Precious: Based on the novel “Push” by Sapphire presents the story of a poor and illiterate teen who is twice impregnated by her father and abused by her mother as a rival and as an object of compensation for her own deep narcissistic injury. Sandra Walker, Carlotta Miles, and Annelle Primm will engage the audience in a discussion about whether and/or how psychodynamic perspectives can make a difference in work with people who share the experience of Precious and her mother. The opportunities and obstacles involved when working with people from America's underclass who are experiencing intergenerational trauma will be discussed.
Walker says that Precious vividly portrays the multiple traumas inflicted on an adolescent girl by her family and community. Precious Jones takes refuge in her fantasies, and somehow manages to engage the interest and compassion of adults who are in the helping professions—teachers, nurses, and social workers.
How do we, as psychodynamic clinicians, understand her resilience? How equipped are we to help young people in our inner cities to heal from trauma and transform their experiences into more hopeful lives? How equipped are we to understand those family members and peers who commit acts of brutality? This film discussion will embrace these questions and others from the audience.
Other significant films depicting trauma, loss, and difficulty in mourning include The Kid (1921, Charlie Chaplin), Blackboard Jungle (1955, Richard Brooks), Forbidden Games (1952, René Clément), Pixot (1983, Hector Babenco), Salaam Bombay! (1988, Mira Nair), Menace II Society (1993, Allen and Albert Hughes), and the two discussed in this article, Los Olvidados, The Young and the Damned (1950, Luis Bunuel), and Boyz 'N the Hood (1991, John Singleton).
In 1950, the renowned Spanish director Luis Bunuel burst onto the international scene with a film combining neo-realistic and surrealistic images and ideas—Los Olivados, translated as The Young and the Damned or The Forgotten. This harsh, somber, and painful film is replete with unrelenting and retaliatory violence like John Singleton's Boyz 'N the Hood. Except for the shooting of Jaibo by the police, many boys—as well as chickens and roosters—are gruelingly bludgeoned to injury and death by sticks and stones, and others are threatened. Bunuel links this Mexico City street life of over-stimulation, deprivation, and violent trauma with dissolving images of other cities: New York, Paris, and London.
The primary characters, including the rooster-like Jaibo, just escaped from a reform school; Pedro, whose mother identifies him with his deserting father, deprives him of food and is excessively blaming; and a peasant boy, Little Eyes, who was told by his father to endlessly wait at a given spot in the market until his return, are all deprived of fathering. The only character with a father, Julian, regularly retrieves him from his bar.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
The only mother depicted is alternately punitive, depriving, and seductive. Little Eyes and Pedro yearn for the older Jaibo as a potential father, but identify with him in his conscienceless, relentless violence, and nefarious manipulations. The film illustrates Leonard Shengold's view that “deprivation can lead to the same traumatic and sadomasochistic imbalance as overstimulation.” Bunuel implies that because of a lack of loving, consistent parental relationships, internal aggression cannot be mediated and that individual aggression is reinforced by the humiliation and injustice of an aggressive society.
John Singleton's 1992 Boys 'N the Hood compares two families—Tre and his educated, middle-class father and, across the street, an underclass family that includes Ricky, a football player awaiting his SAT scores, Doughboy and other half brothers, and their drug-addicted mother. The adolescents were involved with three other youths in a “dissing,” and Ricky is killed in revenge and held by his friends in a poignant pietà image.
The film continues with Doughboy shooting Ricky's murderers and, according to the story, Doughboy is shot two weeks later.
One motive to kill the murderers was revenge, but it was also because the adolescents could not deal with the shocking traumatic loss of their sibling; they did not have the capacity to mourn, to bear the depression. Tre struggles to bear the loss. He readies his gun to kill, then, aided by the warnings and support of his father, temporarily decides against it. Nonetheless, he joins the retaliators but after hours of searching for Ricky's killer, his reluctance predominates, and he asks to be let out of the car. Because of his more empathic parenting, Tre has more ego strength than Doughboy and his half-brothers who overreact to “dissing,” seek immediate gratification, have less frustration tolerance, and feel more humiliated, ashamed, and helpless about the loss. Among the indicators of helplessness, neediness, and primitive oral yearnings are many soda bottles, drugs, and a pacifier. They lack the capacity for coping with these feelings or doing the work of mourning. To do so would involve acknowledging the loss, bearing it, working it through, and emotionally detaching from the lost one so that they have the opportunity for reinvestment in learning and adaptive relationships.
Some adolescents deal with the threat of the abyss of mourning and depression by acting-out sexually, aggressively, and with drugs. To illustrate this hypothesis, one inner-city boy told of a friend whose older brother was shot at the edge of the school ground. In recounting this, the boy said, “I feel so sad that I am about to cry, and then I get mad and beat people up and start messing stuff up. I want to kill the person who did it.” Another boy said, “The sadness tries to get out but it can't.”
Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the world blind,” and Auden said, “Those who do evil to others have evil done to them.”
These ideas are also, of course, most relevant to many situations including initiating and perpetuating warfare. Both individuals and political entities project badness as well as helplessness, impotence, and rage onto the other, justifying destructive retaliation.
The victim of physical, mental, or sexual abuse turns from the passive vulnerable position, and by identifying with the aggressor becomes the active perpetrator, often enjoying some of the destructiveness of the hatred. As in the film, it can then provoke retaliatory violence because the victims and their friends feel the same kind of shame and humiliation. One sees another victim and potential aggressor in the cycle of violence in the one-year-old infant in the film who is exposed to the trauma of seeing his bleeding, dead father and the reactions of his caretakers.
There are certainly many other causes for the violence that we see in the inner city.
Set against a background of slavery and segregation which has already initiated a sense of degradation, these include the availability of guns, drugs, the rich/poor gap, poor schools, the intensity of racial discrimination, and the lack of opportunity. Could the U.S. murder rate that is 10 times that of Western Europe relate to the history of slavery? Joseph Noshpitz sees slavery and the ensuing traumatic history as building up an “inner hater, inner enemy, and inner destroyer. This is portable, they carry it with them everywhere.” Few youths escape its effects. Someone like Tre in Boys 'N the Hood who was given great positive input can overcome the pressure of the self-destructive moiety, but that is exceptional. “Most simply hate themselves (albeit largely unconsciously); when they are dissed or insulted, they have extreme reactions not only to the external threat but to the even more painful inner doubt of derisive self-devaluation.”
These issues of loss, mourning, and reparation are included in the presentation by Lissa Weinstein and Diana Diamond entitled “Faith and Faithlessness: The Role of the Erotic Imagination.” They say that the representational world with its myriad images of self in relation to others and the feelings and fantasies that link self to object finds its most complete and faithful expression in cinema. Accordingly, film remains an arena for the exploration of fundamental relational processes and dilemmas that confront us, including those involved in the formation and breaking of long-term erotic attachments. In this discussion group, we will explore issue of faith and faithlessness in romantic attachments as they are depicted cinematically in two films, Love, by the Hungarian director, Karoly Makk, and Faithless, which was written by Ingmar Bergman and directed by his romantic partner and muse Liv Ullmann. Both films explore the power of the imagination to sustain erotic attachments, even in the face of loss and deprivation, separation and betrayal. The plot of both films centers around issues of faith and faithlessness, and both illuminate aspects of the representational world, including the nature of object relations, that are both the cause and consequence of infidelity, the transformations in internal objects and one's relation to them that occur in processes of loss, mourning, and reparation, and the reparative function of the creative process itself.
Clips and briefer discussion of other films including Private Confessions (Ullmann, 2006), Brief Encounter (Lean, 1945), and Love (Szabo, 2002) will also be included. The focus will be on the ways in which aspects of cinematic technique utilized in these films are uniquely suited to illustrate the relationship with the internal object, constructed and transformed through the erotic imagination, and how this relationship continues to evolve and change throughout one's life, catalyzing shifts in one's experience of self and others, even in the face of death and separation. Also explored will be the ways in which these films are to some extent autobiographical and bring together the fantasy life of the director/screenwriter and the audience. We will also look at the ways in which socio-historical conditions may catalyze or curtail the reliance on and development of the representational world and may foster the displacement of Eros onto the world of objects and memory.