The common archetypes of human existence

In 1979, I was completing a Diploma in Education. The Method Lecturer for English bounced into the room about a month into the year and wrote “common archetypes of human existence” on the board. He asked us to suggest what these were. My memory is that we all kind of looked around the room hopelessly but I may be projecting my own ignorance onto everyone. He went on to talk about Jung and of the place of archetypes in literature.



Now I think of this kind of ignorance as startling – so much of my world view is informed through a psychoanalytic lens and way of operating. I was thinking this as I was watching A Dangerous Method – how different the perspective on life might be without the work of Freud and Jung. A small part of this film alerts us to the revolutionary nature of their work. As reviewer Julie Rigg says “The idea that sexuality was at the core of many psychiatric disorders was like a bombshell in this conventional society: intellectually exciting but also risky.”

So the director Cronenberg explores the birth of psychoanalysis through the intellectual and personal relationships of Jung and his patient, and lover Sabina Spielrein and through the relationship between Freud and Jung – which began with great promise and curdled in less than a decade. Like this relationship, the film begins with much promise but doesn’t quite work. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, the film tries to cover too much territory. Is it about the personal or about the ideas behind psychotherapy? If about the personal – what is the focus: fidelity, sex, adultery, Freud’s father/son relationship with Jung, competition, anti-Semitism, free love, betrayal – what? It touches on all these things. If it’s about the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, is it about the role of sex, the theory of the unconscious, the place of mythology, the collective unconscious or how to progress these understandings into broader society? We get a smattering of all these things but not enough of any to be satisfied.


Secondly, I found it hard to see inside the façade of Jung to get a sense of what he was really like. Perhaps this is historically accurate; maybe he was a closed book. The only time we see him in an unguarded moment is when he is so excited at meeting Freud that he forgets all social graces. It makes hard to really understand the gist of his relationship with Spielrein which forms a key part of the film and to make any kind of judgement about the changing relationship with Freud. For example, does he spank Spielrein as her doctor or her lover? (And why do I use the word “spank” instead of “hit” or “smack”?)


I’m not sure if this opaqueness of character stems from the way that he is played by Fassbinder, an excellent actor usually, or by some uncertainty on Cronenberg’s part about Jung’s actual character and motivations, or by a very historically real repressed public persona.


I found the final scenes poignant and moving. They showed what the film could have been about.

Shame about Shame

I loved Hunger, the last collaboration between Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender. Shame is a different kettle of fish. Fassbender plays Brandon, a sex addict – which seems to be the major point of the film. He does a bloody good job, reducing sex to the hard yards of any kind of addiction. Not pretty. There is one pretty scene – Brandon eyeing off a young woman on the subway. She is dressed in purple with a perky little hat and the camera rolls around her body in a kind of alluring and erotic fantasy. Everyone has done this – looked over at a perfect stranger and contemplated sex. Focused not on their face but on their body and what it (and yours ) might do. The scene is real, and authentic, and in the end a bit scary.

My hero film reviewer Roger Ebert said this about Shame: “This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.” I wish I could agree. He is right about one thing – the acting is sensational. Ebert says :

“There's a close-up in "Shame" of Michael Fassbender's face showing pain, grief and anger. His character, Brandon, is having an orgasm. For the movie's writer-director, Steve McQueen, that could be the film's master shot. There is no concern about the movement of Brandon's lower body. No concern about his partner. The close-up limits our view to his suffering. He is enduring a sexual function that has long since stopped giving him any pleasure and is self-abuse in the most profound way.”

Shame is about Brandon, some kind of well-paid tertiary sector employee, and his dysfunctional sister, a nightclub sister. He is tightly bounded – she is all over the shop. They have had a difficult childhood. Part of the tension in the film is watching them clash within the tight confines of his expensive but sparsely furnished apartment. I think that what is happening in this film is a kind of parallel process. Just as Brandon uses people for sex in a relentless and joyless way, he too is used by the director. His acting makes this film; if it were plot-line alone, people would leave in drives. So I think people rate this film despite the fact that it leave you feeling kind of ripped off. The New York Times critic says it better than me:

“Is “Shame” the name of something Brandon does feel, or of something the filmmakers think he should feel? The movie, for all its displays of honesty (which is to say nudity), is also curiously coy. It presents Brandon for our titillation, our disapproval and perhaps our envy, but denies him access to our sympathy. I know, that’s the point, that Mr. McQueen wants to show how the intensity of Brandon’s need shuts him off from real intimacy, but this seems to be a foregone conclusion, the result of an elegant experiment that was rigged from the start.”

Dark and crazy

What little I know of life in Romania has been conveyed mainly by films until now. I have seen some splendid films including Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I thought about a lot when I was reading The Appointment. In the latter film, an old man is carted from hospital to hospital in the course of one night, getting sicker and sicker as doctors keep refusing to treat him and send him away. The plot line of The Appointment is not dissimilar. The main character (unnamed) is on a tram journey across town which lasts the course of the book. She has been “summoned” by the authorities for interrogation; this trip is just one of many already taken. The journey in the story allows for the character to reflect on her life while adding a kind of forward impetus to the narrative. We are keen to find out what will happen to her as we linger in the surreal and muddy waters of life under the Ceaucescu regime.

It’s a hard book to read. There is nothing desirable about her life and awful things happen to most characters. As occurs in toxic regimes (and this applies to workplaces as much as cultures and countries), people behave very badly toward one another when there is fear and scape-goating around. Or they drink to escape or have nihilistic or abusive sex. All of these elements pertain in this novel. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it but it provides both a sense of truth, and some very fine writing. Take the following for example:

“The water squirted and gathered around the tree trunks in shallow pools, full of drowned ants. The earth drank slowly. Then Grandfather said You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. From here to there it's just the farty splutter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.” (p80)

This novel was written by Herta Muller who emigrated to Germany in 1987, two years before the Ceaucescu regime was overthrown. She accurately captures the way in which the individual is made powerless by the state in writing: "there's nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned." One reviewer, Costica Bradatan, wrote: “Müller's work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. ‘Bearing witness’ is just the right phrase – it doesn’t make it an easy read but it does make the narrative compelling. It reminds me of the novel I read earlier in the year set in Libya (In the Country of Men). In that case, the author made the politics more palatable by telling the story through the perspective of a small boy. I liked that novel a lot but I’m glad that Muller didn’t try to make it easy to read. Like the ride with Mr Lazarescu, you kind of need to endure the awfulness and the craziness. I guess the other obvious comparison is anything by Kafka, but I haven’t been in that territory for a long time.

Bradatan also writes:

"There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail…That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for."

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