The Problem with the Drapers

In Carl Jung’s school of analytical psychology the feminine and masculine archetypes are referred to as anima (feminine) and animus (masculine). The male and female archetype are carried within everyone, regardless of gender. In general, the archetype corresponding with our physical gender is expressed while the aspects of the opposite gender are repressed. This Jungian perspective gives an interesting explanation for the marital woes in Don and Betty Draper’s marital woes on the AMC show Mad Men.

Don married Betty right as he was attempting to establish his Don Draper persona. Don was born the illegitimate son of a prostitute who died at childbirth. His childhood name was Dick Whitman, and he was raised in a very troubled depression era farm family. All he wanted to do was escape the constraints of his past and get a fresh start on a new life. Fate handed him that chance in the form of a war-time accident. By switching id tags with a dead commanding officer, Dick Whitman died and assumed the imaginary identity of Don Draper.

The new Don wanted to create the perfect life. He moved to New York and married a beautiful blond model from a Philadelphia Main Line family. With the birth of an infant this season, they even achieved 2.5 kids. In Jungian terms, Betty is Don’s ideal anima image: she represents the perfect woman to Don’s unconscious. From the moment they met, he sees her with false eyes as part of his perfect life. Don is never able to see the real woman in front of him, just the projection of his internal image of what an ideal wife should be.

In the last episode, as the couple are preparing to divorce, Betty complains that she was never enough for Don. She’s right, in a way. Don built up an imaginary life consisting of an unreal persona for himself. Betty is just part of that creation. Don sees her only as a picture perfect,  imaginary, fantasy person, and that is a standard no one can ever live up to.

Don’s flings are usually the exact opposite of Betty, evidence of psychic compensation for something that is missing. In season one he was in relationships with both the Beatnik, independent Midge Daniels, and the department store heiress Rachel Menken. Both women are brunette in contrast to Betty’s blond. Both women are independent, successful, and seemingly unable to be tied down. They do not rely on men the way Betty does. These women are not plastic Barbie dolls.

In season 2, Don again starts an affair with a successful, pushy, self-confident woman, Bobbie Barrett. She is older than Don, a detail which I think was important yet downplayed on the show. Think of classic movies like “Harold and Maude”, “The Graduate”, or “Summer of ‘42.” In each of these movies an older woman seduces a younger man and drags him out of childhood. Early on in the season, Bobbie and Don are involved in a car wreck. Certainly, this is no accident: there is, after all, only one car involved. The accident is smack on the head for Don, a sign that he is going to be forced to grow up.

In Season 3, Don gets into a mess with his children’s school teacher. This affair is a sort of last grasp at the image of a caring mother he never had. Don watches the teacher help the kids prepare boxes for watching the eclipse: exactly the kind of nurturing protection he never felt against the darkness of his father’s abuse. In reality, though, this is another relationship that cannot last. Life is forcing Don to grow up and reconcile his two persona’s: Don and Dick.

Regardless of if a new relationship lies in Don’s future, or if he salvages his marriage, Don is going to have to face reality. Projections will have to be withdrawn. Don and Dick will have to be integrated into some legitimate whole.

 

Ungluecklich?

Olivia Judson asks the curious question: do the sounds of our language, and particularly the facial gestures required to make them, influence our mood?

 

When the future looked bright

The memory of a fruit fly

This article continues to blow my mind. Tuesday’s Science Times section reports that scientists are watching neuron level memories being created in fruit flies. The insects are taught to associate certain smells with a highly unpleasant electrical shock. The flies learn quickly to avoid things with that smell (how does this work with fruit flies, of all things, when so many other bugs will fly into a light bulb time and time again?).

Are  fruit flies (with 200 neurons, apparently) smarter than we thought? Or, are homo sapiens (with 100 billion neurons) less uniquely intelligent that we think? Can the scientists make the bugs remember a trip to the Grand Canyon that they never took? Can memory be reduced to an incidence of learned associations?

Those last two questions probably aren’t fair at this early stage of the game, but I’m wondering what it is about this study that bugs me (pun not intended). Something seems to be amiss, but I, as an ignorant observer, can’t quite figure out what it is.

Awkward Family Moments

muchas gracias exit lines

Quote to ponder

I’ve just opened Ernest Wolf’s 1988 text The Psychology of the Self and got stuck (in a good, ponderous way) at this quote:

It is plausible, for example, that in the extended upper middle-class family of Freud’s Vienna, the child was not neglected, but overstimulated in an ambience of hypersexuality precisely because the mores of the day favored that sex be hush-hush and illicit, not to be talked about but enjoyed on the sly. The degree of preoccupation with sexuality in those days of Victorian puritanism can be gathered by recalling that in some o the best houses piano legs were draped with skirts so as to be neither overstimulating nor offensive.  Today, in contrast, litlte remains hidden about sexuality. Furthermore, and this is probably of the greatest importance, the extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins, cooks, maids, governesses, and so forth has mostly shrunk to the core family of siblings and parents, none of whom are at home enough to be easily and generously available to the youngsters. The key person for needed selfobject responsiveness, the mother, is much more liekely to have to go to twork, and, at any rate, to be more overworked and harrassed by the multiplicity of demands made on her than her grandmother was. Institutional substitutes such as schools and day care centers have yet to demonstrate that they can provide a child with sufficient stimulation and psychological nourishment, that is with appropriate selfobject experiences, to avoid the child’s feeling uncared for and unresponded to. In contemporary society, therefore, the shrinking importance of the family results in a gradual impoverishmnet of the self-sustaining aspects of the selfobject experiences that the child has. This may be one explanation for the apparently increasing morbidity of narcissistic disorders, that is, disorders of the self. One also wonders whether the increasing seriousness of drug abuse among young people and the steadily increasing suicide rate during the last two decades could be related to the shifting child rearing patterns that are deficient in self-sustaining and self-supporting experiences.

Note that this was written in 1988,  a period now considered by some to be the good old days of family values. This passage, to me, demonstrates how much society has changed over the last 100 years, and how much our perceptions of “neuroses” and mental illness change over time.

If a kidney, heart, or lung is diseased, that means that on a physical and organic level it is functioning improperly. Mental illness, as we perceive it, is not always a case of deficient brain performance. The biologists and neuroscientist study mental illness and see a case of chemical or organic irregularities.

The psychologist, by contrast, is asked to look at patterns of thinking in sometimes organically very functional brains. Wolf’s paragraph unintentionally directs our thinking to the question of what is to be considered mental illness. Should mental illness be defined as including behavior that is eccentric and outside the norm (narcissism, extremes in personality characteristics, temporary depression, etc.) or do we limit the definition to purely organic and material aberrations?

I think the answer is obvious: organically and chemically normal functioning brains can still result in behaviors that make it difficult for the individual to functionally interact within his or her environment. It is just this sort of qualitative criteria that makes a  purely quantitative and “scientific” psychology so difficult.

national park

It costs more and works less in the US

No health coverage tied to 45,000 deaths a year

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

“We’re losing more Americans every day because of inaction … than drunk driving and homicide combined,” Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.

Cool Pictures

This site has some interesting psychology related images to ponder…..

Another Maaisai story

May we continue to learn more from them than vice versa . . . .

Seven years ago, Carmen Agra Deedy stumbled upon a front-page story in The New York Times that she couldn’t shake from her mind.

The story told of a peaceful Maasai tribe in the village of Enoosaen in a far corner of Kenya, and a most unusual gift this village had just bestowed upon the United States: 14 cows.

“I couldn’t stop thinking of this beautiful story,” said Deedy, a resident of Avondale Estates and a popular children’s author and storyteller. “I was captivated by its compassion, its generosity and sensitivity.”