Self-Heaing in Cinema: Chapter 5 Part 4 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Navigating Chaos

The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life–in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work. –C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections Proposing the term creative illness, Henri Ellenberger compares the solitude and depression in Jung’s life during 1913-19 with Freud’s period of what he called neurasthenia and hysteria. –Ronald Hayman, A Life of Jung That which wounds also heals. –The Delphic Oracle

Even before John Briggs’s and F. David Peat’s Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change (2000), the idea of learning from chaos was sufficiently widespread to be in Jung’s sense “archetypal.” Mircea Eliade’s monumental study Shamanism shows tribal healers typically gaining their vocation during periods resembling mental and/or physical disease. Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony chronicles a comparable theme running throughout the Romantic Movement, with the poet as tormented bard/teacher/healer. In antiquity, the phrase “wounded physician” became associated first with Chiron, then Christ. It was an “archetype” Jung lived and as biographies of him have grown more frank, they have come to emphasize its importance (e.g., Claire Dunne’s Wounded Healer of the Soul–Carl Jung and Robert C. Smith’s The Wounded Jung: Effects of Jung's Relationships on His Life and Work).

Comparably, just as a Judoist or Aikidoist uses attackers’ momentum to manage them, so Milton Erickson found in his patients’ afflictions means to overcome those afflictions–a procedure he learned personally when he attained extraordinary sensitivity while recovering from two different strains of polio. In their studies of Erickson, Grinder and Bandler termed his use of whatever the patients presented “utilization” and made it a principle in their psychology. Utilization is a lesson that includes and builds on all that we have been mapping. What causes being lost at a particular Gravesean level? Remaining entranced by a no-longer adequate map (trope). As Erickson found, only by generating new trances in patients could he lead them out of the fractal patterns of the old trances into which passions and traumas had driven them.

As if to meet a comparable need, the film industry has cherished the simulation and stimulation of affects powerful enough to break through psychological paralysis. For this, cinema has repeatedly overstepped religious and other taboos, thereby risking boycotts and court action from conservatives. Despite the traditional dichotomy of emotion and thought, this emotionalism actually contributes to the intellectually “big picture.” About the once-firm separation between reason and affect, a growing understanding is, “all information processing is emotional” (Dodge 159). Rather than being the result of ratiocination, an ota has closer kinship with the vivid spontaneity of obsessions and hallucinations (as with the protagonist’s compulsive search in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977).

Today, however, the distinction between sane and insane seems less self—evident than before the philosopher Michel Foucault (among others) depicted past approaches to the mentally ill as conspiracies to deprive social deviants of civil rights (e.g., Madness and Civilization). Psychology is in flux, so that applying any single school of it to cinema seems more and more out of date, but all the schools have in common the notion of some pattern of human development. Since complexity theory has sharpened understanding of development per se, it is providing indications of what a generic developmental psychology might be.

The gist of it is that, except perhaps in those with brains split by surgery or accident, all mental processes are interrelated. Although traditional psychiatry tried to see affective disorders (e.g., depression) and cognitive ones (e.g., schizophrenia) as entirely different, frequently, people diagnosed as “schizophrenics” undergo depression and depressives have eccentric ideas. A famous study has demonstrated that American mental-health professionals tended to apply the term “schizophrenia” to symptoms called “depression” in Great Britain (Cooper, Kendal, and Gurland et passim). Neither national borders nor boundaries between disciplines now protect old distinctions.

From mathematics and biology, systems dynamics comes with promising new approaches. According to one computer model, for instance, if the neural chemical dopamine is released too quickly, “the neuron firing rate splits into two different rhythms. . . . which . . . appear[] . . . as a massive attack of chaos” (Briggs and Peat 167). Based partly on dopamine research, some psychologists believe that depressive, manic, manic-depressive, schizo-affective, and schizophrenic disorders are phases of a single continuum (Swerdlow and Koob 197-245). D. A. Schwarz has written of a paranoid-depressive continuum (Schwarz 1964, 690-706). The brain has the potential for a wide spectrum of responses to the environment–a spectrum all of which may be useful if the mind does not lock into a small segment of the continuum.

No longer quite as terrified of mental chaos as were Freudians, the newer attitude is to ascertain within what limits it may have value.Studies documenting a statistical link between depression and creative production include Andreasen, “Creativity and Mental Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers and Their First Degree Relatives,” 1288–1299; Andreasen and Glick, “Bipolar Affective Disorder and Creativity: Implications and Clinical Management,” 207–17; Jamison, “Mood Disorders and Patterns of Creativity in British Writers and Artists,”125-34; Wittkower and Wittkower, Born Under Saturn; Wolpert, ed. Manic–Depressive Illness: History of a Syndrome; Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hipocratic Times to Modern Times. Sceptical about such a connection is Albert Rothenberg, Creativity and Madness: New Findings and Old Sterotypes, 150-53.

He raises some reasonable methodological questions, but not enough to discount the mass of evidence, at least until further researches enrich understanding of the situation. Numerous studies indicate that a high proportion of creative individuals have suffered from affective disorders–though usually moderate ones or they could not have remained productive. D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb, for example, argue that a mild manic-depressive syndrome enhances creative talents. Slight mania accelerates mental activity and confers the self-confidence necessary for large projects. Slight depression conveys the self-criticism for revision and the isolation required for protracted work. Most interesting, they suggest that mood swings produce a sense of being different that aids the manic-depressive in breaking free from societal norms and traditions (Hershman and Lieb 7-17). The disorder thus serves the same function that anthropologists often presume art or religion does for society as a whole: liminality, a way of stepping beyond quotidian norms or periods of stagnation.

This above notion (a continuum of symptoms from near normalcy to “schizophrenia” with people constantly shifting along it) is a pre—modern idea revived in altered form by postmodernism. When, for instance, in defining that condition, Fredric Jameson notes “schizophrenia”-like malaise in present culture, he is employing this idea (Jameson 120). Implicitly, the stresses of our age bring the onset of mental disease to the highly susceptible. To others, stress alters consciousness sufficiently to affect cultural conventions, particularly in the postmodern “vertigo” where traditional orientations slip away. According to Anne Friedberg’s extension of Jameson’s approach, in cinema particularly, audiences feel rootless, glancing through all time and space (Friedberg 420).

To exemplify this alienated vision, Jameson quotes an autobiography of a “schizophrenic,” who in acute stages of the condition perceives “illimitable vastness, brilliant light . . . gloss and smoothness” (Jameson 120). In reviving the sanity/insanity continuum, what Jameson omits is the ancient associations between the insane and the inspired. From that religious perspective, the glowing textureless void (approximated by some postmodern art) could carry additional connotations–the boundless light typical of near-death experiences and of mystical visions. Ignoring this, Jameson sees postmodern changes of consciousness as only a sickening of society.

Leaving conventional consciousness, however, is not necessarily a disease or a disaster. Based on much fieldwork including her own with 122 shamans in Southeast Asia, Ruth-Inge Heinze concludes, “all who go professionally into trance on demand, lead, outside their trance periods, a productive life which bears no indication of any pathology” (Heinze 120). L. Bryce-Boyer determined that in traditional Apache communities the trance mediums were the least likely to evidence actual schizophrenia, because their professions required them to alter consciousness at will (Bryce-Boyer 235-57). As an art, cinema helps train the imagination to navigate a psychological continuum.

Cutting through the medical intricacies to what may be the basic situation, Hollywood (particularly when expounding Graves’s stage six) takes for granted such a continuum, connecting normalcy with all mental extremes. Viewers are expected to empathize with screened mystics, geniuses, and psychos. In movies, inspiration or insanity appears to be simply an exaggerated form of what the average viewers feel in dreams and nightmares. In Zelig (1984), for instance, Woody Allen has the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim say: “The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. Now I myself felt his feelings were really not all that different from the . . . normal person, only carried to an extreme degree.”

This attitude attributed to Bettleheim may perhaps seem objectionable to the hypercritical. According to Elizabeth Ermath (who does not note the concept’s increasing prominence in psychology), empathy is a relic of modernism: “[It] implies the exchangeability of consciousness between individuals, a sort of generic “human” consciousness that is the provisional sum of human capability” (Ermath 28). Systems dynamics, though, shows how a few simple patterns may produce countless formations; thus, human minds could have enough in common for empathy despite their obvious variety. The popularity of films about psychologically extreme conditions argues that, on some level, such empathy flourishes and seems valuable to audiences.

What is this value? In an episode of the television series Northern Exposure (November 8, 1993), a shaman, wishing to expand his practice to Anglo—Americans, seeks to find “the White healing stories,” new narratives he might tell to treat diseased souls. Frustratingly, he wastes hours tape recording urban folk tales, but can find no shamanist use for them. Then, noticing how empathy inspired by a movie relieves a psychosomatic disorder in his apprentice shaman, he decides cinema is the new “magic” and “medicine.”

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 6 Part 2

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