The Lost Child Complex in Australian Film

Jung, Story and Playing Beneath the Past

Terrie Waddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781317380207
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Movements in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The mythologising of lost and abandoned children significantly influences Australian storytelling. In The Lost Child Complex in Australian Film, Terrie Waddell looks at the concept of the 'lost child' from a psychological and cultural perspective. Taking an interdisciplinary Jungian approach, she re-evaluates this cyclic storytelling motif in history, literature, and the creative arts, as the nucleus of a cultural complex – a group obsession that as Jung argued of all complexes, has us.

Waddell explores 'the lost child' in its many manifestations, as an element of the individual and collective psyche, historically related to the trauma of colonisation and war, and as key theme in Australian cinema from the industry's formative years to the present day. The films discussed in textual depth transcend literal lost in the bush mythologies, or actual cases of displaced children, to focus on vulnerable children rendered lost through government and institutional practices, and adult/parental characters developmentally arrested by comforting or traumatic childhood memories. The victory/winning fixation governing the USA – diametrically opposed to the lost child motif – is also discussed as a comparative example of the mesmerising nature of the cultural complex. Examining iconic characters and events, such as the Gallipoli Campaign and Trump's presidency, and films such as The Babadook, Lion, and Predestination, this book scrutinises the way in which a culture talks to itself, about itself. This analysis looks beyond the melancholy traditionally ascribed to the lost child, by arguing that the repetitive and prolific imagery that this theme stimulates, can be positive and inspiring.

The Lost Child Complex in Australian Film is a unique and compelling work which will be highly relevant for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian ideas, cultural studies, screen and media studies. It will also appeal to Jungian psychotherapists and analytical psychologists as well as readers with a broader interest in Australian history and politics.

Part One
The lost child complex - a cultural and screen history

1
Beginnings

Complex, settlement, cultural memory

Much of this chapter, like the introduction, was written in the historic State Library of Victoria where Ned Kelly’s armour is kept. On each visit I passed a bronze statue of doomed nineteenth-century explorers, Burke and Wills, marking the corner of busy Collins and Swanston Street in Melbourne’s central business district. In the last few years of monument controversy, particularly with confederate statues toppling in the United States, it seemed of the times that the couple were removed. This came about not because Robert Burke and William Wills were inappropriate icons – white, male, ill-prepared, British and Irish explorers who failed to accept advice and assistance from local indigenous people on their mission to cross Australia vertically from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria, consequently dying of starvation en route back to Melbourne in 1861 – but because the statute needed to be relocated to make way for a new metro-rail project (Hancock, 2017). That the folly of these men – lostness itself – should be immortalised in the heart of the city always struck me as misdirected. But the monument had its logic when considering the odes and marketed tours dedicated to lost children in regional centres, and the ever evolving lost in the bush narratives of novels and cinema. With seventy deaths reported from 1860 to 1869, the lost child popularised in colonial literature and poetry is now reimagined on the screen as a fusion of literal child, inner child and disavowed child (Torney, 2005). It is a theme, or perhaps a pulse, that keeps audiences engaged. More than a cultural memory of vulnerability in a country colonised through violence, empire building and the misery of Britain’s convict ‘orphans’, it is a psychological obsession – a cultural complex that can’t be shaken.

The complex and the child

Hillman asks, ‘What is this “child” – that is surely the first question. Whatever we say about children and childhood is not altogether about children and childhood … some realm of the psyche called “childhood” is being personified by the child and carried by the child for the adult’ (1975/1991, p. 8). The idea of the child and childhood as a liminal experience between birth and adolescence (itself a twentieth-century concept) has been a debated topic for both sociology and the various schools and offshoots of psychoanalysis (see Jenks, 1996; Main, 2008). Joyce Mercer (2003) discusses Freud and Jung’s abstract rather than lived approach to childhood, generally presenting male development as normative in their theoretical models. Psychoanalysis challenged the nineteenth-century association of childhood with sexual innocence, in its insistence that early sexuality was central to psychological development; for Freud, the child was polymorphously perverse, capable of undifferentiated sexual arousal beyond bodily erogenous zones (Freud, 1905/1953). Although Jung didn’t place great weight on Oedipally focussed concepts of development, like Freud, he distanced himself from the real-world lives of children, elevating the child to an archetypal symbol of futurity, eternity and divinity: a figure signifying the promise of conscious and unconscious union (Jung, 1959/1968).

Archetypes as unconscious motifs or patterns that influence emotional behaviour, in Jung’s thinking were only realised only through personal and cultural projection: ‘The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived’ (1959/1968: § 6). By couching the archetype as element of the unconscious, either dormant or seeking conscious recognition, Jung was clear that these structures are perceived and driven by both culture and the individual’s experiences; in this way they ‘change their shape continually’ but their essence is unchanging (1959/1968: § 301). In his formulation of archetypal psychology in the 1970s, Hillman approached the concept of the archetype a little differently by arguing that the image is the archetype and the key to self-understanding involves engaging with this energy/image on its own terms – as it appears and behaves, without imposing rational meanings or definitions. He described archetypes as ‘the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world … axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return’ (1989, p. 23).

While Mercer focuses on Jung’s lack of empirical and sociological research, claiming that his abstractions, ‘while upholding a basically hopeful and positive view of the child, risks distortions in over-idealized spiritualities of childhood’ (p. 115), the value of conflating the actual child, the internal child and child-asarchetypal symbol is a useful stratagem for exploring the lost child as a cultural complex. It might seem convoluted, but while this book will discuss the plight of actual children, particularly in Chapter 4, these generalised cases are argued to provide projective hooks for the inner/archetypal child at the core of the complex. Jung more figuratively drew on divine child imagery, its psychological significance and its sinuous connection to more culturally generated ideas of the child. With the same reasoning, images, events, fantasies, constructions and histories of the lost child are presented here as signifiers for unconsciously embedded and recurring archetypal matter. Mythological and romanticised lost children in the arts, often inspired from, but not facsimiles of, flesh and blood subjects, tell us more about various aspects of our (creators and audiences) individual and collective psyches. Simply put, they can be thought of as persistent internal voices/images that seek attention. Jungian and archetypal psychology encourages us to listen to, learn from and develop relationships with these presences.

Complexes as the common and inevitable consequence of an archetypally configured psyche were argued to be entangled with lived experience, psychological motifs and autonomous emotions that stem from unconscious rather than ego activity, or affects in Jung’s thinking (Jung, 1960/1969; Perry, 1970). While Freud pathologised the complex, largely in relation to a matrix of Oedipal-related conflicts, Jung expanded on the concept and was less invested in understanding its hold on the personality in entirely negative terms (Freud, 1899/1991). As knotted clusters of lived and unconscious material framed around an archetypal core, ostensibly problematic to the subject and considered to be activated by trauma, complexes – also called ‘splinter psyches’ – were thought to aid individuation, or psychological growth (Jung, 1960/1969: § 204). Traditionally complexes were seen to operate on a personal rather than collective level, but Singer and Kimbles reframed the idea of the complex to include its potential influence on cultures and nations, enfolding individuals and collectives simultaneously: ‘Much of what tears us apart can be understood as the manifestations of autonomous processes in the collective and individual psyche that organize themselves as cultural complexes’ (2004, p. 1). They characterise the group complex as a cyclic reimagining of a particular archetypally themed fixation, capable of erupting on a personal and collective level:

cultural complexes are based on repetitive, historical group experiences which have taken root in the cultural unconscious of the group. At any ripe time, these slumbering cultural complexes can be activated in the cultural unconscious and take hold of the collective psyche of the group and the individual/collective psyche of individual members of the group. The inner sociology of the cultural complexes can seize the imagination, the behaviour and the emotions of the collective psyche and unleash tremendously irrational forces in the name of their ‘logic’.

(Singer and Kimbles, 2004, p. 7)

Referencing Donald Kalsched (1996) in particular, they focus on trauma as a trigger for the complex – ‘wound[s] that cry out’, as Cathy Caruth refers to this form of suffering (1996, p. 4). She echoes the nature of the complex in its cultural aspect when talking of the Freudian repetition or resurfacing of trauma related affects, not consciously ‘initiated by the individual’s own acts but rather appear as the possession of some people by a sort of fate, a series of painful events to which they are subjected, and which seem to be entirely outside their wish or control’ (Caruth, 1996, p. 2).

This has resonance with Jung’s formulation of the complex in its capacity to disrupt conscious will and illicit compulsive thoughts and physical responses that as ‘have us’. Caruth credits Freud’s great insight in Moses and Monotheism to be ‘that history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s trauma’s’ (1996, p. 24). To refine this idea further, the cultural complex not only entangles individuals in each other’s disparate traumas, but as previously mentioned, is capable of simultaneously enfolding individuals and groups into a commonly themed and repetitive trauma. Anne Kaplan in ‘Traumatic Contact Zones and Embodied Translators: with reference to select Australian texts’, recognises the cultural symptoms of complex-like eruptions that involve trauma and repetition:

When catastrophe affects a group of people, as in the case of holocaust, slavery or colonization … one can perhaps talk of ‘collective’ or ‘shared’ trauma. If the events are overwhelming, groups may ‘forget’ horrendous actions from the past, and simply split them off from daily consciousness. Yet, although not ‘remembered’ … the impact of such actions may evidence itself in cultural symptoms of various kinds.

(Kaplan, 2004, p. 46)

Such symptoms can present as cyclical images and/or narratives. In the Australian context, one of many of these collective obsessions is the lost child. The breadth of scenarios and concepts that revisit and reconfigure the trauma of a combined sense/memory/fantasy of childhood and displacement is testament to the depth of the complex and its intransigent hold. Thinking in this way, the notion of the complex acting autonomously, against our will, corresponds in a similar way to the sexual connotation of the term ‘having us’ – drawing us into a state of intoxication, neutralising the will to disengage and seemingly depleting our agency.

Australian cinema’s relationship with the complex is variously expressed. It can simply revolve around a sense of nostalgia and mourning for lost children as projections of an inner child, stifled perhaps in the process of colonisation – an affect of forgotten ancestral trauma still rooted in the collective unconscious – and can also present in its shadow/disavowed aspect. When the complex manifests in this way, lostness can also be displaced onto others as a means of exorcism or avoiding the challenge of confrontation and acceptance. In terms of post-colonialism, Kaplan argues, that trauma disrupts not only settler cultures but also subjugated indigenous communities: ‘both colonizing culture and that of the colonized are mutually impacted and changed. Mingling inevitably takes place, and racial purity is a myth’ (p. 53). Related to social ‘mingling’ is the idea that the complex has the potential to become a shared, and arguably, inflicted, psychological condition. As will be explored in Chapter 4, the lost child complex, possibly stirred by European separation and abandonment, was through successive generations, projected onto indigenous, vulnerable, war-torn and refugee others. Undocumented children trying to enter Australia have been the most recent group to epitomise the lost, displaced and neglected.

If we consider the arts as an amplifier of cultural obsessions, neurosis and inadequacies, then proliferation of lost child narratives on screen suggests a complex at work. While it is more comfortable, yet still confronting, to accept our own responses to the lost child, it is also incumbent upon us to also explore the possibility and damage of our projections. Jung argued that trying to rid oneself of complexes was as counterproductive as trying to rid oneself of the shadow – aspects of the personality unacceptable to the ego. The notion of the collective shadow was the closest Jung came to hypothesising a cultural/collective complex, but in both structures, the key to understanding the complex lays in developing a connection to it – exploring what its presence might be telling us about ourselves.

It is critical to understand the archetypal energy at the heart of the complex if any kind of relationship is to be formed. If for instance, we think of more stereotypically structured films, consciously utilising a cultural obsession (or complex) for narrative intrigue, it is easy to pinpoint where the pivotal archetypal pattern is projected – usually onto an object that is ultimately ungraspable. We might look at the Oedipal developmental stage (to some a fiction in itself, but nevertheless a good story) where, usually from a Freudian hetero-male perspective, the child bonds with the mother and so competes with the father/lover to assume his position in the world. When morphing into a more intractable complex, the child develops an obsession for the mother and women/objects signifying this familial role (Freud, 1899/1991). The energy or concept of mother can then be identified as the archetypal core, usually triggered by an actual mother or mother figure. This idea of mother then, can never be obtained and yet remains the focus of the subject’s life, obsessions, projections and ambitions. Like desire, the archetypal mother is only ever imagined and searched for. The same logic applies to the lost child – as an inner element of the psyche, it can never be materially possessed – and it can never be found.

Singer argues that cultural complexes can be entangled ‘not only with our personal history and complexes but with other cultural complexes as well’ (Singer and Kimbles, 2004, p. 32). This generational feeding on and being fed by multiple psychological fixations according to Singer, creates ‘exotic permutations and combinations within ourselves and between us and others, creating what I have come to think of as “recombinant visionary mythologies”’ (Singer and Kimbles, 2004, p. 32). As discussed further in the chapter, these genetic-like ‘visionary mythologies’ become obvious in Australian literature’s diverse lost child incarnations since colonisation, and the early stages of our film industry in 1906 with the release of The Story of the Kelly Gang. But before exploring tangible expressions of the lost child in Australian cinema, it is important to grapple with the concept of the child itself and the various, often fanciful, signifiers attached to this stage of life.

The child as divine, a concept of soul, and lost

Mercer’s identification of Jung’s disproportionate focus on the child not as an empirical being, but a symbol and archetypal image of the divine in mythology, is for her a point of frustration in his work: ‘it is a wonder-child, a divine child, begotten, born and brought up in quite extraordinary circumstances, and not – this is the point – a human child’ (Jung, 1959/1968: § 21). In terms of the transcendent function – a process of self-understanding arrived at by a union of unconscious material and consciousness, a birth of sorts that gives rise to a new realisation/assessment – the divine child is the product of a joining of these opposites, a third emergent force, a symbol of futurity, wholeness and the unifying factor itself (Jung, 1959/1969; Miller, 2005; Kalsched, 2013). Wholeness and the capacity to unify are qualities that Jung also attributes to the Self, variously defined as a symbol of unification and the primary regulator of the psyche (Jung, 1959/1969, 1963/1970). Jung’s mythological child took many forms – largely human, but also divinely endowed animals and objects:

Often the child is formed after the Christian model; more often, though, it develops from earlier, altogether non-Christian levels-that is to say, out of chthonic animals such as crocodiles, dragons, serpents, or monkeys. Sometimes the child appears in the cup of a flower, or out of a golden egg, or as the center of a mandala. In dreams it often appears as the dreamer’s son or daughter or as a boy, youth, or young girl … appearing more cosmically, surrounded by stars or with a starry coronet; or as the king’s son or the witch’s child with daemonic attributes. Seen as a special instance of ‘the treasure hard to attain’ motif, the child motif is extremely variable and assumes all manner of shapes, such as the jewel, the pearl, the flower, the chalice, the golden egg, the quaternity, the golden ball, and so on. It can be interchanged with these and similar images almost without limit.

(Jung, 1959/1968: § 270)

The numinous elevation of the child to divine-like energy is a metaphor for the function of the internal child in Jung’s configuration of the psyche; particularly in the context of individuation. During this process of self-discovery, that in classical Jungian thought lead to a sense of unity, the child emerges as a dominant and significant psychological motif, guiding the subject’s inner development and potential. Jung uses the concept of the divine child as bourgeoning saviour to suggest its capacity to pave ‘the way for a future change of personality’ a product of the integration of conscious and unconscious material (Jung, 1959/1968: § 278).

In addition to divinity, the child has also been equated to soul – the core or essence of being. For Kalsched, Jung is trying to protect and preserve an ‘innocent true self’ against the harsh realities of inner and outer worlds (2013, p. 16). This becomes significant to Kalsched’s formulation of what he calls the self-care system...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE The lost child complex – a cultural and screen history
• PART TWO Double wounding
• PART THREE Inner children and the victory complex
• Concluding remarks
• References
• Screen references
• Index