updated
I have several interpretations to offer for
Thelma and Louise but will only focus on two in any detail. The first is the
superego/paranoia reading. This reading requires two theoretical apparati . The
first is Freud’s construction of the stage of primary narcissism in its
ontogenetic form. It is constructed through looking at the behaviour of people suffering from psychosis as well as people
who are bed-ridden and physically ill and how both seem to not care about finding success or love. Freud writes that “libido and ego-interest
share the same fate and are once more indistinguishable from each other” and
have been withdrawn from objects in the outside world (On Narcissism 82-3).
While Freud claims that the child initially makes itself its own ideal
Jacobson, Klein, and others dispute this and see megalomania as a defensive
process (Freeman, Some Aspects of Pathological
Narcissism, p. 553; Hendrick, Early Development of the Ego, p. 57; Klein, Envy and Gratitude, p. 76) and arising later in
development (Jacobson, ‘The Self and the Object World’, p.102). Instead, Jacobson believes the primary narcissistic stage can be:
the genetic origin of the opposing, active-aggressive and passive-submissive attitudes to different phases in the child's earliest experiences of oral gratification. The
desires either to make the mother part of himself or to become part of her appear, indeed, to be derived
from fantasies of either devouring the love object or being devoured by it (Jacobson, Self and Object World,
p.101).
While the sick person
withdraws his ego interest from the world temporarily, so his energy can
focussed on getting better, the psychotic has ‘foreclosed’ his ego ideals and
remains at the primary narcissistic stage of being able to satisfy the phantasy
of possessing the mother or being a part of her without action. Many writers
criticize Freud for his idea of primary narcissism from a misunderstanding. The
ego, in Freud’s view, has been developing since birth and the child has been interacting with sense perceptions of the mother and there have been interactions between the two. By the time of the stage of
primary narcissism the ego has gone through significant developments already.
It has left the realm of 2-d vision and autistic sensations of objects and
brightness for the realm of 3-d mnemic traces and recognition of things in its
environment. However, the child doesn’t have an ego ideal to force it or drive
it to ego-competitive or object-loving interactions with others. “The development of
the ego [ideal] consists in a departure from primary narcissism and
gives rise to a vigorous attempt to recover that state” Freud writes, “[t]his
departure is brought about by means of the displacement of libido on to an ego
ideal imposed from without; and satisfaction is brought about
from fulfilling this ideal” (On Narcissism, p.100).
Roughly there are 5 stages that Freud
mentions 1. The ocular, auto-erotic, or autistic 2. The oral, primary
narcissism 3. The anal 4. The phallic 5. Latency. The ego, qua whole self-representation, begins at the oral
and in the following stages the child can no longer simply fantasize that it
will control or possess. or merge or resonate with the mother in the future
without living up to its ideals. Roughly, at the anal stage the child
encounters the father imago of absolute perfection (God) and identifies with
him to form an ego ideal in which he strives to possess the sole phallus that
exists for all people by being the strongest or the smartest. At the phallic
stage the child encounters the father imago as worldly perfection (cultural
hero) and identifies with him to form an ego ideal in which he strives to
posses the phallus that exists in the reputation of his community by being the
first in his field (occupation) or in having social power. In latency the child
encounters the father as group perfection and identifies with him
to form an ego ideal in which he strives for his group to be the most powerful
in relation to other groups.
The encounter with the father imago leads
not just to the ego ideal but also to a conflict with him that creates signal
anxiety at the ocular, anal, phallic, etc. stages and an important issue of
whether or not the child fully internalizes the father or not[1].
The relation to the partially internalized father who forms the basis for the
Oedipus and every other triangular complex at the anal, oral, etc. stages gives
rise to the defences of paranoia and melancholia. The child represses an attack
on an object it is making a father imago transference upon and the consequences
for having destroyed the father imago means that the impulse is either
projected (paranoia) or the badness of the attacked object is introjected
(melancholia) so the father imago can be kept alive in some way[2]. At the phallic stage paranoia concerns
the ‘interest ego’ and someone who wants to ruin one’s reputation or success or
humiliate one. At the anal stage paranoia concerns the ‘body ego’ and someone
who wants to kill or destroy one. At the oral stage paranoia concerns the ‘skin
ego’ and the boundary of inside and outside being overcome by a bad outside.
Lastly, at the ocular stage, in which separation from the mother is only based
upon her as a part object (i.e breast) paranoia is total annihilation and often
not just of oneself but a huge disaster or catastrophe that takes the world
along with it.
Melanie Klein gives the phantasy
equivalents to these things a specific shape, so that even though we don’t have
the explicit discussion of these ontogenetic levels of functioning we can tell
by the phantasy images that they are taking place. It must be remembered that
Klein isn’t talking about the child imagining such complex images as if from a
host of possible choices. Criticism of her work often portrays the child as
having cogitation that is too complex for such early development but it misses
the point. Rather the images of the father imago or persecutors would come from
its own organ or bodily sensations: feelings hunger and an empty belly; feeling
its early uncoordinated musculature only manifesting in little knots here and
there in its body, (etc.). My interpretation of Thelma and Louise is that in
terms of images we have a steady decline from the phallic level down to the
auto-erotic or ocular stage in which Thelma and Louise lose all ego ideals and
father images and even the final separation of part self and part-object
representation. I believe the logical conclusion in this order or sequence is that the final regression from the early ocular-auto-erotic stage to a point before
part self-representation exists, is likely not rejoining with the mother in a
return to the womb, but to post-natal stage that doesn’t possess a
part-self-representation[3].
Each stage of
regression must involve 1. Initial signal anxiety in relation to the partially
internalized father imago. 2. An attack on the partially internalized father
(phallus) imago 3. Paranoia or persecutory anxiety.
The first signal
anxiety in the movie is when Harlan tries to rape Thelma outside of the bar. Helen Deutsch writes: "It is interesting to note that, when the father is
blamed for the little girl's lack of a penis, castration by
him has already acquired the libidinal significance attaching to this idea in
the form of the rape-phantasy (Deutsch, The Significance of Masochism in
the Mental Life of Women, p. 50). Although Deutsch calls this a phantasy she later mentions the anxiety associated with it (ibid., 54).
Louise killing Harlan after he tried to rape Thelma would be the first attack on the father imago and results in the paranoid vengeance figure of Hal the detective trying to bring them to justice. At first Hal just wants to bring them in for questioning and seems well disposed and sympathetic but viewing the persecutor this way is not incompatible with the potential harm he represents[4]. We can conjecture that they might be charged and have their names associated with a crime (i.e. their good name or reputation brought down) even though Hal’s sympathy implies they won’t do serious time. However, after they commit robbery and put a patrolman into the trunk of his car he changes his position and the persecutory aspect rises to the fore:
Louise killing Harlan after he tried to rape Thelma would be the first attack on the father imago and results in the paranoid vengeance figure of Hal the detective trying to bring them to justice. At first Hal just wants to bring them in for questioning and seems well disposed and sympathetic but viewing the persecutor this way is not incompatible with the potential harm he represents[4]. We can conjecture that they might be charged and have their names associated with a crime (i.e. their good name or reputation brought down) even though Hal’s sympathy implies they won’t do serious time. However, after they commit robbery and put a patrolman into the trunk of his car he changes his position and the persecutory aspect rises to the fore:
HAL Then I'm sorry.
We're gonna have to charge you with murder. Now, do you want to come out of this alive?.... LOUISE You know, certain words and
phrases just keep floating through
my mind, things like
incarceration, cavity search, life imprisonment, death by electrocution, that sort of thing. So, come out alive? I don't know. Let us think about that.
This
situation would be a blending of phallic and anal positions because the
patrolman they 'locked in the trunk' represents anal signal anxiety. In terms of
social ontology the phallic father imago is a cultural hero or someone who is
famous and the first in his field or occupation while the anal father is
god-like or a ruler over a whole people. This difference can be seen in Star Wars, for example, in
which Darth Vader is in high command of the army but the emperor is the ruler
of the empire. Although, here we are dealing with images/phantasy alone and don't have the presented social ontology, there is a
similarity between the patrolman and the emperor in that they both have their
eyes hidden[5].
The emperor has his cowl or hood covering his eyes and the patrolman has his
sunglasses. This is part of the anal Oedipus complex in that it’s not possible
to look at the primal father’s face or in his eyes like mythology holds that
one can’t look upon God[6].
Although Thelma and
Louise put the patrolman in the trunk of his car, they don’t kill him or do
something that could lead to his death (they even shoot air holes in the trunk
for him). This means that the next murder of the father imago occurs when
Thelma and Louise blow up the tanker trunk. Compared to their car the enormous
cylindrical tanker truck represents the “unique and gigantic” properties of the
anal phallus or father. Now, instead of Hal the detective as the image of the
figure after them, the girls are next chased by police cars. The anal phallus
by image is uncastrateable. When one castrates it another comes to take its
place. In the car chase we watch as one police car crashes, only to show
another police car closing the distance, to crash again, and then another… [7].
The next instance of
signal anxiety is clearly when Thelma and Louise escape the regenerating police
cars but then see 3 patrol cars approaching on the other lane of the highway. I
can’t say much about what makes these 3 cars represent oral signal anxiety but
I can say that the number 3 in analytic literature is associated with penis (1
penis and 2 testicles). Additionally, compared to the giant explosion of the
anal phallus the next act of violence seems much reduced. The only noticeable
thing is that during the chase “Louise and Thelma blow
through a stand of buildings left from when the train went through here”
(script). Although this blow
through the stand of buildings didn’t kill anyone, going through the fence in
an area in which there were people (there was laundry hung out to dry) could
have killed someone. However, I take Winnicot’s transitional object of the oral
stage to be an instance of the father imago (i.e. the infant in instinctual
renunciation turns from the mother to the not-mother object). Thus, it is a
deeper interpretation here to take the violence to be against things (property)
than against humans. Anyway, after
this destruction of property or things occurs the police cars are no longer
following in single file but appear as a swarm: “They are now being pursued by
at least fifteen cars…police cars are swarming across the desert”
(script). Compared to the multiple
and regenerating anal phallus, the oral persecutory is represented as a swarm
of penises inside the mother which can be externalized defensively[8].
Lastly, in escape from the oral swarm of
police persecutors the girls almost go off the cliff into the grand canyon. A
single helicopter appeared just before this happens and I take this to be
ocular signal anxiety in relation to the single penis found in the mother’s
breast (part-object)[9]. This leads
to the attack on the father imago which is even more subtle than the oral one.
A massive amount of police cars and FBI agents surround Thelma and Louise and an
officer announces:
POLICE (O.S.) (over loudspeaker) This is the Arizona
Highway Patrol. You are under arrest. You
are considered armed and dangerous.
Any failure to obey any command will be considered an act of aggression against us (script, emphasis mine).
Thelma likens the gathered police and
agents to an “army” and there is an extreme sense of overkill about the scene
reminiscent of cartoons in which a character has guns, bombs, missiles, etc.
(all the weapons of the army) directed against another. This ‘overkill’
obviously has a function of turning the violence into something so unreal that
parents won’t object to their children enjoying something so absurd, but, at
the same time it firmly captures the annihilation paranoia at work in this
stage[10].
The parents are so much bigger than the infant and it has next to no
coordination of its musculature and this disparity might give a sense of how
the persecution might feel even though the child doesn’t have the cognitive
capacity of grasping any of this. Rather, the subjective sense of the infant’s
plight comes from the its part self-representation being tenuously separated
from the breast as part-object. Because it has the smallest amount of ego
differentiation it lacks defense except for the most primitive and brutal
scotomatization or projection of the cognitive apparatus itself which leads, as
Bion points out, into bizarre objects (i.e. the phonograph that listens to the
child) (Bion, Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic
Personalities).
After their non-compliance that becomes an
act of aggression, the annihilation paranoia or persecution is felt by Thelma
and Louise but, as with the other stages, they foreclose the father imago and
choose to regress. They choose psychic death in union with the mother in which
even the part-self representation doesn’t exist. It is possible to take this
ocular foreclosure to mean a return to the birth stage but I have the sense
that there is ego development prior to the part object (just as there is in the
womb) that doesn’t yield even part-object representations ‘for consciousness’
although the ego must follow the same procedure of being built from
internalization. This is important because melancholic reactions that occur at
the ocular or oral level will have depressive reactions that show up as lack of
energy and disposition to illness, but I believe cancer can be conceived of as
a pre-self-representation biological melancholic reaction to the father imago[11].
[1] The process which normally serves as the final solution of these
successive anxiety situations is comprehensible to us through the
phenomena by which we recognize identification. Those identifications resulting
from each successive type of aggression contribute functions to the
ego which, on the one hand, are essential to the permanent mastery of the
corresponding anxiety, and, on the other hand, to the
full development of the functions which constitute the ego.
The failure to complete any of these
identifications results in a defect in ego-organization which is manifest in
adult life by one or another type of defect in the management of instinctual
impulses in a mature way without an excess of inhibition (Hendrick, Ego
Development and Certain Character Problems, p. 338).
[2] Joyce McDougall also brings out this partial internalization state.
Working with homosexual women she writes that the phallic father is
internalized but not fully: “the daughter appears to have abandoned him as an
object of libidinal wishes at the height of the classical Oedipal period
(McDougall, Homosexuality in Women, p.191). This partially internalized father
is “zealously guarded” Joyce writes, because he “is a bulwark against psychotic
dissolution” (ibid. p. 191). Klein mentions the genetic connection between
paranoia and melancholia in A Contribution to the Psychogenesis
of Manic-Depressive States (p. 148).
[3] Freud’s concept of
oceanic oneness with the earth is experienced before the ego puts up inside and
outside barriers (i.e. the skin ego of oral-primary narcissism, Civilization,
p.66-8). It clearly needs to exist after birth so that the oneness with the
earth can have content. I understand this oneness as the proto-ocular stage and
the part-self representation occurs at partial identification with the father
imago. However, it is likely that development in the ego occurs post-natally
before this point is reached although it is not ‘for-consciousness’.
[4] “The central thrust of her paper is to make the contrast before and
after this change in the relation with objects - in effect, from what
she calls paranoia to a relationship of sad concern for the
object. That emphasis stands out in the material that ‘Rt’ gave her -
such as his ‘amazing’ suspicion whilst admiring his analyst” (Hinshelwood, R.D,
Melanie Klein and Repression: An Examination of Some Unpublished Notes of 1934,
p. 19).
[5] Imagistically Darth Vader is clearly a phallic deutero combined
parent figure. The helmet resembles a woman’s profile (long hair) and his
cassock resembles a woman’s dress as most priestly garb does.
[6]
The hypnotist asserts that
he is in possession of a mysterious power that robs the subject of his own
will; or, which is the same thing, the subject believes it of him.
This mysterious power (which is even now often described popularly as ‘animal
magnetism’) must be the same power that is looked upon by primitive people as
the source of taboo, the same that emanates from kings and chieftains and makes
it dangerous to approach them (mana). The hypnotist, then, is supposed
to be in possession of this power; and how does he manifest it? By telling the
subject to look him in the eyes; his most typical method of
hypnotizing is by his look. But it is precisely the sight of
the chieftain that is dangerous and unbearable for primitive people,
just as later that of the Godhead is for mortals. Even Moses had to act as an
intermediary between his people and Jehovah, since the people could not support
the sight of God; and when he returned from the presence of God his
face shone—some of the mana had been transferred on to him,
just as happens with the intermediary among primitive people. (Group psych, p.
125)
[7] Klein talks of anal
paranoia as being multiple:
He…felt as though they
were his enemies and were hemming him in and weighing him down by clinging so
closely to his body. They represented his internalized objects and excrements
which were persecuting him from within. In virtue of the displacement of his fears of internal dangers into the external world, his enemies inside him had been transformed into
enemies outside him. (Psychoanalysis of Children, p. 353). Chasseguet-Smirgel
talks of the uncastrateable anal phallus in Perversion, Idealization and Sublimation (p. 356).
[8] When I described the
fight which in phantasy John had inside the mother's body with
his father's penises (crabs)—actually with a swarm of them—I pointed out that the meat-house, which had apparently not been broken
into and which John was trying to prevent them from getting into, represented
not only the inside of his mother's
body but his own inside (A Contribution to the Theory of Intellectual
Inhibtion, p. 212).
[9] Besides the swarm of penises and multiple excrements Klein speaks
of an earlier single penis inside the mother’s body “her
destructive impulses against her mother's
body and her father's penis imagined to be inside it
(Psychoanalysis of Children, p. 91). Later she refines this to say the single
penis is found in relation to the breast: “Phantasies
of the penis inside the mother, or inside her breast, turn the father into
a hostile intruder. This phantasy is particularly strong when the infant
has not had the full enjoyment and happiness that the
early relation to the mother can afford him and has not
taken in the first good object with some security” (Envy and Gratitude,
p.197, emphasis mine). Additionally, the autistic signal
anxiety has been related as ‘falling anxiety’ (Reich) and a black hole
(Grotstein) that is well symbolized by falling into the Grand Canyon. This
falling is felt to be endless and shows the encounter with the father as the
ego function of space (2-d to 3-d vision) and mythically is shown in Uranus
embracing Gaia (ocular), just as the skin ego, representing the
self-representation over time, is shown in Cronos (oral). Zeus is clearly the
emergence of the object as perfection (anal) and Heracles enters as the
cultural hero (phallic).
[10] We are, I think, justified in assuming that some of the functions
which we know from the later ego are there in the beginning. Prominent amongst
these functions is that of dealing with anxiety. I hold
that anxiety arises from the operation of the Death
Instinct within the organism, is felt as fear of annihilation (death) and takes the form of fear of
persecution. (Some Schizoid Mechanisms, p. 100, emphasis mine).
[11] Klein maintains that there are phantasies related to these
pre-self-representation identifications and internalizations: Other important
sources of primary anxiety are the trauma of birth
(separation anxiety) and frustration of bodily needs; and these
experiences too are from the beginning felt to be caused by bad objects. Even
if these objects are felt to be external, they become
through introjection internal persecutors and thus reinforce the fear
of the destructive impulse within (Some Schizoid Mechanisms, p. 100). The
self and object representations in pre-ocular instances still find their basis
in bodily sensations and even though they aren’t ‘for consciousness’ it’s clear
that consciousness, and the following self-consciousness, are preceded by
cogitation or mind. For example, we don’t have to think about or be aware of
our hear-beat, breathing, and many other simple bodily processes although we
can be and that is because of an awareness more primitive than consciousness
that can be tapped into.
