On the lighter side

The students in my undergraduate psychoanalytic theory seminar have discovered some terrific illustrations for some Kleinian ideas that are too perfect not to share.

These clips (sorry about the ads) are from The Family Guy. No, I haven't seen it (come on! there's only so many hours in the day!), but I will try to catch it when I can now.

First up, a terrific illustration of the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position. Note the demands, note how the baby deals with the Oedipal threat, note the fear of retaliation from the object... Klein in a one-minute cartoon:





And this one... well. It just made me laugh. Because my sons do this:





More analyses welcome. Another must-watch for fans of Freud, it seems. Many, many thanks to everyone: Katie, Izzy, Tori, Sally, Liz, Emma, Rachel, Fay!

Oh! My Winnipeg!

A couple of weeks ago, your Psycho-Babble On... team went to the lovely Showroom cinema in Sheffield to enjoy an evening of Guy Maddin's dramamentary, tragic love letter and noir homage, My Winnipeg. It was decided, by virtue of me being Canadian and the more strictly psychoanalytically-inclined, that I should be charged with the task of offering to you, our loyal reader (notice the singular -- I assume nothing), thorough analyses and commentary on this artistic endeavour. (Plus, it was my turn after a long holiday to add something to the blog.)

Well, let me start with the proviso that I've never been to Winnipeg, and while it is 'close' it is still a 25 hour drive from my hometown of Toronto. I did, however, get most of the ice hockey references, and yes, I've had my nose freeze shut when out walking in December (though that was in Montreal).

The problem with trying to write about a film like My Winnipeg is that it is so relentlessly and unrepentantly intelligent, and knowing, that it renders any analysis by critical hacks (almost) pointless. It's like reading Angela Carter: you start thinking to yourself, 'I know what this is! I know what this is! This is a panopticon she's describing here!' and when you turn the page your enthusiasm crashes to the bottom of your stomach when you read, 'It is a panopticon that I am describing here' -- and neither with Carter's novels nor with Maddin's film does this necessarily inhibit your appreciation or enjoyment of the offering, but it does crush the pretensions of we critics that think artists can't say anything without our explanations.

SO, what can I say about My Winnipeg? Or, what can I say about My Winnipeg that Maddin hasn't already? It is a brilliant examination of and play with Oedipus, even if I though there was one too many shots of Maddin's mother's naked lap to make the point. But the association of home with the mother, and how both are simultaneously longer-for and loathed, is brilliantly portrayed. Winnipeg's unique situation, as a city of slumbering numbness at a mythical junction of two rivers, inciting both passion and contempt, makes it a northern Thebes, and Maddin himself a winking (pre-eye gouging, obviously) Oedipus.

And these Oedipal pictures are drawn in neat black-and-white, the noir style both lovingly and satirically presented, but the overall effect is to heighten the tragedy, since noir is itself so steeped in the Freudian melodrama. Hitchcock, too, looms large, not only stylistically, but with small but overt links to Psycho, Vertigo and -- I think -- The Birds. Maybe others, too -- I'd have to watch it again, which I'll be more than happy to do one day.

Maddin's mother -- or, I should say, 'Maddin's' 'mother', because really I'm taking about the representation of her here, not the woman herself (who I've never met, even though, yes, we're both from Canada) -- is fantastically rendered: she is not only Jocasta, but also Freud himself -- the relentlessly interogator who pushes through the snowbanks of denial ('snowbanks of denial'? -- it works, watch the film) to expose those truths that her children would hide from her; but, more akin to Melanie Klein, she is a menace, a monstrous figure that haunts every unconscious frame.

My Winnipeg deserves a place on the psychoanaytic cultural shelf, right up along there with the Theban plays, The Oresteia, Hamlet et al. Go and see it.

Klein at the British Museum

Not really, no. But her work lives on, and nowhere it is more apparent than in the British Museum. You can see why Freud -- and Klein, and Jung... the lot, really -- kept finding inspiration, or rather, 'evidence', in the art of the ancients.

I've been especially haunted by a figure that I found in Asian section. ('Room 33' in your guidebooks.)

I think you'll see why.



Wild analysis on why this has been haunting me is, of course, as welcome as it is inevitable. (I know my audience.) But I've finally had a moment to do some basic research, and though anthropology isn't exactly my forte, I thought I'd share some of my findings.

(Hey, let's be honest: anthropology was never really Freud's forte either. But who would want to live in a world without Totem and Taboo?)

SO, back to my nightmare. The British Museum website on this figure tells us that this is a sandstone figure of Chamunda. Here's a snippet from their description:

The Great Hindu goddess Devi takes many forms: benign, sensuous and maternal at one level, horrifying and powerful at another. Chamunda, with her skeletal frame and staring socket eyes, is one of her fiercest manifestations, associated with corpses and even sacrificial rituals.

And here we've got all the classic imagery of death and destruction, of Klein's mother intent on revenge, in the infant's phantasy, for all of the attacks that she has suffered at the hands (and poos) of her baby. She's already obviously endured these anal attacks, her inner contents (father's penis, other children, shit -- all threatening objects to her children) having been ripped from her. And how she's coming back, armed with a thunderbolt, trident, snake and sword. With the skull-cap and severed head she's carrying her first trophies.

Notice in the British Museum description what her weapons are for: to fight ignorance, which we can see linked to the epistemophillic impulse, the force that initiates anal aggression in the first place (see 'Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict'), and to fight 'ego' -- though I don't think they mean 'ego' in the way Klein would intend it, obviously, there still there suggestions of an attack on the self, which is what the paranoid imagined retaliation of the mother actually is, after all.

In a longer, and much more detailed explanation (which is interesting beyond its description of Chamunda), Chandra Alexandre explains how Chamunda was linked to death and was demonised by patriarchal traditions in India, which is very interesting in the context of men's envy and fear of the 'bad' (read: all-powerful and frustrating) mother, manifested so often in patriarchal strictures, institutions and misogyny more generally.

Please post your comments if you can offer any further enlightenment!