Psychoanalytic Reflections on Notes on a Scandal: The Psychopathology of Everyday Strife

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have once quipped “I never read a book I must review—it prejudices one so!” The cleverness of Wilde's joke, of course, is that it applies equally to our reviews of books we have read, and films we have seen—just less obviously and therefore more perniciously so. We only “see” the film that we are capable of seeing; the film that we wish to see, as our “prejudices”—that is, our personalities, conflicts, and defenses—dictate. This is a central theme of Richard Eyre's award winning Notes on a Scandal, a riveting drama about the relationship between Sheeba, a young high school art teacher having an affair with a student, and Barbara, a veteran teacher who creepily befriends her. As some reviewers have pointed out, perhaps the most disturbing message of this disturbing film is that Notes on a Scandal isn't really about them; it's about us. If I could choose a subtitle for the film, with a nod to Freud, it might be The Psychopathology of Everyday Strife. Or, in a less highbrow mode: Delusions R Us.

Notes on a Scandal is indeed a sumptuous buffet for a psychoanalytic commentator. The film's territory overlaps strikingly with that of the clinical psychoanalyst. It offers a profound illumination of the driving power of sexual and emotional needs; of the corrupting influence of feelings of entitlement; of the raw sadism that can be easily unleashed by narcissistic injuries; and of the stunning tenacity of the “repetition compulsion,” to name just a few of the themes that catch the clinician's eye. Furthermore, these are played out among the female leads in the film—no conventional idealization of women here!—in keeping with the psychoanalyst's unsentimental view of the dynamics of sex and aggression in both genders. Indeed, one of the most powerful aspects of the film is its unblinking exploration of the dark side of a female friendship. To quote from the title of Louise Kaplan's important book, Notes on a Scandal dares to examine the relatively uncharted territory of Female Perversions.

But despite all of its Freudian content, Notes on a Scandal actually has an even more profound and disturbing psychoanalytic sensibility. What I have in mind is that aspect of psychoanalysis which, according to Freud, most “disturb(s) the peace of this world.” Freud's most discomfiting claim was this: We humans cannot rightly claim that we control, or even really know, ourselves. As familiar and comfortable as this “modernist” claim may seem to us as 21st century, post-modern intellectuals, I would argue—and I think that Notes on a Scandal does as well—that Freud's point about our difficulty assimilating this “blow to our narcissism” still stands.

In this sense, Notes on a Scandal is a classically modernist (and therefore classically psychoanalytic) film, in the spirit of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Schoenberg, Picasso, Nietzsche, and their compatriots. At its heart is a profoundly unreliable narrator, the aptly named Barbara Covett. Barbara thinks she knows herself—indeed, she thinks she knows it all. And yet the film shows us that this woman is incapable of seeing the most basic truths about herself. She cannot admit her motives or her actual desires, hiding them from herself under a screen of rationalizations even as she acts them out repeatedly. When her sister empathically inquires about her sexuality and love life, Barbara is unable to respond, deceiving herself much more than her sister. When confronted by Sheeba, at the climax of the film, with the truth about herself, Barbara is able to thoroughly ignore it.

Sheeba's situation is somewhat different, yet just as thoroughly Freudian. When her outraged husband screams the anguished question—“Why?”—Sheeba is more honest with herself than Barbara, but no more transparent to herself. In one of the most powerful moments of the film, she responds to this question—why has she behaved in a way that has destroyed her life and the lives of those she loves?—with three astonishingly frank words: “I don't know!” Even with the back story that the film provides about Sheeba's loneliness and frustrations, it makes the point that she cannot explain, nor could she control, her actions. She is driven, opaque to herself, and unable, despite her intelligence and reflectiveness, to identify why she seduces Steven, how she really feels about her husband, and what she truly wants from Barbara.

And, like Barbara, she does not know because she cannot stand to know these things. Her conscious life, less dramatically than Barbara's, but no less truly, is a self-protective delusion, a self-serving fiction, a convenient dream meant to mask a reality she cannot tolerate.

It is this view of the human condition, our inevitable and thorough unreliability as narrators of our own lives, which Freud emphasized and which Notes puts, quite literally, in our faces. When we rail against it—perhaps by seeing these characters as “Others,” or by trying to make their behavior seem comprehensible—we are continuing the revolt against modernism. Does all of this, though, imply a hopeless pessimism about our lot as humans? On this question, I conclude with a few more clinically oriented thoughts.

The patients we see in our offices, ourselves included, are the Barbaras and Sheebas of the world; divided subjects unknown to themselves. What does clinical psychoanalysis have to offer to them, and to us? Can such profoundly split psyches be rejoined through the “talking cure”? Freud was the first of many to oversimplify this task. Despite his discovery that the contents of each individual's unconscious are emotional dynamite, buried deeply for good reason, he naively imagined, for a good part of his career, that people could actually be introduced to themselves in short order and to good effect. Several professional generations later, we psychoanalysts are less naive but still trying to figure out the practical and therapeutic paradoxes created by the kinds of profound self-divisions and self-deceptions portrayed so powerfully in Notes on a Scandal.

But this takes me too far afield. These remarks are only an effort to comment on Notes on a Scandal using a psychoanalytic lens, and my idiosyncratic psychoanalytic lens at that. Any psychoanalyst worthy of the title is as attuned to the nature, sources, limits, and effects of his own particular subjectivity as to that of his patients. Psychoanalysis fancies itself as the “science of subjectivity,” a challenging and paradoxical ideal if ever there was one. Among many other things, Notes on a Scandal brings this difficult sensibility to our attention in a most compelling way.