Film today: The Sixth Sense

The 2014-2015 Film Series of The Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc (T-BIPS) and The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society presents today the M. Night Shyamalan film, The Sixth Sense, starring Bruce Willis as a child psychologist Dr. Crow and Haley Joel Osment as his disturbed patient, Cole. And what ails Cole the most? Like so many gifted children in a disturbed world of family ghosts, he sees what no one else can bear to see.

That parents in many families unwittingly reveal their torments –having dissociated or repressed their own past traumas of chronic misrecognition; attacks on their reality; or physical, emotional, and sexual abuse— inadvertently leads to terrifying consequences for their children and themselves. It is not only the ghosts of Shyamalan’s film who are lost souls, but all of us who cannot face our own trauma, including our inevitable finitude. Our wish not to see what Cole sees, along with our collective denial of death, allows the audience to believe that Dr. Crow must be alive after having been shot a year earlier. This despite that crows, of course, were well known to have been long associated with death, or its harbinger. The crow has also been attributed powers as a spirit guide, with the powers of sight and transformation.

It is Dr. Crow who must lead lost souls, both living and dead, to some form of grace. The ghosts are tormented by their self deception— they do not know they are dead. Cole, like the gifted child in a family haunted by the ghosts of past trauma, struggles valiantly to face that which he also wishes to avoid (seeing the torment of others). Ironically, perhaps inevitably, it is the healer himself who cannot face his own truth—for we are all wounded healers—and Cole can only be helped to face, to listen to, the ghosts as he helps Dr. Cole face his own plight.  The wisdom in Cole is his gentleness in revealing what he intuitively understands is too painful for Dr. Cole to see.

[Is it an ethical dilemma for the therapist to be blind about one’s self (and only on the road to healing) while simultaneously attempting to heal patients? Is it incumbent upon the therapist to be set free by one’s own truth before ever attempting to help others? Perhaps Cole and Crow were both lucky to have encountered one another, despite the pain engendered on their way to a second chance.]