Fears of Difference: The Diversity of Holocaust Experiences -- a film series

A Collaboration of
USF's Department of Women's Studies
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society
The Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies
USF's Library's Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center
The Florida Holocaust Museum, St.Petersburg, Florida

The Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival (of the Tampa Jewish Community Center & the Golda Meir Kent Jewish Center)
USF Hillel

Venue: College of Medicine, MDA 1097 (Behind the Medical Clinic)~~~

University of South Florida, 4202 Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Film: Korczak
Scholar: Cornelis Boterbloem, Ph.D.
USF, Professor of History
Clinician: John Hartman, Ph.D., Psychologist/Psychoanalyst

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Film: Facing Windows
Scholar: Patrizia La Trecchia, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor & Director of Italian Studies
Clinician: Edward Stein, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst

Sunday, November 8, 2009 ------ *Program Begins at 1 PM*

Film: Paragraph 175
Scholar: Tamara Zwick, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor of History
Clinician: Will Spell, LMHC, Psychotherapist

&

Film: Hitler’s Hidden Victims: Black Survivors of the Holocaust
Scholar: Edward Kissi, Ph.D.
USF, Associate Professor of Africana Studies
Clinician: Kim Vaz, Ph.D., Psychotherapist/
USF, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies

December, 2009

No film – Happy Holidays!!!

*

Related Activity

The Nazi Genocide of European Roma
Presenter: Leita Kaldi

Florida Holocaust Museum

Wednesday, December 16, 2009
6:30pm-8:00pm
For More Information Contact: Urszula Szczepinska

Curator of Education at (727) 820-0100 ext. 241

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Film: The Reader
Scholars: Margit Grieb, Ph.D.
USF, Assistant Professor of World Languages
Darrell Fasching, Ph.D.
USF, Professor of Religious Studies
Clinician: Elizabeth Reese, MSW, Psychoanalyst


Sunday, February 14, 2010

Film: The Summer of Aviya
Scholar: Rina Donchin
Director, USF’s Hebrew Program
Clinicians: Edward Stein, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst
Harris Feinstein, M.D. Psychiatrist

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Film: A Secret
Scholar: Madeline Camara, USF Associate Professor, World Languages
Clinician: Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D. Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Films: And the Violins Stopped Playing and Purple Triangles
Presenter: Yale Strom, Artist-in-Residence, San Diego State University
Clinician: Michael Poff, MSW, Psychoanalyst

Sunday, May 9, 2010

Film: The Nasty Girl
Scholar: Professor Dana Plays, University of Tampa, Film and Media Studies and Women’s Studies
Clinician: Michael Poff, MSW, Psychoanalyst

Click here for film descriptions.

USF Libraries Holocaust & Genocide Studies

The Center’s mission is to cross international boundaries to engage information specialists, scholars, educators, students, analysts, and activists in a centralized, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and synergistic approach to genocide education, mental health and public policy, and prevention.


The Florida Holocaust Museum

The mission is to honor the memory of millions of innocent men, women, and children who suffered or died in the Holocaust. The museum is dedicated to teaching members of all races and cultures to recognize the inherent worth and dignity of human life in order to prevent future genocides.

Psychotherapy in the Entertainment Spotlight

Posted by Heather Pyle, PsyD

Considering the recent success of HBO's acclaimed series, "In Treatment", it would seem that a refreshingly different spotlight is being cast on the field by the entertainment industry. While not a new release, "What Do You Make of These Sounds", Dar Williams' (known for her music on the New England Folk scene) poignant song about psychotherapy has been receiving renewed interest on psychology internet listservs recently. It's good to see the benefits of therapy are in the public eye despite the current healthcare climate and seductive appeal of the ever-present "quick fixes."

If you haven't yet heard this song, the video is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5_DvbMLJk . It is well worth a listen.


Lyrics (Courtesy of Lyricsmode.com)

I don't go to therapy to find out if I'm a freak.
I go and I find the one and only answer every week.
And it's just me and all the memories to follow.
Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour
And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent
When I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent
And she's so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,
But she knows that it's much better if I get it for myself...
And she says

Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, what do you hear in these sounds?
And... oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds? ? ? ? ?

I say I hear a doubt, with the voice of true believing
And the promises to stay, and the footsteps that are leaving
And she says "oh", I say "what? "...she says "exactly",
I say"what, you think I'm angry
Does that mean you think I'm angry?"
She says "look, you come here every week
With jigsaw pieces of your past
Its all on little soundbytes and voices out of photographs
And that's all yours, that's the guide, that's the map
So tell me, where does the arrow point to?
Who invented roses? "

And.......Oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds?
And...oooooooh,aaaaaaah
What do you hear in these sounds? ? ? ? ?


And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think
That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink
But oh how I loved everybody else
When I finally got to talk so much about myself............

And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in
And I say well I'm lucky, cause I am like east berlin
I had this wall and what I knew of the free world
Was that I could see their fireworks
And I could hear their radio
And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing
And they'd know that I was scared
They'd would know that I was guessing
But the wall came down and there they stood before me
With their stumbling and their mumbling
And their calling out just like me...and...

Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, the stories that nobody hears...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, and I collect these sounds in my ears...and
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, that's what I hear in these sounds...and...
Oooooooh,aaaaaaah, that's what I hear in these......
That's what I hear in these souu ouuun nnnds!

Words and Music by Dar Williams

"The Temple Guardian"

Because the subject matter is about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (and the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, T-BIPS, supports a network of low fee - pro bono therapy for family members of Afghani and Iraqi soldiers and veterans, called The Veterans Family Initiative, VFI) and because it was written by Charles Larsen, a long time colleague of mine at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and perhaps because it is set in FLorida, a mutual colleague of mine and the author's sent me a description of the novel "The Temple Guardian." Here is our mutual colleague's description:

The Temple Guardian, by Charles Larsen, is an action packed literary novel available from Amazon.com.

“The Temple Guardian,” delves into the consequences, including ripple effects, of warring upon several people. A Haiku precedes each chapter.

The male protagonist is Michael Stark, age 55, a Vietnam combat veteran who has struggled with his demons for many years. His female opposite is Norma Jennings, a nurse who has been impacted upon by her former husband’s service in the First Gulf War.

Almost all of the contemporary action takes place in South Florida, and in a small fictional town near Steinhatchee. Explosive action and sensual explorations are juxtaposed with philosophical, tranquil, and lyrical experiences. Dreams, flashbacks, and reflections provide insight into the way events, past and present, weave themselves into our lives.

It is a novel about the process of emerging from the crippling effects of post traumatic stress, a struggle that most of us engage in while attempting to build our lives into meaningful wholes. There are apparent movements toward acceptance and resolution, then setbacks in the current world, which threaten to reverse any apparent progress. There are near Platonic dialogues between Michael Stark and a Catholic priest (also a Vietnam veteran), as well as between Michael and a Vietnamese man who once held him captive under horrific conditions. There is vivid action in the flashbacks and memories of both Michael and Norma Jennings. Contemporary action takes place in North Florida, the Everglades (where Michael’s 17 year old daughter is assaulted by drug dealing Vietnam veterans), and in the Florida Keys.

“The Temple Guardian” is a tale of struggle, of overcoming, and also failing. In the end there is a resolution of sorts to the angst felt by Michael and Norma, namely a sense of hope.

Wide Sargasso Sea: The Ghosts Between Them

Wide Sargasso Sea was written by Jean Rhys (a pen name) and published in 1966 winning wide acclaim. It is a story of the life of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole, who came of age six years after the slaves were emancipated in the West Indies. It was a time when the old planter class was being displaced with new English settlers. Antoinette and her family lived in the shadow of the splendor they once enjoyed. Rhys’s novel is an effort to tell a story about the mad wife of Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre, but centering it around the issue of race and imperialism in the 19th century.

Dr. Kersuze Simeon-Jones and Michael Poff, MSW facilitated the film discussion. Dr. Kersuze Simeon-Jones is an Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature and Africana Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Michael Poff, LCSW is in private practice and specializes in child, adolescent, adult and family psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and adult psychoanalysis.

Dr. Simeon-Jones focused the discussion on the concept of the “outsider;” specifically the “crazy Creole woman” locked in the attic of her home. She interrogated the idea of sanity and who gets to judge it. In the film, the “crazy Creole woman,” Antoinette is taken to a cold and frigid place where she can not be herself and where she is belittled and observed as an oddity in another culture. The film can be seen as a commentary on the marriage between the Caribbean and Europe in which Europe has a certain image based on stereotypes and prejudices about the Caribbean people from the beginning of the relation, but it was never based on reality. Assuming much about Antoinette, but not really knowing who Antoinette is, Edward grows angry when he begins to learn about her family and past life from those who are bent on undermining her happiness. Unable to reconcile his image of a wife, from the real wife, he becomes cruel to her.

According to Dr. Simeon-Jones, Antoinette is “mad” not because of heredity, but because of a series of unfortunate circumstances that conspire against her. Her mother was plagued with problems and tragedies, poverty, loss of her son, and social ostracism; she was not available to offer a stable, affirming environment to Antoinette. She ends up locked in a room, drugged by her black warden and made to have sex with him. Antoinette witnesses this scene and it is the last she sees of her mother. Antoinette ends up in a loveless marriage in which she is poised to repeat her mother’s life. From the beginning of their relationships, her husband Edward never really loved her but was more interested in impressing his father and gaining access to her wealth.

Michael Poff discussed the internal world of the characters as a manifestation of the unconscious of the author, Jean Rhys, who lived in isolation in England and suffered from alcohol addiction and probably depression. The novel is an expression of her imagination.

If she were a patient in therapy, the analyst would ask for her associations, thoughts and feelings. Poff relied on his own emotional reaction to the entire story as additional information about what the inner life of the author might be. Her subjectivity could be characterized as pain-filled, helpless, and a regression far away from loving relationships toward a more paranoid stance. The characters in the film occupy a paranoid position because they are lacking in empathy and trust; as a result they have a need to control others and can not see any good in the other person.

This paranoid position begins with an idealization, a stance in which the beloved is seen as having no faults. Antoinette and Edward hope to find in their union, a perfect relationship. But as their togetherness brings them in touch with their own humanity, each suffers narcissistic injuries in which shame comes to predominant. Antoinette’s self-esteem is strained because she is considered a “white cockroach.” Edward’s self-esteem is challenged because he does not feel validated by his own family. His rigid thinking about femininity and masculinity, only serves to wound and enrage him when he begins to learn that Antoinette not only might not be a virgin, but that she may also be “mad.”

The couple’s problems explode because Edward begins to devalue Antoinette’s attributes that endeared her to the audience: her joy, playfulness, strong sexuality, and her eccentricities. Edward is so repulsed by these traits not only in Antoinette, but in him too – (that he might be a little crazy or a little boyish) that to acknowledge them as part of him is unthinkable and therefore he projects his unwanted traits onto Antoinette turning her into an object of revulsion.

The abundance of lower-level defenses: paranoia, splitting, magical thinking, and denial, spells doom for their marriage because both are regressed to the pre-Oedipal developmental level. In the pre-Oedipal mindset, people feel an abundance of shame. They fear people are going to ridicule and laugh at them. Edward is caught up in maintaining his image and is enraged by learning that others know things he does not. The abundance of themes of capturing, containing, cruelty, control and not letting something out points to the problem of anality;--what’s inside can’t come out because it is too dangerous. It must be controlled. Antoinette digs in the dirt looking for gold, not finding it, in the end, her shame and rage ignite and she kills both Edward and herself.

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Dr. Kersuze Simeon-Jones is an Assistant Professor of Francophone Literature and Africana Studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Dr. Simeon-Jones received a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, focusing on the Comparative History and Literature of the Black Diaspora, from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. She received an M.A. in French Literature and Francophone Literature: Africa and the Caribbean, from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; she received a B.A. in French Literature and Spanish Language & Literature, also from Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Dr. Simeon-Jones’s primary teaching and research interests include Francophone Studies: history, literature and culture, Comparative Literature of the Black Diaspora, Black Internationalism: Literary and Socio-Political Movements,Women History within the Diaspora. Her forth coming book is 19th-20th Century Literary and Socio-Political Writings of the Black Diaspora (Lexington Books; forthcoming).

Michael Poff, LCSW is in private practice, Tampa and specializes in child, adolescent, adult and family psychoanalytic psychotherapy, adult psychoanalysis. He completed training as a psychoanalyst at the Carter-Jenkins Center, Tampa in 2005. He is a supervisor to clinicians in psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice and is a psychoanalytic staff member, The Carter-Jenkins Center, Tampa. He is currently co-authoring a chapter on health and relationships, in nursing textbook: Comprehensive Women’s Health Care, edtied by Alexander, Hood, and Mallard-Johnson. For over twenty years, Mike Poff has been coordinating local annual psychoanalytic society film series and has been a field instructor, supervisor for MSW students in training, USF School of Social Work, a guest lecturer USF Department of Psychiatry and the USF School of Nursing, an outpatient psychotherapist with the Menninger/St. Joseph’s Psychiatry Center, Tampa and a Child and family psychotherapist, The Children’s Home, Tampa.
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Raphaël Fauveau's photostream -- picture of waterfall

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Attention: Fair Use Policy for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings--To cite “Women in Crisis Film Series: Wide Sargasso Sea: The Ghosts Between Them,'" you should refer to the particular title and that it comes from “Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings,” a blog of the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and the web address tbipsblogspot.com.

Women in Crisis Film Series -- The Piano Teacher with Dr. Margit Grieb and Dr. Kim Vaz

The Piano Teacher, written by Elfriede Jelinek, was adapted for film and directed by Michael Haneke. Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her “musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.” Violence, abuse, and subjugation permeate the work of both the writer and the director. Together, they produced a masterful display of destructive bonds in the domestic arena: terrorism in the home that escapes to become terrorism to the public sphere.

The University of South Florida’s, Margit Grieb, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of World Languages facilitated the most recent film discussion in the Women and Crisis series along with Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society board member, Kim Vaz, Ph.D. Dr. Grieb noted that the film was aptly set in Vienna, Austria given its’ focus on sexuality and violence, particularly, sadomasochism.

Dr. Grieb noted that Austria gave rise to early thinking about sexual perversion with work of the Austro-German sexologist, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing and later in the work Sigmund Freud. For Dr. Grieb, the main character’s (Erika Kohut) sexual practices are an outward expression of her state of mind with respect to her overbearing mother and her young lover.

According to Dr. Grieb, Jelinek’s work critiques Vienna’s “high-culture’s” male-dominated, capitalist social structure that author says exploits and subjugates women. This is the world of this repressed, oppressed, and oppressive piano teacher. Erika Kohut found the perfect world for her icy exterior in the tyrannical world of the piano conservatory. Just as Erika’s mother commands, demands and controls her; Erika reigns over her students like a despot.

Dr. Grieb oriented the audience to pay attention to the way the director created distance between the audience and Erika by not using close-up or ‘point of view shots.’ She asked the audience to decide if the use of distance helped viewers cope with the disturbing scenes. Did the director’s technique make us less emotionally invested in Erika and more able to view her with a critical eye?

Drawing on Jelinek’s own discussion of her novel, Dr. Grieb interpreted Erika as a ‘phallic woman’ who appropriated the masculine perogative of watching female bodies and couples having intercourse. As a voueyer, Erika transgressed masculine norms and in the end paid a price with her life.

After viewing the film, audience members had the following questions: "What causes people to victimize others?" "What makes them turn out that way?" "Was Erika sadistic to her students to 'save' them from her fate?" "How is it that a person can go to work and seem ‘normal,’ yet have so many problems at home and emotionally?" "Can a woman really be considered a “phallic” mother in a patriarchal society?"

Kim Vaz discussed the film from the perspective of a clinician and from the viewpoint that it was a story about malignant trauma. Drawing on the work of Stefanie Teitelbaum, Sue Grand, Harriet Kimble Wyre and Rayan LaMothe, Dr. Vaz explained that malignant trauma occurs at the hands of people and is unlike traumas derived from natural disasters. Malignant trauma is so difficult to recover from and to treat because the betrayal involved leaves surviors with an inability to symbolize or put into words their experience of victimization. What is so shocking to their psyches is that their abuse happens in the context of their abuser’s unwillingness to see their humanity.

Erika’s pervasive feelings and acts of envy, rage, sadomasochism, aggression, and despair arose from her chronic abuse inflicted by her mother’s insistence that she become a successful pianist and her disappointment in Erika's job as a piano teacher. Erika is in bondage to her mother, who never recognizes her daughter’s separate subjectivity.

There is no one else around in Erika’s life that could intervene. Her father is absent and he dies in a mental hospital. Erika’s mother scolds her when she arrives home one day to discover that her father has died. This scene reveals her mother’s complete dependence on Erika. While telling Erika that her father has died, mother slaps the daughter's face. In a reversal of roles, mother is panicked without her daughter beside her. Instead of being set free to go out into the world, Erica has been forced to take her father’s place, literally sleeping in the bed with her mother and serving as the breadwinner for them.

Erika’s inability to escape her mother’s control gives rise to many bizzare behaviors. As Rayan LaMothe notes, "families and cultures transform victims of malignant trauma into perpetrators of these very traumas on others." Sue Grand’s idea is that "to escape the catastrophic loneliness" 'victims-turned-perpetrators' like Erika, become the perpetrator using violence and sadism to inscribe their loneliness on their victims." This Erika does expertly. Picture: "Tatto Girl" by Nina Frasier
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Margit Grieb teaches courses on German film, literature, language and culture and directs the USF Film Studies Certificate Program. She has published articles on videogames, German cinema and television, Avant Garde Feminist new media productions, and the films of Wim Wenders. Her book German Film in the Wake of New Media is in publication. Currently, she is working on another book project, an edited anthology of essays dealing with depiction of Native Americans in German films, books, and amusement parks. (Pictured: Dr. Grieb's students at USF. )

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Attention: Fair Use Policy for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings--To cite “Women in Crisis Film Series: 'The Piano Teacher,'" you should refer to the particular title and that it comes from “Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings,” a blog of the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and the web address tbipsblogspot.com.

OLD SCHOOL ACCENT ON THE NEW: Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society Hosts Robert Michels, MD

In an early morning conversation with Tampa colleagues, Robert Michels, MD described transference as an accent. Like a language learned early in life that will always color future learned languages, transference will color all interpersonal relationships. Current relationships are always influenced by early relationships. While accents enrich experience, hopefully there will be enough learned phonemes for there to be flexibility.

Both in early conversation and in his morning presentation, Michels gave an historical approach to the competition of orthodoxies. He noted how difficult it was last century for analysts to liberate themselves from Freudian ideas and Freud's mythos. He noted, as well, the major shift from attention to (unconcious and repressed) content, managing both the transference and the resistance, to attention to process and the way one chooses not to reveal content; a shift from defense analysis to character analysis.

In the 21st century, with the popularity of the Relational approach and with the recognition of the negative effects (such as narcissistic injury), of austerity, clinicians now think of themselves, not as 'expert,' but as collaborative colleagues with patients. Today, clinicians are less committed to one theory, and, instead, pluralism (in theory) exists. Analysts are less authoritarian, and less able to sit comfortably assured that their theory or technique or shibbolith is the one. Michels advocated having as many tools as possible, and then skillfully using the one applicable to the moment.

Michels is a brilliant mind, facile enough to have his finger on the pulse of changing theory and technique. Ironically (or maybe not), the presentation, as one attendee noted, was an enactment of the difficulty in giving up what was learned early in career (ego psychology) in order to flexibly apply or adapt to the new. Michels thick 'accent' on contempoary theory was noticeable, but the morning was none the less accessible and enjoyable.

Volver: Against Idealization of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Pedro Almodovar's Films

Volver, a film by Pedro Almodovar, starring Penelope Cruz is a tale of a family of women and their intergenerational experience of sexual abuse and the murders of the fathers/perpetrators.


We watched this film as part of the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies (T-BIPS), The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society (TBPS), and the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of South Florida film series, “Women in Crisis: Scholarly and Clinical Perspectives.” Adriana Novoa, Ph.D. USF’s Humanities and Cultural Studies and Horacio Arias, M.D. facilitated the discussion with the audience. [Pictured left to right: Adriana Novoa, Ph.D.; Kim Vaz, Ph.D.; Horacio Arias, M.D.; and USF student David Astril.]

Dr. Novoa noted that Volver is just one in a series of Almodavar’s films (Talk to Her, Bad Education, All about My Mother) that continues his focus on the impossibility of the unity between men and women and the romanticizing of all female family and friendship groups that provide unconditional support, renewal, and protection.

She interprets Volver against the backdrop of a contemporary Spanish society in transition between village and city life. In the region of the country in which the film is set, the idealization of the mother as matriarch is particularly strong. The mythology and fantasy is that the mother allows for the adult to have a woman to return home to who will offer a perfect asylum.

In the film, Irene the mother of Raimunda and Sole pretends to the girls that her marriage to their father was a perfect love in which he died in her arms. The truth turns out to be that he was a womanizer and a child molester, a truth Irene ignored for years, casting her daughter Raimunda out of the family to keep from having to face it.

The movie is replete with splits: male vs. females; men are dangerous women are safe; the dead vs. the living; ghosts vs. real people. Irene exists in a dissociated state. She is both dead and alive, a ghost and a real person. She arrives to her daughters lives in the city in the trunk of a car; she has a stench from her constant flatulence and she sleeps under the bed.

It is only in her dissociated state that Irene can “not notice” that her daughter is being abused. The daughters are themselves confused. They ask and wonder if their mother is alive and does the forgiveness the mother says she has returned to give coming from the mother who is alive, or the one who is dead.

Novoa sees Alamodavar’s views as retrograde and sexist. He is playing into the values of an authoritarian state that says that the mother is responsible for holding the nation together. He provides a romanticized vision of the return of the mother to a terrorized and torn society, ripped apart by the unchecked destructiveness of the father who rapes, violates and disunites the family/nation. Once the man is dead, reconciliation can occur and women can help heal the fractures.

This essentializing of the female characters minimizes the negative qualities that are a natural part of mother/daughter relationships that are steeped in a history of betrayal. Irene feels rage against her husband and a lack of remorse for murdering those who have betrayed her. Irene burns the people who cause her pain (her husband and his lover) and or casts them out of her house (e.g. her daughter).

Dr. Novoa noted that in Almodavar’s hands, Irene is a terrible mother imposing her will on her children dominating them and celebrating their failures at love because it makes room for her. For Irene, single women need not be alone she tells Sole, implying that her mother can fill the romantic void. Mother and daughter can share the same bed. Irene demoralizes her daughters through critiques of their bodies (in a way that leads the audience to wonders if Irene blames Raimunda for her own molestation).

Dr. Arias pointed out that the film uses comedy to ease our anxiety about sexual abuse. But but joking about our problems does not eliminate the need to actually process them – to learn new ways of handling our ambivalent feelings for the people we love. In his analysis, Dr. Arias said that the Irene (Raimunda’s mother) was unable to have a loving relationship with her husband and was incapable of emotionally connecting with her daughter. Because Irene did not have the ability to relate, she could not teach her daughter how to resolve the problems in her own intimate relationships with her male partner for whom Raimunda had both loving and hateful feelings.

Raimunda was unable to resolve her contradictory feelings about the hate that she felt for her father because of his abuse and the rage she felt toward her mother for “not noticing” the abuse. Her rage against her mother was coupled with the longing and need for her her. Because Raimunda was unable to handle her complex feelings generated by her husband’s masturbation and sexual inappropriateness with her daughter and to assertively protect her daughter – i.e., repeating the failure of her mother, the abusive man ends up dead. The goal of therapy for people with this type of ambivalence would aim to help them integrate these disparate emotions and tolerate and make sense of the contradictory affect in order to have relationships that neither devalue or idealize the other person.

Attention: Fair Use Policy for Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings
To cite “Volver: Against Idealization of Mother-Daughter Relationships in Pedro Almodovar's Films,” you should refer to the particular title and that it comes from “Contemporary Psychoanalytic Musings,” a blog of the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, and the web address tbipsblogspot.com.

Couples: Otto Kernberg on Mature Love Relationships and Carla Leone on Treating Couples Using a Self and Intersubjective Approach

The Tampa Bay community has had a wealth of thought about Couples lately. On February 14, 2009, The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society hosted Otto Kernberg, MD, who gave a descriptive account of nine features he sees as essential to the capacity for a mature love relationship. He described a mature love relationship as one where each partner has achieved sexual freedom with genital primacy as organizer; the ability to tolerate normal ambivalence (love with aggression); a sustained capacity to have interest in and emotional intimacy with/sexual longing for; and to respect the partner as whole object instead of narcissistically gratifying part object.

The nine phenomena elaborated were: 1. an interest in the life project of another (without incapacitating envy); 2. basic trust (a reciprocal ability to be open and honest, even about one’s own faults); 3. a capacity for authentic forgiveness (versus masochistic submission or denial of aggression); 4. humility and gratitude; 5. a common ego ideal as a joint life project; 6. mature dependency (a willingness to receive help without shame, fear, or guilt and to give help; and a fair distribution of tasks and responsibilities; versus power struggles where blaming about who is right, who is wrong leads to mutual frustration); 7. permanence of sexual passion (to love other with changing body and physical imperfections) requiring resolution of the Oedipal conflict; 8. acceptance of loss, jealousy, and boundary protection (accept that the other can not love us in exactly same way as we love them); and 9. love and mourning (when loss by death or disruption of life project allows for full appreciation of whom lost, leading to acceptance of love for new partner without guilt or insecurity.)

On March 21, 2009, the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society featured Carla Leone, PhD, for a full day workshop on treatment of couples from a Self-Intersubjective point of reference. Leone highlighted four goals applicable to both partners in Couples treatment:

1) Strengthening the Self (of both). These include self-esteem and affect regulation, as well as mentalizing (ala Fonagy and Target). Leone does this by equal (easier said than done) empathic immersion. Each partner must hear that the therapist understands her/him from within her/his own perspective/subjectivity. She uses Fossaghy’s subject centered listening.

2) Explicitly illuminating the self-object needs of each. The therapist offers her/his self as a self object for what is needed at the moment, attuned to the self state of each partner. This can be done using heightened affective moments ‘Can you stay there a little longer?’

3) Illuminating the patterns that prevent each from getting needs met. As implicit relational models on how-to-be-with-an-other are learned, and as defenses are self-protective (once the Self is strengthened, defenses are less useful or less necessary), Leone invites a partner to mentalize (think about the mental life of the other) ‘Do you have a theory about why your partner is being aggressive?’ and illuminates organizing principles and their repetitive dimension. She notes how one partner may participate in or co-create these patterns because ‘that is what they know.’

4) Facilitating new relationship experiences (not just words) between partners, and between each partner and the therapist. Leone coaches and directs, without shaming, each partner to ask or tell the other partner what is needed and how the message might optimally be delivered.

S.E. FL Assoc. Psychoanalytic Psychology (SEFAPP) will also provide “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Couple Therapy” Saturday, April 18th, 2009 8:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Hollywood, FL at Memorial Regional Hospital, Auditorium A, B, C & D, 3501 Johnson Street, Hollywood, FL 33021. Presenters: Glenn E. Good, Ph.D. Leonard J. Ferrante, Psy.D., NCSP
questions, please call SEFAPP at 954-597-0820 or via email at sefapp@gmail.com

Vehicles of Expression

Walking is the predominant method of getting around during the New Orleans festival of “Super Sunday.” The Mardi Gras Indian tribes and a host of Mardi Gras icons such as the Skeletons, the Baby Dolls, the Second Liners, and the Jazz bands, parade through their neighborhood streets until they arrive at Taylor Park where the Indians will be admired by the waiting crowds who have been dancing, drinking, eating, and preening in front of each other for hours.

Psychoanalysts are trained to explore the motivations behind why standard practices are in fact standard, or the norm. Their training also prepares them to inquire about the practices that deviate from the norm.

On Super Sunday, I was enthralled by the opulence of the Indian costumes. But also present for admiration were the men who had turned their cars into automotive theatre. My attention was drawn, first to the flamboyantly decorated automobiles, and then to the general issue of those who were getting around by means other than walking and those at the festival who were signaling their use of vehicles either by riding on them or pulling them. These included bikes, strollers, scooters, horses, motorcycles, trucks, ‘floats,’ and even shopping carts.


By sheer force of numbers, men were far more likely to be associated with the use of alternative methods of moving about the parade route and the Park. There were men displaying their artfully designed cars; men selling Bar-B-Que from the back of their trucks; men unloading Indian headdresses from flatbeds; and men motoring down the parade route in assisted devices.

Everywhere I looked, if there were people engaged in other forms of transportation than walking, it would be men: on horses, on motorcycles, and on bicycles. It is not that women don’t do all these things; it’s that they don’t do them there, at Super Sunday festival.
Each year, The Mardi Gras Indian Council and R.E.A.L. (Recreating The Environmental Ability to Live) sponsor “Super Sunday.” It is ordinarily in March on a Sunday near St. Joseph’s feast day. The festival begins at 11:00 a.m. Taylor Park @ Washington Ave. and S. Derbigny where crowds can be entertained by the Mardi Gras Indian Tribes and artists such as Big Al Carson. The Indians begin their procession @ Washington Ave. and LaSalle St. and walk to Taylor Park.

While women, men, transvestites, queer people, masked people, politicians, social activists, tourists, and locals all mingle with the performers, Super Sunday is an event of masculine prowess, creativity, sexuality, transcendence and dominance. No where is this better illustrated than in the comparison between “men’s wheels” and “women’s wheels.”


In his article "Emotional Aspects of Motoring," psychoanalyst Gerald Grumet (1989) suggests that when we are driving, "obsolete childhood struggles are revived and displaced onto our cars, streets, and highways and can involve the “full range of human interactions and emotions." People transfer their emotions about others unto vehicles because of "symbolic resemblances" and can direct aggression of fear to dominating 'parental' rivals such as trucks and buses. Vehicles he conjectures, enable us to use motoring as a way to address our needs for power, control, dominance, in addition, to defense of our territory, opposition to those who oppose us, and even feelings of escape, freedom and release.

It might be said that the desire to standout through a creative product have propelled mostly men to flamboyantly alter their cars. As they stand by their cars and meet the steady stream of admirers, it is not hard to speculate that some feelings may be derived of having gained "love and admiration," satisfaction of having successfully competed, or relief or momentary release from feelings of inferiority. Pleasure can be derived when we are able to signal that we can "confront high speeds, and danger and in doing so," we feel a sense of being released, or of having escaped and that we are freed; are able to achieve. We can also express our sexual or aggressive urges" (Grumet, 1989).

Recent writings on the psychoanalytic theory of masculine identity development include the role of the mother, in addition to the father as a catalyst for the construction a boy's gender role identity. In the past, it was the boy’s identification with his father and his dis-identification with his mother that analysts believed would put the boy on the path to the development of an acceptable masculinity.

As analysts have turned to feminist theory to widen the scope of their understanding of gender formation, gender expression, gender fluidity and disavowal, they have begun to see that the boy’s relationship to his mother creates a life-long yearning to either be with her or be with what she provides (Grumet, 1989): nurturance, affirmation, and adoration.

On Super Sunday, men are able to express a range of subjectivities and are given carte blanche on what affect, desire, or boundary crossing they display.

Women on the other hand are "walkers" or "strollers." Baby carriages and women’s bodies are literally collapsed into the maternal. Hypersexualized women, following an aesthetic that is strongly regional, push strollers as their voluptuous bodies reek of archetypal fertility and availability.

The women with their strollers are ambulatory memorials to bygone days when the men were babies and moved by what Grumet (1989) has described as "mother-powered transportation." Moving without propelling one's induces a sense of euphoria. The contradiction of the "forward movement without effortless motion releases thrill and excitement."

Boys are coerced throughout their childhoods to separate from their mothers least they be known as "momma’s boys," or as a "pussy, sissy or faggot." Psychoanalyst, Michael Diamond (2006) writes that in acquiescing to social pressure to disindentify with the mother, boys lose "a large part of their dyadic connection and pressured to repudiate what he has loss. So, not only is he forced to cut his ties with his mother and lose access to those emotional and physical ministrations and nurturing she provided, but he must devalue what she offered him" and what he has now lost access to in his quest to become a man who is socially approved of.

Throughout their lives, men mourn the “trauma” of being separated from their mother and the security, protection, and adulation she provided. Diamond writes that “he may feel emotionally abandoned without being aware of it . . ., while experiencing his identification with his mother as shameful. This is often manifested in defensive efforts against neediness . . . . and men come to behave like “impenetrable citadels.”
As men allow themselves to slip back in time and slip across bounded identities to become Indians, Skeletons, drivers of hot rods, masters of horses, conductors of motorized vehicles-- they become creators. They create the world of the mother and infant through an abundance of food, the extravagance of costuming/layering, the communal rituals of having a trusted other help dress them; by producing the soothing rhythms of the music, by facilitating a profusion of entertainment choices, and through a glut of readily available intimacy and sex.

From a consideration of vehicles on display on Super Sunday, I would suggest that it is a male dominated space in which men’s unconscious desires for dominance, freedom, and an expanded sense of self (i.e., to be more than an ordinary man) are given full sway.

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References

Diamond, M. J. (2006). Masculinity Unraveled: The Roots of Male Gender Identity and Shifting Male Ego Ideals Throughout Life. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54,1099-1130.

Grumet, G.W. (1989). Emotional Aspects of Motoring. Psychoanalytic Review, 76,19-36.

MacCash, Doug, Art Critique of the Times-Picayune "Art in the Fast Lane".

The copyright of the article Vechicles of Expression in City of Spirits: Psychoanalysis and South Culture on the T-BIPS blog is owned by Kim Vaz. Permission to republish Vechicles of Expression in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. Contact Kim Vaz at kimmvaz@gmail.com.