted so that background noise didn’t interfere with the class and/or to prevent feedback loops, so it was hard to have spontaneous conversations.  A few brave souls offered ideas about themes that were important to attend to in the film and, generally, the Reluctant Co-Teacher and I would respond to them, frequently riffing with them about that theme or perspective.  After a bit, I began calling on people and asking them for a contribution. 

The Brady Bunch: More Zoom

A conversation about a film or a book or a work of art, unlike a lecture or a formal paper, meanders.  Themes emerge, are discussed, then another theme emerges, and, maybe much later, an earlier theme remerges and is seen in a new light.  The discreet process that emerged as the result of the Zoom organization of the class (if you haven’t used Zoom, one of the ways that people’s pictures are organized is a little like the old television show Hollywood Squares, or the introduction to the show The Brady Bunch.  Unlike both of those, the placement of the people is random –they aren’t in a space where they can relate to each other by looking in the direction of the speaker – they can only look at the screen where everyone is).  So this conversation was more like a patch work quilt than a stream or a river.  Ideas would emerge, be worked over, and then we would move onto the next.

And what a lot of ideas there were!  Both the film and the students proved to have a wealth of ideas that were worth considering.  Many of the ideas that emerged were simply acknowledged as being worth pursuing rather than being pursued.  For instance, one of the thoughts of a student was about the Oedipal configuration of the Kim family.  In our brief conversation about that, we focused on the relationship between the Kim father and son, but noted that, during the meal the Kims ate at the Park’s house, a fight erupted between the Kim father and mother.  It was scary – to the Kim children and to us as viewers.  But the parents were able to resolve it with humor – even though real issues seem to have erupted between them.  So, rather than exploring this perspective in detail, we noted that it could be a topic, in itself, for a paper.  (In fact, as I am thinking now, the topic of food and family meals in the movie could be an interesting psychoanalytically discussed angle on the film.)

Similarly, the doubling of the families was noted by another student to be a fruitful avenue into understanding the structure of the film.  This Freudian concept was articulated in his essay On the Uncanny.  In particular, she noted that the Kims were struck by the Parks – they thought about them a great deal, but the Parks had very little interest or awareness of the Kims or people of their ilk.  The exception to this was the Park’s imagining that the woman that their first chauffeur had (supposedly) seduced and had sex in their car with was a drug user – and remembering this and imagining themselves to be dirty like the drug using hussy heightened their own sexual arousal.

This led us to talk about the ways in which the disavowed underclass is seen as having more powerful sexual desires and a more interesting sexual life than the master group that exerts control across cultures and times.  This clearly has implications about the functioning of the minds of the 1% and of the rest of the culture - especially as filtered through those minds and as they imagine (project their disavowed desires onto) each other.

Another student noted the sensual qualities of the movie – and the importance of the body in understanding the experience of the characters.  This led us to focus on the sense of smell.  The Park’s son – in another exception to the rule that the Parks were not curious about the Kims – noticed that the Kims all smelled alike.  They could not wash off the smell of the basement – though they thought they could change this by using different detergents to give each of them a different smell off.  But the Park father, who wanted the servants to stay on their side of the line, noticed that their smells transgressed that line and that those smells were not the smells of a particular family, but of a class of people.  Ultimately, it was the Park father’s disgust at the smell of those from the underground that led to his demise (I am avoiding specifics here to avoid spoiling the film – if you have seen it, you will know what we were referring to here).

Another student characterized the film as a dream, noting that the role of the servants was to help keep the Parks asleep.  Allowing the Parks to remain unaware of how much effort was required to keep their lives “simple”.  This led us to note how unstable this situation was – how the movie/dream kept reeling towards revealing all of the shenanigans supporting the Park's blissful unawareness, and this was related to the issues of the class differences that were highlighted at the beginning.  We talked about a Marxist revolution that might be lying right under the surface of our current apparent economic well-being, but also noted that the strife between the Kims and the old housekeeper and her family did not bode well for the unity of the servant class against the lording class.

Stairs between classes.

Yet another student was taken with the beauty of the images of the steps that connected the place where the Parks lived with the place where the Kims lived.  We wondered about the stairs as a metaphor – for instance for the idea of education – an education that was not perhaps economically available to Ki-woo – as a connector between the classes – one that presumably would lift those from the lower classes to the higher classes.  This was certainly Ki-woo’s fantasy at the end of the film, but it had the quality of a fantasy that was unrealizable and we talked about how the US’s class system, which used to use education as a leveler, is increasingly making higher education available to those with a background that requires support – so our class system is becoming more impermeable.

This led the Reluctant Co-Teacher to reflect on the different physical levels represented in the movie - with the upstairs - the private part of the home, serving as a place from which to spy on what was going on downstairs.  Meanwhile there was a total lack of awareness of what was going on in the subbasement.  But there were also levels that were created by the tables - with the Parks above the table while the Kims cowered beneath it, listening to them having sex.

This leads, now I realize that my mind is reorganizing the patchwork of the class into a flow, to an observation about the symbolism of water, rain, flooding and sewage.  The Parks, as representatives of both wealth and consciousness, are able to remain high and dry – while the unconscious and the poor are saturated with the visceral qualities of water – not as a shower, but a deluge, and one that carries with it the waste of everyone higher.  At one point in the rainstorm, the Kim’s toilet was repeatedly vomiting black waste into the already flooded space.  The Kim's daughter, "Jessica", nonchalantly closed the toilet, and climbed on top of it as the black waste now spit sideways out from under the seat.  A brilliant image of managing the traumatic material that shoots up from below – whether that is the sewers or the unconscious.

And this, in turn, was related to an observation about trauma in the movie.  The Park’s son had been traumatized on an earlier birthday when he saw a ghost emerging from the basement.  Of course, this was the housekeeper’s husband who was sneaking upstairs to get some food.  We talked about this as the return of the repressed, another Freudian idea that could be used to organize this film.  Especially as that relates to the party at the end, which the Park mother imagined as a reparative party – the "trauma recovery party" – that turns into the trauma to end all traumas with the reappearance of the old housekeepers husband.  There seemed to be a powerful moral lesson – a function of the superego – that would have emerged from following this trail to its logical conclusion.

I could go on – there were other useful avenues into exploring the meanings of this dense and horrifying (the Reluctant Co-Teacher pointed out that it used many horror film tropes in its construction) and funny and lovely and loving film.  The poignant ending, with the lovely fantasy that would allow Ki-woo’s father to be repatriated with what was left of his family, provides a hopeful option for what is largely a tragic masterpiece, and the role of hope in surviving horror could be another avenue into this work.  As I think about it, as a tragedy of the lower class, this is not so much about the discovery of one's own abilities to escape the fates as it is about the discovery of the limited ability of cunning and guile to help individual's escape the cage of their social class.

The array of possible entry points – lifting the curtain and peaking in – maybe taking a few steps inside – mirrors my experience of writing as the Reluctant Psychoanalyst.  The post that I create on any given day is the result of the mixture of the work I am writing about, which dominates, I think, and my own personal context – the person that I bring to that work on that day, including the particular analytic perspective that I take on the work.  On another day, I would enter the work in a different way.  On a few occasions I have found, after a post has been up for a few days, that a different entry point tugs at my sleeve and I write a second take on it.  Asymmetry is a recent example where I took a first pass and then a different second pass.

I hope the class learned, as I have, that there are many analytic understandings of any work of art.  My hope in writing a post is not to provide a definitive take, but a preliminary one, one that will, I hope, stimulate the reader to share a point of view, but also to use what I have to offer as a point from which to launch into novel and idiosyncratic perspectives that are their own.  The joy of applied psychoanalysis, whether in the consulting room, on the web, or in the classroom (now redundant with being on the web) is that there is a simultaneous meeting of minds – moments of intersection and shared understanding – mixed with moments of private appreciation – private moments that are able to arise because of a relational, emotional, and ideational context that supports them.  We are able to appreciate that we live in a world with others that can understand and connect with us, and that we live in the world that is also very much our own private universe.

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