In 1994, I had been in therapy for some few years and as apparently often happens, I was one of those clients who seek to become healers themselves. No doubt you have heard the term "wounded healers". I became fascinated by the process on both sides of the chairs. I was also no doubt in the thrall of transferential identification with my own therapist. But it all energized me nonetheless. I did a lot of reading on my own, but decided I might be better off organizing my burgeoning interest by seeking a degree. I had just turned 40, and needed to continue making my living as a government attorney, so I could ill afford quitting and going to school full time, which pretty much all the well known schools require. I found a local free standing school which catered to the working crowd, and would allow me to take classes at night. Of course, its accreditation was less than global and only applied to California, where I live. But that was fine with me, the main purpose was extending my exploration of my mind and minds at large, and if I did quit being a lawyer (as more often than not I wanted to do) got a Ph.D. or Psy.D and became a therapist, I wouldn't likely be leaving the state. And whatever limitations of accreditation of the school, there were several really great teachers, all of them practitioners. Five years later, having done all the coursework, passed the Comprehensives, having had the sacred honor of being a trainee therapist (under supervision) at a clinic for about two years, I decided it was not for me for a variety of reasons both external and internal, and quit before completing my dissertation and final oral examination. I have absolutely no regrets about the time and money I spent and the people with whom I came into contact and the learning I acquired. I kept a few of my papers, and in this mission of mine to preserve things, yet purge paper and other stuff, I am putting one I wrote in the Fall of 1995 in response to an assignment in a class Psychopathology II. It was the goal to take a movie which involves psychological issues and write on it referencing the aspects of the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) we had been studying. This was mine. I got an A, and the very nice comment "Excellent paper--very well thought out". I really liked this teacher, Michael Gerson, and I also still am moved by the movie I chose, so I kept this paper in hard copy for nearly 30 years as you can see.
ORDINARY PEOPLE
Introduction
From the time of this assignment I wanted to write about "Ordinary People". However, concerned about focusing on a film so generally known, so discussed, so. . . .well, ordinary, I went in search of something more exotic. I love films, so it was no burden to collect a few to watch again, "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof", "The Glass Menagerie", "The Little Foxes", "Marty", and one I had never previously seen, the more recent, and graphic, "Damage". This last Thanksgiving weekend, I came back to "Ordinary People". I saw it fifteen years ago in a little theatre in Stamford, Connecticut with a college friend. I wrote in my journal at the time, on October 11, 1980, as follows:
...(W)ent to see the movie "Ordinary People". It is about
a family whose older son has died and whose second son,
feeling responsible for having survived, attempted suicide
and is slowly, heartrendingly on his way to a psychological
recovery. He has a father who, while loving, never saw the
boy's problem and a mother for whom open feeling is
anathema. As played by Mary Tyler Moore, she is a cold
cheerleader. . . publicly wonderful, ostensibly affectionate
and self-less, but unable in her private moments, with her
second, younger son, to express even the slightest hint of
love. In fact, she rejects his love, even his touch. She gave
it all to the first boy, the dead one. Conrad, her second son,
believes his mother never forgave him for living, and so it is.
"Ordinary People" is about the way feelings can destroy lives
or make them stronger.
The movie stirred me as before in its commonality, the commonality of struggling with a seemingly arbitrary universe. Calvin tells his wife at the end of the film, "It would have been alright if there hadn't been any mess. You need everything neat. . ." That is precisely the point. It isn't neat. It never is.
When man is born, the human race as well as the individual,
he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite
as instincts, into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain
and open. There is certainty only about the past--and about
the future only as far as it is death (Fromm, 1956).
The person who tries to force the definite for himself and for those around him is going to wreak havoc beyond that given to us by nature, or, depending on one's belief system, by a "disappointed" God.
Beth demands control when it is not possible. If she cannot control circumstances, she will control her response to them and the response of those closest to her. Love is measured by a false front. But this orchestrated, nicely constructed family life has become a sieve. Very messy feelings are leaking out. A battle is joined amont the three remaining family members, both intrapsychic and interpersonal. Two survive. One bolts.
II
The Story Context
Calvin is a successful tax attorney. Beth is the ideal, careful, likeable wife and perfect mother. They live in a well-to-do, well-ordered upper middle class existence. They had two sons, Buck and Conrad.
Buck was blonde-handsome, outgoing and athletic. Conrad is darkly handsome, serious and quiet.
When tragedy struck, it took Buck. Buck drowned when the boat in which he and Conrad were sailing got caught in a storm and overturned. Conrad lived, but tried to kill himself, in apparent guilt, by slashing his wrists. Calvin saved his life and Conrad spent four months in a psychiatric hospital suffering from major depression, treated with everything, including ECT. As the movie begins, he has been out of the hospital for a month and a half. His look is tortured, his eyes sunken, his hair growing unevenly. He tries to do ordinary things. Choir. Swimming.
III
Diagnosis
There are four players. The dead Buck is no less important than the rest. His live presence was, in hindsight, the tenuous glue for the family. He was everything Calvin, Beth and Conrad aspired to be. A little wild. Reckless. Risking. Careless. Open. Conrad idealized Buck. Beth invested her expectations in him. Calvin felt the need to tame him. Buck was their defense against each other.
Buck's death is a catalyst. By dying he cast everything out of place. Unlike Beth's napkins in a drawer, these things, these people, could not easily be replaced or fixed.
Conrad was cast about, first literally, subject to and witness to a horrible life changing event. It is the stuff of post-traumatic stress syndrome. He relives, awake and asleep, the tossing and turning in and against the storm, his brother and him shouting at one another to try to survive. Dreams of the event wake him up in a hyperventilating panic and sweat. He feels "on stage", detached, without enjoyment of the things that used to have meaning to him. When there is an emotion, it is irritability, anger, explosiveness. He cannot concentrate in class, at choir or at swimming. He tries to forget that he hung on, that Buck let go and that he let go of Buck. Family life, though, just goes on. There is no mention of Buck, of that life altering, mind altering, emotion altering, moment in time. Calvin and Beth compound the unreality and the trauma by not acknowledging it. Conrad is expected to be as he was before the accident (there is a sense that it was primarily as a reflection of, or corollary to, Buck). He is bound in every direction.
There is great temptation to label Beth a narcissistic personality in the DSM-IV, Axis II, context, alternating with an obsessive-compulsive personality. The element that seems to be missing from the obsessive compulsive personality picture is that while she is critical, primarily of Conrad, she is not particularly self-critical. The "this is how I am" element is not for her ego-dystonic, although it could be seen as an avoidance of her own buried feeling of deficiency. The walls are impenetrable. She is determinedly a false self, who refuses "misanthropic self-reflection" which would "reveal its own nothingness" and "would be its undoing". (Finely, 1978). For her, Conrad's self-destruction is only an attempt to hurt her, not a child's natural cry for her love. What may be most unforgivable about Conrad for Beth is that he is like her (as Calvin point out to a third party), in cutting off emotion (they were the only two not to cry a Buck's funeral). I admit to liking pop psychology books that sum up the soil in which someone like Conrad is cultivated.
The child of the narcissist is never seen as she truly is.
Even before birth, the parent has attributed characteristics
to the child which jobe with the fulminating needs of his
unconscious. After birth, the child is maimed by endless
attempts to improve her. She is found intrinsically unlovable
and defective because she is born of a parent who feels
horribly insufficient (although he can't admit it) and who
unconsciously puts this label not on himself but on his
child. The child can be attacked and corrected without
the parent recognizing that he himself is the target. . .
Children of narcissists emerge from this crucible with
a common and most serious problem. They feel that they
do not have a right to exist. (Golomb, 1992).
When Beth refuses Conrad's hug, refuses to be photographed with him using a crazy-making propriety and logic, "Calvin, take the picture. Calvin, give me the camera!", she dismisses Conrad's very existence. Something as simple as setting the dining room table is a moment of hurt for him. He says, "Mom. . ." longing for her to reach back to him. The phone rings. It saves her from contact, and negates him. "I wasn't doing anything, just getting ready for dinner. . . " When he simply looks into Buck's room when she is in a vulnerable reverie, she shouts, "Don't do that!" Don't do what? She treats even his physical proximity as toxic. (Her treatment of him after this tragedy begs the question of how she treated him as an infant). He is so toxic she never came to the hospital to see him. He cannot help but believe he is toxic to others. She engages in an almost purposeful, sadistic missing of opportunities. She exploits her son's vulnerabilities. In a sense, she is correct, Conrad's attempt to kill himself was an attempt to hurt her--his anger at her turned on himself. It appears his anger has more than one target. His mother yes, but Buck as well, for not surviving, for not being the strong one as everyone thought he was. For fooling around on the boat. He is angry at himself, for hanging onto the boat successfully. Finally, he is angry at his father, to whom he says "You don't see things, Dad". To express the anger, without elaborate disguise, openly, is to violate the unwritten contract drafted by Beth, to which Calvin signed on at marriage, and Conrad by accident of his birth--superficiality, accomplishment, privacy, the refusal to acknowledge the inevitability of pain, to express it, to share it. It is to be controlled, and if not controlled, ignored. Conrad has been stranded psychically. He had to make sense of the senseless. He had to account for it all. His mother's every action indicates that it is somebody's fault that somebody more important than him, Buck, died. Unless someone did something, it should not have happened. It could not have happened. . .but for Conrad. Conrad's depression is where it all coalesces. It is overwhelming. There is nothing to do but to cut off feeling, and to destroy himself. Destruction is better than pain, the intolerable of a lost mother and a lost self. When, though, he begins to rebel against being held responsible, when he begins to think for himself, and worse, to feel something, to seek out healthy relationships (and a love relationship) she punishes him for the restorative rebellion. He is "walking all over them" again, as if trying to kill himself was a personal affront to her. What is worse, everyone knows all about it, all those people for whom the front has been maintained, year in and year out.
The boy breaks through the facade. Partly, the breakthrough is thrust on him, by two events. First is the relationship with his "girlfriend". The second is the suicide of Karen, his best friend at the hospital. His girlfriend is the only one to ask him anything directly about his attempt to slash his wrists. "Did it hurt?" she asks. It is the first acknowledgment that this is a part of him, of who he is, that it was all about pain. She is embarrassed, but she hits the mark. She is authentic. Karen kills herself, although she seemed fine. It was false. A pretense. Another pretense by someone Conrad loved, someone he thought was stronger than himself. He tried to take the blame for that as he had for Buck's death, and for his mother's refusal to love him. All of these events set the stage for his damnation or salvation. And Calvin's epiphany also sets the stage.
Calvin has been a fence sitter. He begins, though, to ask questions about his life with Beth. When he asks her if she really loves him, she says, "I feel the way I always have felt about you." That is a profoundly evasive and unsatisfactory answer. Where Conrad is fighting a raging depression, Beth fights a raging narcissism, Calvin is something of a spectator. I could not say he fits any particular "disorder", but he has avoidant qualities, a certain inadequacy in the face of familial upheaval, a Candide like optimism that is misplaced ("He's great; Conrad's great!") and failing. He beings to see things. He begins to see them through his eyes, not Beth's. It is courageous when he suggests to Beth that they all see Conrad's psychiatrist, Dr. Berger, recognizing a destructive element in the family and the need for a radical change. If I have an image of Calvin it is that he, too long, failed to be a true buffer between Beth and Conrad. He recognizes he was not listening to Conrad. Conrad, for his part, leads the way to the understanding that Dr. Berger articulates, "Feelings are scary. Sometimes they are painful. If you can't feel pain, you can't feel anything else."
Conrad and Calvin tear up the implicit contract. That means letting Beth go her own way. The prognosis for Conrad and Calvin is good. For Beth, it is problematic.
Well, there it is. I leave you with someone's compilation on YouTube with some scenes that cannot help but have effect and cause affect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7glYvP7syg
Makes me want to rewatch Ordinary People. With new Insight!
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