From the PANY Bulletin, Summer, ’08

I am certain that I am far from the only member of PANY/NYUPI who was deeply saddened at hearing that Jules Glenn had died. Jules was not merely a revered teacher and a major contributor to psychoanalysis, he was a naturally warm and friendly man who took a genuine interest in people. I took classes with him as a candidate at the NYU Institute and later attended many discussion groups and seminars with him as a faculty member. He was always friendly, down to earth, “hamish”.

A quiet stranger came into town one day . . .

Every now and then in practice, we see a patient who captures our attention with a dramatic childhood memory within the first few visits; then, defenses set in and the treatment settles into a focus upon the external details of day to day life until something triggers the return of the repressed memory.  Billy Bob Thornton’s film, Sling Blade, is like such a patient.

How do films evoke an identification with one character as opposed to another? Two recent films, The Bourne Ultimatum and No Country for Old Men give us a character who appears to be indomitable, almost supernaturally in control. Both of these characters are professional killers who leave a trail of bodies behind them. Yet we react to them very differently. Jason Bourne is a hero whom we admire and wish to identify with whereas the relentless murderer, Anton Chigurh, in No Country is a bogeyman, a nightmarish figure whom we fear but do not identify with. He may unconsciously act out our most extreme aggressive fantasies, but we tend to place him in our representational world as an external object.

Filmmakers usually allow us to identify with a hero or dis-identify with a villain by manipulating their circumstances and motives. Jason Bourne kills those who attack him. He defends women. Although he is relatively unexpressive, we are led to feel that he can be kind and empathic. He is fighting a cruel system that has made him into a killer by using and corrupting his idealism. The killer in No Country is motivated by greed and self need only, killing people because they get in his way, although observing an odd idiosyncratic moral code.

However, a third character, from another recent film provides us with a model that stands on the prism point between these two archetypes, an object with whom we both wish to identify and fear as an external threat to our moral integrity. I am referring to Ben Wade, the charismatic outlaw, played by Russell Crowe, in 3:10 to Yuma.

Over the past 3 months, I have published film essays with a particular focus on the Primal Scene. I began with the recent film, The Lives of Others (February), using Arlow’s paper, “The Revenge Motive in the Primal Scene” as my primary text. In the following months, in commentaries on LA Confidental (March) and the two films, The Crying Game and Mona Lisa (April), I have continued to focus on a sense of exclusion and a wish for revenge as an important dynamic in understanding the primal scene as it is represented in those films. This examination of Bertolucci’s The Conformist continues those themes. In doing so, I have ignored other important themes in this complex work in order to focus on a peculiar aspect of the film as I see it.

The Conformist was the first film that I ever “analyzed”, and doing that got me interested in thinking and writing about unconscious fantasy in film. I would like to point the reader to two extraordinary (to me) features of this film: 1. An unprecedented concentration of primal scene imagery; and, 2. A configuration of imagery that allows us to “reconstruct” a very specific, detailed primal scene fantasy. I have written about this in a much more condensed version in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1997: vol. 78:1031-1033). This expanded version was published in Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film (Herbert H. Stein, M.D.; 2002, Ereads).