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Harold and Maude in the Clinical Hour

2025; Wiley; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1468-5922.13072

1468-5922

Dan Quinn,

Empathy and Medical Education

Analysts are ghost whisperers. The dead float in and out of our sessions daily, and patients frequently sidestep them: the long-gone abusive father, the ancestor savaged by history, the spectre of one's own approaching end, and all the other dead who drop in, offering conversations that patients don't want to have. However, my patient Reese has been sucked for many years toward death. Obsessively imagining the approaching demise of her parents, she takes to her bed awash in anticipatory grief, and falls into a leaden, lonesome depression. Thanatos whispers in her ear, "Let's just go ahead and die with them, in advance …" And down she goes to the underworld. We must surrender to the psyche's story before we can begin to tell it, but for Reese, who has relied upon a bubbly sociability, encountering the collapse of persona that accompanies grief has been especially terrifying. In our sessions, we have pieced together how her history shapes her, how she went from being the only child of adoring parents straight into marriage, without truly "launching", and a lifetime of burying pain in attempted fusion. But the act of gradually explaining her biography falls short of telling its story, and hasn't weakened the power of Thanatos, who, again and again, extends his bony finger, filling her mind with reminders of the husband who finally left her, friends who are planning to move away, and images of her parents' house, empty after they have died. The power and tenacity of the depression, which we have orbited in analytic circumambulation for years, has frightened us both. Reese's highly intellectual ego is adept at explanations, but the Self is after a feelingful story, and without that her ego has remained a helpless witness as her psyche keeps dragging her into the imagined catastrophe. Several weeks ago, when Reese once again pined in lonely isolation, drowning in the fatalities yet to come and mystified again by her preoccupation with future deaths, an image suddenly came to me of the young man in bed with an elderly woman in the 1970's film, Harold and Maude. When I mentioned it, Reese and I both recalled this movie fondly, and, through the movie, began to piece together the previously unintelligible story that her psyche has befuddled us with for years. In the movie, Harold is an isolated young fellow who—like Reese—has failed to launch and is obsessed with death. To disturb his mother, he stages his own suicides, sneaks into the funerals of strangers, and drives a sports car modified to resemble a hearse1. Just as Reese feels most alive when she is grieving, Harold feels most alive when he is plotting his next theatrical suicide. Harold's high-society mother, like Reese, is fixated on persona and social success and would greatly prefer to sail unbothered through life. She works tirelessly to find a suitable wife for the blatantly unmarriageable Harold, echoing the fairy tale motif of seeking the right princess for the prince. Harold rejects every prospective bride, hilariously, by staging more gruesome suicides. But then—in one of Hollywood's finest meet-cutes—he spots a little old lady across a graveyard at the funeral of a stranger, chomping on an apple like an octogenarian Eve while she enjoys the eulogy. Encountering each other at multiple funerals they each recognize a fellow thanatotic voyeur, and a highly improper love affair ensues with the unshakably authentic, spontaneous Maude, including a police chase scene when Maude spies an ailing potted tree in the urban landscape in need of rescue. Look at it, Harold. It's suffocating. It's the smog. People can live with it, but it gives trees asthma. They can't breathe. See the leaves are all brown. Harold, we've got to do something about this life. (Higgins, 1971) She enlists Harold's help in stealing a truck—and then the motorcycle of the policeman who tries to arrest them—to rescue the tree and move it to its proper place in the woods. Maude, an unlikely candidate for bride, nonetheless echoes here the sensitivity of the princess for the presence of the pea buried under many mattresses in Andersen's The Right Princess, as well as the feelingful Cinderella in the Grimm Brothers' Aschenputtel, in which the prince is drawn to the girl who privately waters the tree on her mother's grave with her tears. The tree here, of course, is a stand-in for the alienated Harold (and for all of us who were disenchanted hippies in the 70s). Maude, like Harold, is drawn to the dead, but she also loves picnics, posing nude for a sculptor, and dancing to her player piano: she has done her grieving and, we learn later, has an initiated relationship with death. It's through his meeting with this unlikely princess that Harold both answers the call of Thanatos and is initiated into survivorship. How does death's lure function in the psyche, and in the analytic process? It is so powerful that Freud—like Reese, always on the hunt for explanation—was moved to extend his fiercely held idée fixe beyond psychosexuality, Eros, to include Thanatos, the "death instinct", what he thought of as an instinct for self-destruction. This was a monumental addition to his theory. (Later thinkers would muddy the waters, lumping Freud's death instinct with aggressive instincts, but Freud's original, brilliant, limited work is useful here.) Freud explored the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961) and elsewhere, borrowing in part (Jungians are quick to add) from Sabina Spielrein. But Freud, unlike Spielrein, seems oblivious to the generative aspect of Thanatos: that death surfaces in consciousness, luring us into the deep, in order to initiate us into imaginal life. Freud confessed that Spielrein's 1994/1912 essay, "Destruction as a Cause of Coming Into Being", confused him (1961), and I think that was a function of Freud's allegiance to the ego and its penchant for explanations. Freud elevated the ego to primacy and his goal, through psychoanalysis, was to strengthen the ego through explanation: "Wo Es war, soll ich werden" ("Where the Id was, the ego shall be") (1923). Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips complains about this allegiance to explanation, which so hinders Freud and his adherents (and Reese, and many in our intellectually defended culture). "Psychoanalysis attempts to minimize complexity, which is the problem masquerading as the solution. … Psychoanalysis wants us to get better and better at thinking and it's a complete waste of time" (2024). When Thanatos exerts a pull to unseat the fixated ego, Freud can only understand it as a pull to destroy the self. Jung, on the other hand, argues that in the paradoxical development of the ego-Self axis (Erich Neumann's term, 2017), we both strengthen the ego, and must find an increasing willingness to sacrifice the ego. Jung's larger perspective equips us here in a way that Freud's cannot, and which I find useful to remember whenever death enters the room: Thanatos reaches out to dismantle the ego in the interest of the individuating Self. Normal mourning is not completed after six months to a year or two as suggested in earlier literature, but may bring about a permanent alteration of psychological structures that affect various aspects of the mourning persons' lives. These structural consequences of mourning consist in the setting up of a persistent internalized object relationship with the lost object that affects ego and superego functions. The persistent internalized object relationship develops in parallel to the identification with the lost object, and the superego modification includes the internalization of the value systems and life project of the lost object. A new dimension of spiritual orientation, the search for transcendental value systems, is one consequence of this superego modification. (Kernberg, 2010, italics mine.) Hugging her grief like one of Harlow's tortured monkeys gripping a terrycloth mother, Reese has refused to make the sacrifices the Self demands. She won't let go. In our session, shaking her head, Reese recalled the scene in which Harold gives Maude a precious ring he has made for her, and Maude, who lives moment to moment, adores the ring briefly before she suddenly throws it into the ocean! "She was tough in a way that I'm not," Reese said. I remind her that Harold discovers Maude's tattoo from a concentration camp. Her capacity for living through loss, and savouring life, was forged in the survival of unspeakable suffering2. "She'd been through her own particularly horrifying hell," I offered. "You're only part way through yours." Reese, drawn again and again into grief, with depression forcing loss upon her, has yet to come out the other side of a Separatio experience that requires the survival of the loss of the Other, the burning off of the fusional fantasy. Reese is not yet a survivor, and her psyche keeps dragging her into ordeals of loss to give her the experience of surviving them. In a successful, fulfilled grieving process the object is not exactly lost; instead, a capacity for object constancy is developed, allowing for a sustained experience of the dead Other in their absence. Harold, compelled to stand graveside, is still learning how to grieve, and developing the capacity that comes with surviving loss. When Maude cries for those she has lost, and her own lost youth (in a scene that ended up on the cutting room floor), Harold responds: You've never cried before. I never thought you would. I thought, despite anything, you could always be happy. Oh, Harold. You are so young. She strokes his hair. The tears continue to fall. MAUDE (continuing): What have they taught you? Yes. I cry. I cry for you. I cry for this. (the photograph from the past) I cry at beauty—a first snow, a rose, a sunset. As she talks through her tears, Harold is very moved. He takes her hand. MAUDE (continuing): I cry when a man tortures his Brother … when he repents and begs forgiveness … when forgiveness is refused … and when it is granted. To cry is to laugh. To laugh is to cry … a uniquely human trait. And the main thing in life, my dear Harold, is not to be afraid to be human. (Higgins, 1971) Reese, in her prolonged anticipatory grief, has taken refuge in loving the future dead, who are much easier company than the living and breathing, without yet benefitting from the painful experience of surviving their loss. But when survival occurs, and grief manages to tell its story, it can become a productive grief, and the dead can be buried deep inside us where they belong—where we can carry them with us—and make room for life, an unnameable new capacity, what Jung calls "… the new thing … from a dark field of possibilities" (1982, p. 89). Maude functions as a kind of launch pad for Harold, as we often do for our patients, and as I am functioning for Reese. After years of gradually cultivating feeling and unseating the sometimes tyrannical urge for explanation, Reese is finding a capacity, a place inside and between us, where stories can do their work. Reese had forgotten the film's ending, when, sitting beside a romantic fire, Maude tells Harold that she has taken some pills and will be dead within the hour. Protesting violently, Harold has her hauled to an emergency room, and in their last exchange, Harold stands beside her gurney and moans, "But Maude, I love you." "That's beautiful," Maude replies, and with her last words, she provides a phrase that has now become a mantra for Reese's analysis: "Go and love some more."