BOOK REVIEW: ON FRIENDSHIP II

Passages from Lorraine Smith Pangle’s book Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

In friendship, Plato and Aristotle both suggest, “we can best see the true character and extent of our desire to live with others when that desire is shorn of all considerations of necessity and utility. Likewise, Aristotle assumes neither the possibility nor the impossibility of what we would call altruism, but instead offers a sustained and sympathetic exploration of what is really at work in the human heart when an individual seems to disregard his own good to pursue the good of others.”

“Aristotle does not assume that the concern for a friend is necessarily tainted by partiality; he argues that friendship can be rooted on a true assessment of the friend’s worth as a person, and as such, friendship can give us the noblest expression of our sociability.”

The naturalness of friendship (that is, the tendency toward friendship as an essential dimension of human nature), the possibility of selflessness in friendship, and the relationship of friendship to justice, are the three central themes of all major philosophical studies of friendship.
Professor Smith Pangle articulates and proposes keen insights on friendship. She presents her insights first as questions, which she then answers in the affirmative with sustainable arguments throughout her book:

"What are the roots of friendship in human nature? How central to human
happiness is loving and being loved? To what extent is the desire for
affection and friendship reducible to other causes, to our defects and
vulnerabilities and needs for things in themselves altogether extraneous
to friendship, and to what extent is friendship itself a necessary or
central component of the happiness of the healthiest human beings?

"How truly can and do human beings care for others for their own sakes and
promote the good of others as an end in itself? Do they do this at all?
Do they do it when the good of the other conflicts with their own deepest
good? Or is every apparent selfless sacrifice in fact, in some complicated
or disguised way, a pursuit of a greater good for oneself?

"To what extent can friendship answer the longing for a just community with
others that political life invariably fails to answer perfectly? And what
light does an examination of the problems of justice within friendship
shed on the problem of justice as a whole?"

In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy we can benefit much from contributions such as this one from our colleagues in philosophy.
Ernesto Vasquez, MD

BOOK REVIEW: ON FRIENDSHIP I

Passages from Lorraine Smith Pangle’s book Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

“Friendship was a great subject of stories and of philosophical reflection in classical antiquity”---Unshakable loyalty and mutual trust made friendship a most impressive and most appealing classical virtue. Courage is another example of what the ancients considered a virtue. The “special charm and fascination of a great friendship seem to make it at once so noble and so delightfully desirable.”

The “richness and complexity of friendship, its ability to support but also at times to undercut virtue, and the promise it holds of bringing together in one happy union so much of what is highest and so much of what is sweet in life, formed a fruitful topic of philosophical inquiry for the ancients.”

Friendships were to be cultivated and “counted on as one of life's chief good”[s]. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote about friendship more extensively than about any other virtue. He also offered friendship as a “bridge between the virtues and the highest life of philosophy.” In classical Greek and Roman cultures, philosophy was not the study of abstract concepts - aesthetics, ethics, and logic. Rather, it was a form of practice, the practice of aesthetics, ethics, and logic, which fostered the most desirable way of being in the world, the most rewarding form of life, the good life. In that sense, friendship was the practice of, among other things, reciprocity, and it is here that friendship for a woman and a man can get tricky, challenging.

“The study of friendship in classical authors is in many ways a study of human love altogether”, since the Greek word for friendship “can cover all bonds of affection, from the closet erotic and familial ties, to political loyalties, humanitarian sympathies, business relationships, even love for inanimate things.” But the Greek word for friendship ”means first and foremost friendship, for it is precisely in friendships of mature and virtuous individuals that we do see human love not only at its most revealing, but at its richest and highest.”
Ernesto Vasquez, MD

Experience Near

On Saturday afternoon, January 15, 2011, Alan Kindler held an interactive workshop at Memorial Hospital with the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc on staying close to what the patient was experiencing and reporting. [This was a lot harder than one would think, especially for experienced clinicians who may have found it hard to divest themselves from their theories and interpretations and simply reflect back what was heard instead of adding our own speculations.]

In an attempt to have workshop participants practice getting closer to the patient’s experience, Kindler used video clips of actors playing patients and asked audience participants to use empathic observation to access the specific feelings and experience (and the relationship between the two) of ‘patients’, and to make tentative (open to objections and corrections by the patient) responses to their subjective feelings in the context of what the ‘patients’ were relating. Kindler recommended really knowing the details of conscious experience before moving to the unconscious, fully aware that which details come to the foreground of the therapist’s attention are contingent upon the subjectivity of the therapist. Experience-near data, the details of the patient’s experience, passes by so quickly that much is missed in the listening.

Kindler used the following definition of empathy: a mode of observation and listening in which the therapist strives to apprehend the patient’s subjective experience, as reported by the patient in the present about the past. Empathic understanding is the recognition of the details of the patient’s experience at any moment within its context. Empathic understanding requires attention to detail and a life time of practice. [E.Vasquez noted that understanding may be the core of therapeutic action. W.Player noted that empathic understanding might be oxymoronic, since attunement is more implicit than cognitive, to which Kindler suggested empathic resonance.]

Kindler described the components of subjective experience, where affect is central and contextualized, which may include thoughts, fantasies, acts, intentions, memories, images, assumptions, and beliefs. Because affects are central components of the patient’s subjective experience, their accurate recognition is the essential first step. Kindler suggested that clinicians hone the nuanced language of affect to find the right word to help the patient give a name to the affective experience.

The Mutual Influence of Child and Adult Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Examination of Differences and Similarities between Psychoanalytic Work with Chil

On January 15, 2011, Rosalind Chaplin Kindler, MFA, RDT spoke to the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc on “The Mutual Influence of Child and Adult Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Examination of Differences and Similarities between Psychoanalytic Work with Children and Adults.” Kinder noted that child and adult therapy mutually influence and inform one another. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory, incorporating infant research on development and attachment, informs adult treatment with ideas about spontaneity, improvisation, and playfulness, giving language to an engagement that long existed in child treatment. [What I had previously, when working with children, called going by the seat of my pants, I can now call improvisation.]

While talking has been privileged in adult treatments, children have always used action and play. Enactments, recognized by Relational therapists as an essential part of treatment, have long been recognized as common in child treatment. The therapist articulates experience for the child, making connections between feelings and events; might be able to detoxify the event, feeling, or thought in such a way as to bring them into the treatment from dissociation.

Differences include those of volition. Children are commonly, but not exclusively, brought by someone else into therapy; adults are only sometimes coerced. Patterns and expectations may be less entrenched in children. They may be living contemporaneous trauma of misattunement and unresponsiveness in their environment and therapists are present to intervene. Authenticity is the standard with children. A greater flexibility is required of the therapist, sometimes seeing the child with the parents, sometimes alone. Parents, teachers, children may all have competing needs and agendas, while alleviating distress remains a common denominator. There is no one theory or technique for every child or family, and one must also consider one’s own proclivities.

Reminding the audience that what is psychoanalytic is how you think about the material, Kindler includes the parents in the process of child therapy. She informs parents that she, the therapist, is going to try to understand the meaning of the child’s behavior and convey that to the parent. Because pathological accommodation [Brandschaft] can compromise developmental strivings in order to maintain attachments, it is imperative that child therapists help parents develop the capacity to self reflect and to think about the unique child’s experience and developmental needs. Kindler will explain to a parent, e.g. one who complains that a child is ‘manipulative’, that children have a limited repertoire to get their needs met and ask the parent to consider both the lengths a child will go to as well as what the child hopes for. Together parent and therapist can puzzle through to try to find the meaning of the child’s behavior.

Treatment of children requires directly addressing their relational context. Without intervention, parental attitudes might impede the child’s development. Facilitating the parent’s capacity to mentalize the experience of the child is an essential part of treatment. Helping parents develop a capacity to self reflect can also help shift their few of the child. We hope to aid parents in understanding the child in a new way.

Poem: DIALECTICS

DIALECTICS

What do you know sun of the dismal, dreary day
What can you tell me water of the parching drought
What can you say light of the swarthy chilly rain
and you wind of US branches stout
that in your gust rebound
What do you know lingering, enduring flame
of the ashes that will snuff out your reign
What can you ever know of joy, nostalgia,
in your bittersweet might and main

Ernesto Vasquez, MD
January 11, 2011

Kiss of the Spider Woman

The New Year brings ‘Oscar Fever’ when film buffs anticipate which actors and films (of 2010) will be nominated. On Sunday, January 9, 2011, at the Film Series “Developing Passions,” cosponsored by The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc and The Humanities Institute at USF, I had the opportunity to revisit the 1985 film Kiss of the Spider Woman, nominated for Best Picture and Best Director and bestowing the Oscar on William Hurt for Best Actor. Kiss of the Spider Woman is set in a prison cell in South America where two men, one arrested for homosexual acts (Luis Molina/William Hurt), the other (Valentin Arregui/Raul Julia) a political prisoner, are, as clinical psychologist David Baker, PhD notes, transformed by one another. To pass the time, Luis weaves tales from old films he recalls and embellishes, tales disdained by Valentin for their bourgeois love and fascist propaganda. But in every tale Valentin imagines his wealthy, former lover Marta (Sonia Braga) as the heroine, Leni or the Spider Woman. The two men, at first so different, eventually reach a meeting of minds.

Discussant Silvio Gaggi, PhD described the use of meta-theater to highlight the characters, movies embedded in the movie, a stratification of visual images like Warhol’s Marilyn: a series of lithographs from a drawing from a photo from a negative. He noted the changing interplay of the two characters: who is the escapist, who the realist? David Baker, PhD described how film can be used to illuminate the unconscious, and how Kiss of the Spider Woman so aptly parallels the psychoanalytic situation (two people in a room together; both become observers of their lives, seeing things via the other that they might never have otherwise seen, and both are changed and grow). In Kiss of the Spider Woman, both men must step out of themselves and, more importantly, be affected-in a two person psychological process- by the other, to be transformed. Baker pointed out that beauty stems from imagination, not from linear thinking or from action, and that a sense of beauty is required for transformation. Love, he said, is an act of imagination, and imagining [the forward edge] something more for a patient moves the psychoanalytic process along.

Kiss of the Spider Woman was directed by Hector Babenco and adapted from Manuel Puig’s novel of the same name by Leonard Schrader.

Loneliness

PSYCHOANALYTIC REFLECTIONS ON CACIOPPO'S 'THE NATURE OF LONELINESS'

Feeling lonely is not the same as being alone. Part of our emotional life2, the experience of loneliness emerges when certain normal relational needs3 are not being met; that is, when we lack that life-giving, reciprocal steady-attuned-responsiveness4 which is the condition for the possibility of a sense connectedness.

Human connectedness is so fundamental4 to human functioning and being that without it we fall apart psychologically and physiologically, down to the cellular level.
Physiologically, over time blood pressure climbs and gene expression5 falters. The intellect dulls; the immune system deteriorates. Ageing accelerates under the constant corrosive presence of the stress hormones. The study of this biological/psychological/social interface is dubbed nowadays social neuroscience.
Psychologically, the suffering wrought by loneliness comprises the fields of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Like hunger or thirst, the experience of loneliness also serves as a survival signal that powerfully motivates6 us to seek and to try to maintain the essential nourishment we derive from meaningful human connectedness.

As a survival signal, loneliness has been a powerful evolutionary force, binding humans together not only to survive, but to pursue the good life, a life worth living.

Loneliness is a strong model for understanding and delineating the inextricability of the biological and psychological dimensions of human functioning and being, which are so irreducibly relational and complex .
Ernesto Vasquez, MD.
January 5, 2011.


Cacioppo, J. T. (2008). Loneliness. Human Nature and the Need for Human Connection. New York: W.W. Norton.
2 Orange, D. (1995). Emotional Understanding. Studies in Psychoanalytic Epistemology. New York: Guilford.
3 In Self Psychology these needs are termed selfobject needs and go together with the related notion of selfobject experience:
Kohut, H. (1984). How does Analysis Cure? Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
4 This is one of the major theoretical contributions of Intersubjective Systems Theory: Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow (1997). Working Intersubjectively. Contextualism in Psychoanalytic Practice. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press; Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange (2002). Worlds of Experience. Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.
5 Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product. These products are often proteins, but in non-protein coding genes such as ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes or transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, the product is a functional RNA.
6 The issue of motivation has been comprehensibly addressed phylogenetically and psychoanalytically by Jones, J. M. (1995). Affects as Process. An Inquiry into the Centrality of Affect in Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

An Analytic Attitude

As I come off a three week break from facilitating classes at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc., I think again about how experienced psychoanalytic clinicians might share an analytic attitude with students, avid to experience a deeper relationship and understanding with those who seek them out for help. While an analytic attitude comes with inclination and experience, fostered by training and our own analyses, and while there is no agreement on theory, analysts share the common attitude of endeavoring to understand the intrapsychic and interpersonal life of the patient, to hold the needs of the patient within a frame, and to foster the growth and development of the patient toward a more meaningful and enriched, diverse life. We behave ethically. We behave with restraint. We work to be aware of the influence we have on patients by being self-reflective. We bear, sometimes with our patients, sometimes alone, unbearable affects, tensions, paradox, and uncertainty.

Perhaps I would benefit most from a New Year's resolution to give up control, to 'let go.' Most people, including therapists, particularly those with medical training, have the urge to assert control and avoid vulnerabilities and insufficiencies. Giving up the illusion of control, however scary, and being open to the experience of therapy and its co-creativity, allows transformative possibilities, and leads us and our patients away from self-alienation. Control does not constitute nor uplift the self.

A psychoanalytic attitude is the openness to experience the emotional ‘truth’ of the other’s, as well as our own, subjectivity. It is an ardent experiencing, appreciating experience in its own right, alongside insight, toward the true self; to value not only knowing but being toward the true self. This philosophical attitude decenters insight’s privileged place and makes room for relationship and for being with. Decreasing the patient’s isolation can lessen suffering. Psychotherapy is a sacred experience, under-taken, like faith, with one’s whole being, giving oneself over to the possibility of being in communion, if only rarely and momentarily, with another. Each member of the dyad ideally participates with openness and intensity as we make meaning of ourselves and our lives through revelation and through impact on each other.

Bion advocated an openness to the patient within the bounds of our ethics, always mustering up our respect, decency, and wisdom. When analyzing, open inquiry is preferable to knowledge. Bion advised that we approach each session ‘without memory or desire,’ that we be open to the new possibilities co-created when the therapist does not insist on knowing or on helping, but instead leaves space for a path that is always evolving, unpredictable and unique. When we, with an open heart, do not expect patients to give up their troubles, another serendipitous effect may include the lessening of those very symptoms.

I ask myself, "Can I recognize without flinching another’s subjectivity, or, when I inevitably flinch, can I acknowledge with the patient my discomfort in a way that negotiates a new closeness with, and understanding of, the patient? Can I model that there is no thing too untenable to hear, or to bear feeling, in the company of another? Can I survive the untenable without retaliation (withdrawal, humiliation, breaches of empathy) and hold in tension (not ‘either/or’ but ‘both’) uncertainty with knowing?"

Lycia Alexander-Guerra, MD

Meeting the Continual Challenges... by E. Vazques

Meeting the continual challenges…

We in the Tampa Bay area are all very fortunate to have a number of remarkable ongoing educational opportunities – see the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc’s educational program for trainees for this year, posted on this blog, the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc’s excellent 2010-2011 Speakers Series and its, along with the USF Humanities Institute 2010-11 Film Series (a report from which was just posted on this blog).

I am very grateful to our colleagues who took the trouble and made the effort to put all this together for I cannot think of a better way to help us meet the continual challenges we face as contemporary clinicians – “our everyday struggle to understand and heal by way of the ‘talking cure’; the conflicts between old and new ideas in psychoanalytic theory and practice; the challenge of developmental thinking; the need to recognize our work as situated historically, culturally, and politically; the pervasiveness of cognitive neuroscience, of ‘evidence-based’ treatments like cognitive-behavioral approaches, biological/pharmacological reductionism, and many more“ (Orange, 2010).

Sometimes one can experience these challenges as daunting, as in these lines (my free translation) from Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1917): “Traveler, your footprints
are the road, and nothing more;
you make the path as you walk…
Traveler there is no road,
only wind-grooves on the shoals.”

Fortunately, Orange (2010), contends that “[t]houghtful psychoanalysts and other humanistic clinician are practicing philosophers.” For whom “Socrates remains the dominant ideal for Western philosophy. Simple-living, ever-questioning, relentlessly seeking the good human life…”
As clinicians our personal and professional ideals resemble those of Socrates; we “long to understand, but know how little we know. We are always questioning our assumptions, our reactions, and the inevitable limitations of our points of view. Our field is human emotional life – in particular the lives of those suffering others (the word PATIENT coming from the Latin PARTIOR, meaning to suffer) who come to us full of hope and dread (Mitchell, 1993): hope that a human connection may save them, and dread that it may fail them once more.” She suggests, moreover, that a “hermeneutic sensibility,” a “hermeneutic attitude,” makes our clinical work possible, and that such hermeneutic clinical sensibility includes:
“a) a strong sense of one’s own situation – including one’s theories, personal history, and personality organization –
that constantly and inevitably shapes and limits both one’s actual understanding and one’s capacity to understand
a particular patient;
b) a sense of experiential world or system, one’s own, the patient’s, and that formed with the patient;
c) a strong sense of complexity that resists all forms of reductionism and technical rationality [that is, technique]
in clinical work;
d) a sensitivity to the languages of personal experience, including their nonverbal backgrounds and forms of expression;
e) a strong developmental-historical [and, I would add cultural] sense that gives, overall, equal emphasis to past and future,
one that attends to processes of emergence, including emergence of defense and dissociation, throughout the clinical process;
f) a belief that understanding is effective, that is, that understanding in the rich sense is curative;
g) a conviction that dialogue and conversation are the best way to create and register that emotional resonance indispensable
to meaning-oriented work; and
h) a sense of vocation and devotion similar to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “rigorous practice.” For Schleiermacher,
“misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point”
(Schleiermacher, 1998:110).”

Ernesto Vasquez, MD
October 21, 2010

Orange, D. (2010). Thinking for Clinicians. Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies.
New York: Routledge.
Machado, A. (1917). Poesias Completas. Madrid: Residencia de Estudiantes.

Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society And Humanities Institute Film Series: Developing Passions: LOVE AND ANARCHY

In Love and Anarchy, Italian director Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties, Swept Away) brings us the romantic notion of love triumphing over personal politics. This notion calls into question the age old misogynistic idea that women divert men from their important worldly tasks, and overpower men with their potent sexuality. Much like the existential angst of death looming over all of us, death comes at the end of Love and Anarchy, and so makes Tonio’s (Giancarlo Giannini, who won Best Actor in 1973 at Cannes for this role) and Tripolina’s (Lina Polito) one normal day in the countryside so poignant.

In the film, Tonio learns as a boy (from a beloved, old, anti-fascist) what an anarchist is. His mother, with her pretense of a rope around her neck foreshadowing his fate, draws the picture of an anarchist more acutely. As a man, Tonio travels to the capital, and we see Rome in all its grandeur, skylines and statues. Tonio, however, seeks out its alleys and brothels, one in particular with Salome (Mariangela Melato), with whom he meets to execute her plan to assassinate Mussolini. [Salome wants Mussolini’s head on a platter, so to speak.]

Tonio, a farmer, and somewhat the country bumpkin made ugly with freckles or pockmarks, is out of his element. There is humor in his discomfort around women. Though Tonio can barely utter a word, he is very much aware of the swinging buttocks exiting down the brothel’s hallway. Perhaps out of pity, or perhaps to ensure Tonio’s cooperation, Salome urges Tonio to stay quiet. Just as with a hungry kitten, she says she is happy to satisfy him: that way it’s over with and he can get his head back on track.

Salome, during a day of comic idyllism in the countryside -- with Tonio,Tripolina,(another prostitute) and the high ranking black shirt Spatoletti -- believes Spatoletti cares for her enough to be duped by her wiles. Spatoletti first checks out the church square where Mussolini is to visit (and is to be assassinated), then the party travels on to a country café, where we see Spatoletti for the villain he is, threatening the proprietor for the wait, and misogynistic with women. Tonio too, scouts out the square, then falls asleep in a field as if without a care. Later he and Tripolina make love, falling in love. Tripolina had tried to make it a business transaction, but Tonio is loving and gentle. Tonio seems everything Spatoletti is not, even compassionate with an alley cat.

In his room, Tonio practices with a gun in the mirror, but the room seques to a carnival shooting gallery. Next we see the more literal ‘carnival’ of prostitutes at the brothel pedaling their wares, tits and winks, flirting and insults. But the concomitant fascist gathering has detained all the swells. Tonio enters and seems shocked to see Tripolina at work; he pays and takes her upstairs while the Madam insists they hurry, for it is rush hour. Tonio entreats Tripolina to stay with him for two days before he must go away forever. He reveals his plan and Tripolina asks if Tonio is an anarchist. He replies that someone has to say 'basta!' (enough) and he will do it.

Death is again foreshadowed as Salome, Tonio, and the Madam transport a dying patron to the cemetery. Salome and Tonio fight about the anarchist’s cause, and Tonio confesses his fear (Salome retorts that fascists are not scared) and how he inadvertently became involved in the cause: delivering a suitcase to the comrades of/ for a dying friend. Salome, both compassionate and taunting, calls him “Saint Antonio” and foreshadows death again: “They’ll beat you to death and no one will know.”

Tonio, in bed, considers his plan. Tonio and Tripolina make love in the dark, and we again see the rooftops of Rome. As Tonio sleeps, Tripolina, after praying to the Virgin Mary, sits over him like a guardian. Salome has set the alarm clock, but she and Tripolina fight about waking Tonio. Tripolina says no cause is worth Tonio dying, but Salome thinks it is better to die like a dog than live like one. Salome asks what would happen if all women stopped their soldiers [what, indeed?], then relenting, agrees with Tripolina, remarking, “They are right, never trust a whore.”

Tonio is awakened by the sound of the marching band below. He strikes Tripolina for not awakening him. As the black shirts arrive downstairs, Tonio bursts in to confess, and starts firing at the police. Once out of bullets, he runs into the street where he is punched and kicked by soldiers and sailors before being taken away. Salome shouts: "He was a poor guy with a big heart."

In a well-appointed office, where the statue of a wolf suckling two infants (the founders of Rome)is displayed, Tonio is beaten and threatened, but he will not name names. The news reports that an unknown man, in a fit of madness, shot at police during a routine inspection, and died violently beating his own head against a wall.


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This Film Series, Developing Passions, is a collaboration of the Humanities Institute and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc. and free to the public. All films in this monthly line-up will are on Sundays at 200pm in MDA 1097 at the USF Medical Center. All films will be discussed with the audience by a local university scholar and by a local clinician. Tomorrow, October 17, 2010, Ang Lee’s Eat, Drink, Man, Woman will be viewed and discussed.


Silvio Gaggi, PhD, Director of the Humanities Institute, and Robert Porter, PhD, local psychologist, discussed Love and Anarchy on September 12, 2010.
Gaggi noted how Love and Anarchy portrayed anarchy as a romantic idea, where the father figure is killed with the hope that men could live free and equal, the way nature intended. Gaggi also noted in this film how a scene often begins with a panoramic view, then shrinks to the close up. [I preferred the Opposite approach of the camera, as when the face of famished Tonio is eating heartily, and the scene widens to show him surrounded at the table by prostitutes. While either approach would lend itself to the importance of context, each has a different impact. ]

Robert Porter, PhD in psychology, and clinical discussant, highlighted the theme of adolescence and the struggle to oppose ones parents, who, like fascists, are seen to oppose freedom. But rebellion itself incurs responsibility, and new constraints of maturity, as adolescents grow up. Porter noted, too, that fascists allowed their own hedonism while disallowing it for others. Though a female director, a more complex theme of misogyny exists in the film: Salome in the end was too weak to be an anarchist. Women are seen as weaker and potentially dangerous, distracting men from their role as soldier or anarchist.

The audience was divided on whether or not the prostitutes in the film had real power over their clients.[Perhaps women’s power lies in the ability to foster connectedness, not submission, just as real consolidation of identity (the developmental task of adolescence) is better achieved by transcending doer-done to dynamics of violence and fostering an appreciation of difference. It was love that drove both Salome and Tonio to profess their allegiance to anarchy, as both wanted to avenge someone, killed by fascists, whom they loved. When Tripolina and Salome decide not to wake Tonio, they choose love over anarchy. ]

Lycia Alexander-Guerra, MD