In Truffaut's movie, L'argent de poche (Small Change), we are invited to revel in the world as children see it. Truffaut captures the jubilation, perils and tumult that define the inner life of the child. He reminds the viewer of all the places, real and imagined, that we have known as children—places and experiences that exist now only in memory. Perhaps, he suggests, we adults can no longer handle the wild ride of childhood. As one character in the film comments, “I mean, whereas an adult would have been laid out for good, kids are as solid as a rock. They stumble through life, but they're not hurt. They're much tougher than we are.”
In one well-known scene, an apartment door opens. In runs a smiling Gregory, a mischievous boy of about two, followed by his mother. Gregory's mother bustles into the kitchen to put away her packages, with the distracted, half-attentive air of any young mother whose mind is occupied by several tasks at once. When the woman realizes she has misplaced her wallet, she turns to Gregory and asks if he's seen it. “Non!” he replies with an inscrutable grin. “Did you take it?” she asks again, and again “Non!” he replies impishly, singsong. Admonishing Gregory to stay out of trouble, she wipes her hands on her apron and hurries down the stairs.
Meanwhile, Gregory toddles off in pursuit of his cat. “Minou, viens!” he calls, chasing the cat around the bed, then scooping her up as best he can while she scrambles a bit. He puts the cat down on a chair beneath the open window. Watching her attempt to climb onto the sill, his curiosity is aroused. First gently, then more firmly, Gregory pulls and pushes at the cat. Is he encouraging her to climb out the window? Or trying to grab hold of her and bring her back inside? We can't tell for sure. Gregory himself does not know exactly what he is after or what might come next. Is his own curiosity driving him? Of course, knowing that “curiosity killed the cat,” we viewers are on high alert. Or could it be that Gregory is beginning to wrestle with a vague sense of wrongdoing? After all, didn't his mother tell him to “be good”? Gregory watches as the cat eventually climbs onto the window ledge, stretching languidly, until it falls right out the window. Gregory's eyes widen in surprise and wonder as he peers over the ledge, looking for his cat.
The audience holds its breath, dreading to know what Gregory has seen. The cat, startled and dazed, has landed on a wall and is preparing to leap away. Has it deliberately escaped? Or has it fallen, terrified and stupefied? The audience is left suspended in uncertainty. When the cat finally takes off for safety, Gregory says in a voice filled with awe, “Le chat a fait boum!” (“The cat went kaboom.”) Then, as the audience looks on, hearts in our mouths, Gregory climbs onto the chair himself. Determinedly, he clambers over the window ledge, grabbing hold of the safety bar as if it were monkey bars at the playground. The camera moves back and forth between the crowd that has gathered, aghast, tens of feet below, and the little boy far above, casually swinging his legs over the top of the bar.
Gregory squeezes his body underneath the bar. In a terrifying instant, he lets go, free-falling to the ground. Horrified adults run towards him. We want to look away, but we cannot. We are riveted to the screen. And then, just as suddenly, we watch as Gregory
Anne Adelman, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Chevy Chase, works with children, adolescents, and adults. She co-authored Wearing My Tutu to Analysis: Learning Psychodynamic Concepts from Life and co-edited The Therapist in Mourning: From the FarAway Nearby.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate 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.
lands on the ground and bounces back up, as if buoyed by his own exuberance. He throws his head back in joyful laughter, exclaiming, “Gregory a fait boum!” While his stunned mother falls over in a faint, and neighbors gather around her, Gregory brushes himself off and skips happily down the road kicking a rusty tin can, completely unaware of his near-fatal brush with a terrible end.
We let out our breath. Truffaut's magical hand has intervened, literally cradling Gregory for a soft landing. In this delightful, poignant and, at the same time, perturbing scene, Truffaut shines a light on the magic of imaginary play. Gregory is learning about the boundlessness of his inquisitiveness and about his effect on the world, his ability to make things happen and his capacity to survive what happens to him. In the movie, Truffaut invites the audience to recapture the freedom that allows the child to explore the world, test out his or her emerging theories of how things work, be curious, powerful, brilliant and omnipotent.
The child's world is a breathtaking journey of dips, heights and twirls that makes up the kaleidoscope of the developmental arc. Watch a toddler for a while. Watch her face transform from curious wonder to boundless glee to unreserved fury to tremulous tears and back to wonder, all within the moments it takes to climb to the top of the slide, fling herself down, tumble to the ground, skin both knees and rush off to do it again. As adults, if we lived that way, feeling each passing emotion down to the core of our being, with barely a moment to come up for breath before diving into the next, we would be spent. We adults, or so we like to believe, have mastered the art of self-regulation. We know how to measure our feelings into teaspoon-size bites, how to temper our expectations. Our childhood exuberance—our readiness to plunge headlong into our next impulse—has given way to careful, investigative mini-experiments in the art of living. If I choose to move forward with this decision, what will be the outcome? If I turn down this opportunity, will I feel relief or regret?
Do all patients enter analysis with an illusion of safety, even when mingled with profound mistrust or suspicion?
It occurred to me that beginning an analysis for the first time is like entering Truffaut's world, where the parameters of reality are suspended. Patients enter analysis in the same way that Gregory climbs over the ledge. Whether or not they sense danger ahead, they proceed, hoping that analysis will alleviate their suffering. Often, patients do not know what to expect at the beginning of treatment. Although they may have ideas, wishes and fantasies about psychoanalysis, they do not know where this interior journey will bring them. Beginning analysis requires a kind of letting go. Unlike young children, however, we adults cannot fully relinquish the knowledge that our imagination provides us little protection against either real-life threats or internal dangers.
Do all patients enter analysis with an illusion of safety, even when mingled with profound mistrust or suspicion? I suspect that on some level, such an illusion is a necessary condition for starting treatment. While one may fear what lies ahead, there is still some trust that the analyst generally intends no harm. If risk is on the horizon, perhaps one can look beyond it, hope winning out over dread.
When things go well in analysis, the journey across the childhood landscape of omnipotence and magical thinking unfolds steadily. When the analyst can create for the patient what Truffaut does for Gregory, a world that wraps its arms around the patient and cushions any potential falls, then the analysis can proceed. It is not without emotional risk. Yet, in the presence of a carefully attentive and attuned analyst, such exploration is a form of play in which the representational world both contains and reveals its meanings over time in the space shared between patient and analyst.
But what about when things do not go well? While there are many ways that analysis can go awry, the most egregious are those that puncture the borders of treatment or assault the frame of the treatment. Many boundary violations are subtle and may go unnoticed for a long time by both patient and analyst. There is a kind of heightened allure that may be intrinsic to every analysis, one that requires the analyst's careful attention. In a successful analysis, because patient and analyst enter a mutually created arena of suspended disbelief, the analyst must always keep a watchful eye, careful to ensure that the illusions created within the transference and countertransference remain in the service of greater self-awareness.
The analytic “illusion” is spun from the threads that form the fabric of the analytic process. The premise of analysis rests on this illusion, creating a potential space for playing out early childhood neuroses, pre-oedipal and oedipal fantasies, for deepening the capacity to experience and tolerate intense emotions, such as love, hate, greed, envy, despair and longing, and surviving them. Analysis works because it opens up such potential space. Without the frame that holds it together, the work of analysis becomes impossible. Patients can fall under the sway of being listened to with great care, of being at the center of the world—at least the one that unfolds in the consulting room.
The intensity of the analytic process can be intoxicating for the analyst as well. The analyst is in a position of authority that may stir feelings of narcissism or grandiosity, whether working with a patient who hangs on your every word, or one for whom no prior therapist was ever good enough, or even one who perceives life to be dramatically improved by the treatment. In other words, certain kinds of experiences with patients may contribute to the potential seduction of analysis for the analyst. For all these reasons, the analyst must attend carefully to the frame binding the treatment together.
Our ability to work depends on how carefully we simultaneously hold our interest in our patients' inner lives and our more detached, evenly hovering stance. We wish to convey to our patients that their thoughts and feelings are important to us, but we avoid seducing our patients into feelings of specialness. If we are disinterested or disaffected, the work would be hollow and empty, but, at the other end of the spectrum, if we are too interested, we put the analytic process at risk. To feel special to the analyst can become a burden for the patient in a myriad of ways. For example, the patient may now worry about the risk of overexciting the analyst, whether intellectually, sexually, or through some other emotional avenue, such as envy or loathing.
When boundaries blur, what inevitably gets lost is the patient's capacity to freely explore her impact on others and on the world. Unlike Gregory's persistent curiosity about the cat's flight out the window, there is no one to cushion the fall if the analyst transgresses. In Truffaut's film, we may wonder whether Gregory pushed the cat out the window as an act of sadism or as an exploration of the cause-and-effect of the cat-out-the-window phenomenon. We have no way to know for certain, but we can imagine that either activity may have been sharply curtailed had the scene taken a turn for the real, ending in the bloody outcome we might have expected. Truffaut never takes his eyes off the potential for harm that can befall an inquisitive child. Indeed, as the movie deepens, he examines such harm with an unflinching gaze. Likewise, the analyst must keep a similar benevolent, attentive eye on the analytic space, always aware of the potential for harm that can befall a vulnerable patient.
Editor's Note: A lengthier version of this discussion appears in “Chapter 10: The Bystander in Analytic Treatment,” in Betrayal: Developmental, Literary and Clinical Realms, Salman Ahktar, ed. Karnac: 2013.