Portrayal of the Life Cycle

ONE OF THE most striking psychological portrayals in the film "Devi" is nothing less than that of the whole life cycle. Besides laying out before us, in exquisite aesthetic taste, various characters representing different stages of the life cycle, the artistic presentation induces within us an experience of the major issues of development—birth, sickness, death, marriage, fertility, attachment, rebellion, individuation and detachment—to name a few.

One of the functions of great art, as of psychoanalysis, is to bring one step closer to psychic integration those elements of experience that have been dissociated from one another. During and after seeing this movie, one can feel one's own childlike playfulness and terror in the nephew Khoki, adolescent loneliness and choice of destinies in Doya, the sensuality and separateness of the young couple, the frustration and alienation of mother from her child, the unresolved dependency on father of the older son, the struggle for emancipation from father's authority and power by the younger son, and, most poignantly, the failure of the old man to achieve the culturally prescribed mastery of old age—namely, detachment from family through spiritual reunion with the gods. As the canvas is painted leisurely by the camera, one can feel consciously what is unconsciously probably a universal phenomenon—that is, the condensation of past experience, futuristic expectation, and hope as caught in the time slice of the present.

I would postulate that by age five to six most children begin to have a sense of what is deeply expected of them, not only in terms of good and bad behavior, but in the images and ideals of who they are to become. Ruth Moulton spells out the conflict-ridden destinies that befall the heroine, leading to her psychotic break. I have in mind a more general idea that, given our capacity for foresight and imagination, we are continuously being influenced by the ground plan of the life cycle as we begin to experienc