Memories and Monsters

Psychology, Trauma, and Narrative

Eric R. Severson, David M. Goodman, Eric R. Severson, David M. Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138065451
• eBook ISBN: 9781351660372
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Memories and Monsters explores the nature of the monstrous or uncanny, and the way psychological trauma relates to memory and narration. This interdisciplinary book works on the borderland between psychology and philosophy, drawing from scholars in both fields who have helped mould the bourgeoning field of relational psychoanalysis and phenomenological and existential psychology. The editors have sought out contributions to this field that speak to the pressing question: how are we to attend to and contend with our monsters?

The authors in this volume examine the ways in which we might best relate to our monsters, and how the legacies of ancient traumas and anxieties continue to affect our current stories, memories and everyday practices. Covering such manifestations of the monstrous as racism, crimes against humanity, trauma as portrayed in music and art, and the Holocaust, this book explores the impact the uncanny has on our individual and collective psyches.

By focusing on a very specific theme, and one that excites the imagination, Memories and Monsters stokes the flames of an important current movement in relational psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as professionals in psychology and graduate school students and tutors in the fields of both psychology and philosophy.

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Chapter I
Apocalyptic exceptionalism and existential particularity

The rise in popularity of dystopian myths and our immortal “other”

Paul Cantz

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I believe that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.

(Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

Introduction

The innate incapacity to fully comprehend one’s mortality, as Freud (1913/1966) famously observed, represents an intractably stubborn dynamic of the human condition since, “in the unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his own immortality” (pp. 304–305). Although Freud understood death anxiety as merely a projection of more superficial instinctual conflicts, typically related to castration anxiety, other thinkers – thinkers who have infused a strong existential inflection into psychoanalytic theory, such as Otto Rank, Ernest Becker, and Robert J. Lifton, among others – have preferred to view the terror of death as ontologically formative in the development of the individual psyche and, on a broader scale, the formation and orientation of culture as a whole.

In this chapter, I focus on exploring how death anxiety underwrites dystopian media, which in likelihood gives expression to the archetypal mythopoeic duality of our mortal and immortal senses of self. I further suggest that these media can function as both a defense against as well as a remedy for death anxiety. This is premised on the idea that distinctive cultural pressures will encourage in-kind mythopoeic expressions of archetypal impulses, resulting in psychological symmetry with a person’s experience and understanding of reality – what Jung referred to as “synchronicity,” commonly defined as an acausal connecting principle. To this end, two questions figure prominently: (1) What significant variables in contemporary society have motivated this notable spike in dystopian myths? (2) With what elements are consumers of these myths primarily identifying?

Background

Although dystopian myths have been a ubiquitous, cross-cultural preoccupation throughout the course of recorded human history (e.g. the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Norse Ragnarok, the Book of Revelations, etc.), in our post-nuclear, post-9/11 age we have witnessed a substantive increase in apocalyptic media (namely literature, television, video games, and film). Borg (2003), in writing about the clinical relevance of Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer’s (1997) concept of “Pure War” (which refers to the psychological sequelae of existing in a world in which humankind has developed the potential to completely annihilate itself), offers an explanation for why these types of horrific events have led to an increase in personal traumas: “disasters may highlight the massive insecurities that lie beneath the surface of an otherwise well-protected cultural exterior” (p. 58). In tandem with what ostensibly seems to be an ever increasing rate of terrorist attacks across the globe, the automatic impulse to dissociate our conscious awareness of death in any sustainable fashion has become progressively futile. Mortimer Ostow (1986) likewise suggested a relationship between apocalyptic fantasies and psychopathology, chiefly schizophrenia, explaining that people too deeply entrenched in this mindset “treasure the illusion that they and the world will be reborn into a messianic age” (p. 278) – a particularly dangerous attitude since in this context rebirth necessarily follows mass destruction. In the time since Ostow made these observations, however, these apocalyptic and messianic worldviews have not only intensified, but, like the decapitated Lernean Hydra, have manifested in a multiplicity of directions, impacting contemporary theological, secular, and socio-political myths about the current ‘fallen’ state of society and the utopian promises that await us right on the horizon of our illusions.

This rise in contemporary expressions of dystopian myths has been paced by an increased preoccupation in the biotechnology community with the project of achieving physical immortality. The desire to transcend the constraints of mortality and temporality has, until relatively recently, been the pursuit of mystics and alchemists. With the burgeoning field of nanotechnology accompanied by ambitious biogenetic advancements, the prospect of achieving embodied immortality seems closer to fulfillment with the passing of each news cycle. Prominent figures in the anti-aging movement, chief among them gerontologist Aubrey de Grey and futurist Ray Kurzweil, can largely be credited for establishing and propagating the contemporary scientific infatuation with achieving immortality. They and others have increasingly been shifting the bio-medical zeitgeist in a direction that implicitly privileges youth while ‘disease-ifying’ the aging process, and consequently pathologizing death.

This parallel between the increased interest in dystopian myths and the growing acceptance of anti-aging research within the medical community and popular culture points to a conceptual relationship that remains primed for theoretical elaboration. In numerous cases, dystopian myths serve as a catalytic holding environment for expressing and identifying latent strivings for various archetypal impulses, notable among them the primordial wish to achieve immortality. These expressions manifest in both embodied and disembodied forms that correlate to one’s metaphysical proclivities. Examples of disembodied forms correspond to the ephemeral, supernatural realm (e.g. the immortal soul, reincarnation, etc.), and typically manifest within the context of organized religious traditions, while embodied forms of immortality are often portrayed in more materialistic, often supernatural or science-fiction terms (e.g. super-humans, vampires, zombies, cyborgs, etc.). As the prospect of achieving embodied immortality has become more of a scientifically palatable enterprise, this seems to have ushered in what could be considered the leading edge of the sub-genre of dystopian films that do not rely on purely supernatural explanations (i.e. are more “reality based,” most commonly as viral outbreaks, though more recently by various technological means).

Film, as a consequence of its visual elements, has acted as an especially potent vehicle to express archetypal, mythopoeic impulses in the service of promoting what Irving Singer (2008) has termed “aesthetic truthfulness.” Better suited and more quickly produced than other mediums, especially compared to literature, television offers viewers the experience of developing meaningfully emotional investments and subsequent psychological identifications with the characters on the screen. It is for this reason that I have chosen to utilize the contemporary popular TV series The Walking Dead, produced by the American cable channel AMC, as an exemplar to explicate how prominent themes of death anxiety and death denial as well as the corresponding desire to achieve immortality psychically translates into specific styles of myth identification. This personalized type of myth identification amplifies and gives expression to an uncanny fusion of ‘I-ness’ and ‘otherness’ that flirts with the boundaries between our mortal and immortal senses of self.

The evolution of the zombie genre

Neo-liberal scholars such as Hall (2011) have chosen to interpret the zombie genre in particular as a metaphor for the seemingly unavoidable political, economic, and cultural breakdown of Western capitalistic society, which Hall compares to an epidemic not unlike that of a viral zombie outbreak, and as such capitalism “relentlessly expands, and it will collapse once there is no one else to infect” (p. 15). Films such as Dawn of the Dead and the Resident Evil franchise are of this type. Similarly, Paul Cantor (2013) has suggested that zombies have often been used to symbolize “the force of globalization” (p. 29). Other scholars have likewise identified racism, class warfare, deindustrialization, the specter of nuclear warfare, genetic modifications, and even space exploration as subtexts for the upsurge of zombie media, several of which have been portrayed in George Romero’s iconic series of zombie films.

Indeed, I find many of these explanations compelling insomuch as there have obviously been deliberate efforts made on the production side to co-opt zombie folklore in the service of illuminating sociological dynamics. Kaleidoscopic in function as well as in expression, the zombie genre really is not at all a ‘genre’ in the conventional sense, but rather it functions as an ever-evolving metaphorical vehicle that promotes a mythopoeic frame for artists to address any myriad of cultural anxieties.¹

The Walking Dead employs the dystopian backdrop of a zombie apocalypse, though this show pivots the genre from focusing solely on constructing meta-commentary on the social, political, and economic domains of culture to one that functions on a more individual plane of foundational myth identification, namely addressing the psycho-moral dualities of good and evil, tyranny and freedom, and mortality and immortality.² It is this latter domain that I wish to focus on since I think it represents both the symptom of a growing cultural anxiety around aging and death as well as potentially offering a psychological antidote for such death anxiety. The dualities expressed in The Walking Dead naturally resonate with the elemental dualities that paradoxically gel to form our experience of self, and therefore we can discern a process of dual identification linked with competing mythopoeic impulses, in varying ratios in accordance with one’s degree of psychological maturity.

When we focus our explanation away from the perspective of the standard group or collectivistic psychological analyses and the corresponding identificatory processes that these films facilitate, I believe that we can uncover compelling psychological dynamics that also operate on the individual level (cf. Arlow, 1961; cf. Cantz, 2012; Cantz & Castle, 2013). To this end, the eminent mythologist William Doty (2000) considered one of the functions of myth to be “the primal, foundational accounts of aspects of the real, experienced world and humankind’s roles and relative statuses within it” (p. 31), which in turn illuminates “the political and moral values of culture and provides systems of interpreting individual experience within a universal perspective” (p. 33). The dystopian, post-apocalyptic mythscape, with its necessarily fantastical elements, seems to provide a fertile space to explore and perhaps even play with concepts that are unconsciously unpalatable in their pure state, namely the reality of death. As Otto Rank (1936) reminds us, “the idea of death appears so much more clearly in religion, mythology and folklore than in the individual who apparently can bear the idea of death only collectively” (p. 120).

It is important to analyze these cinematic dynamics with the understanding that ‘death’ often serves as a metaphor that can hold multiple meanings depending on the manner in which consumers of these contemporary expressions of myths identify. ‘Death’ is the common designation for the absence of something that had once been alive; it is a privileged idea of non-being – a special label for posthumous categorization that can only be conceptualized by a living being who necessarily³ projects their phantasies of being dead onto the unfathomability of no longer being. In a way, this is a motivated confabulation to explain the unexplainable. Therefore, to psychically accommodate for zombies, and perhaps more aptly their moniker (the ‘un-dead’) requires the creation of an artificial third category of being that personifies death. This absurd third category allows for a socially sanctioned expression of our fears of death and of losing our sense of selves. The manner in which individuals identify with these zombie characters will either lead to an emboldening of existing neurotic defenses or, more ambitiously, assuage death anxiety in the service of living a fulfilling life.⁴

Two modes of myth identification

The allure of dystopian myths in general, perhaps more strongly expressed in The Walking Dead in particular, facilitates a process of dual identification for the individual viewer. Consumers of these dystopian myths happily allow themselves to be transported by the illusion of surviving improbable (not to mention impossible!) ‘what if’ apocalyptic scenarios, whilst being able to concurrently psychically accommodate the demise of the majority of humanity. This produces, or perhaps uncovers, an important psychic space where contradictory forms of myth identifications can co-exist in a manner that is emotionally tolerable – a psychic field where one can engage with the terror of alterity by proxy.

Otto Rank’s (1926/1971) theoretical elaboration on the theme of der Doppelgänger (the double) may be more instructive in conceptualizing the living characters in The Walking Dead than in previous zombie media since, distinctive to this series, the audience quickly learns that regardless of whether one becomes ‘zombified’ by an actual zombie (which is the conventional method by which zombie transformation occurs), one inevitably transitions into a zombie upon death, natural or otherwise. Rank contended that the double originally functioned as a type of psychic defense, serving to insure against the destruction of their ego, or, as Freud put it in his essay The Uncanny (1919/1966, p. 217), the double functioned as an “energetic denial of the power of death.” It is likely that the ‘immortal’ soul acted as the first ‘double’ of the body, facilitating a sense of immortalized otherness that was simultaneously experienced as being both similar to and distinctive from oneself. It is worth noting that this concept continues to carry theological currency in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as for example: “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: listening to monsters
• 1 Apocalyptic exceptionalism and existential particularity: the rise in popularity of dystopian myths and our immortal “other”
• 2 The Golem must live, the Golem must die: on the moral imperative of writing critical cultural histories of psychology
• 3 The Golem and the decline of language and magic—or, why our machines disappoint
• 4 Is loyalty really a virtue? Shame and the monstrous Other
• 5 Toward a psychoanalysis of passion
• 6 Living in the shadows of the past: German memory, trauma, and legacies of perpetration
• 7 Haunting and historicity
• 8 Changing societal narratives, fighting “crimes against humanity”
• 9 Positioning self and other: how psychiatric patients, psychiatric inmates, and mental health care professionals construct discursively their relationship to total institutions
• 10 “I am not myself, but I am not an other”: self-dissolution narrative in medical rehabilitation psychotherapy
• 11 The idealized “other”: a reparative fiction
• 12 Foucault and Derrida on interiority and the limits of psychoanalyzing sexuality and madness
• 13 Beautiful troubling alterity: an intersubjective response to Nabokov’s Lolita
• 14 The music knows: grieving existential trauma in art, music, and psychoanalysis
• Index