The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2014, 74, (195–203) © 2014 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis 0002-9548/14 www.palgrave-journals.com/ajp/
HOME, BITTER SWEET HOME. A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING Isaac Tylim
The paper offers a psychoanalytic reading of the popular TV series “Homeland.” The series’ manifest content centers on terrorism and counterterrorism. From a dynamic perspective, the viewer is invited to mistrust what is represented, and focus on the tension between what is projected on the screen and what remains hidden in the narrative’s intriguing subtexts. These are: the choreography of internal and external reality, a recurrent theme of longing for the absent, idealized pre-Oedipal father, and attempts to transform memories of horror.
KEY WORDS: trauma; projective identification; memory; working through; psychic truth. DOI:10.1057/ajp.2014.11
The critically acclaimed TV series “Homeland” centers on Sergeant Nick Brody returning home after spending 8 years as a prisoner of war in Iraq. CIA agent Carrie Mathison suspects he has “turned” and is conspiring to stage a domestic attack. Throughout the series Nick is referred to as Brody, while the agent assigned to the case is called by her first name, Carrie. The central and ancillary characters have a history of trauma. Homeland’s creators try to represent a “terrorist’s logic” as well as a “counterterrorist’s” one evolving from unprocessed traumatic events in the lives of victims and perpetrators. Good guys and bad guys, all seem to manifest signs associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, the series highlights how
Isaac Tylim, Psy.D., ABPP, Training Analyst, International Psychoanalytic Association; Faculty, and Supervisor, NYU Postdoc and IPTAR, NYC. Co-Founder, Trauma and Disaster Specialization Program, NYU; Co-Founder, Art, Psychoanalysis and Society Project, IPTAR. He has been the Secretary of the IPA Committee in the United Nations since 1997. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the first IPA conference on Psychoanalysis and Cinema, held in Hollywood in 1995. Journalist, Member of the Foreign Press Association, and a regular contributor to the Buenos Aires Herald’s cultural section. Address correspondence to Isaac Tylim, Psy.D., ABPP, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 128 Wooster Street, New York, 10012
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trauma gets transmitted from generation to generation, from individual to family, and entire communities. The characters’ memories of terror seem to have forced them to live in psychological exile. They long to reach “home,” a place where they can feel safe and in peace. “Homeland” stands for a space capable of containing the unspeakable, that is, memories of terror. Brody has been tortured, and his absence from home has affected the lives of his wife and two children. Carrie appears to suffer from bipolar illness. She was also traumatized by a terrorist attack in the Middle East where her translator was killed. Gradually one learns that Saul, her benevolent supervisor, has lost touch with his only daughter after a bitter divorce. He volunteers to chase after American fugitive Aileen, who, with her Saudi Arabian boyfriend, are believed to be involved with Al Qaeda. Aileen was raised in Saudi Arabia. She was sent to boarding school after her wealthy father discovered that she fell in love with a Muslim young man at age 15. PSYCHOANALYTIC REFLECTIONS
Does “Homeland” imitate reality? Is this series merely a work of fiction, or a hybrid form—part documentary, part fiction? The opening frame is intended to place the viewer in an actual or real sociopolitical and historical context. Audiences are invited to a wedding of the real to the reel.1 Black and white images point to a genre defined by its ambiguity. Portraits of presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, highlight the link of the plot to current external events. Clips of September 11, 2001 with the burning Twin Towers and people running for their lives evoke in the viewer different types of memories. Is this opening scene a device to get viewers in touch with their own memories of horror? Is the scene’s intention to affect the viewers’ internal worlds so it may resonate with Brody’s and Carrie’s respective traumas? Images are texts that reveal while they conceal. One ought to be suspicious of the manifest, that is, of what appears on the screen, since it may operate as a diversion from the latent, unseen aspects of the narrative. The viewer may benefit from a strategy that concentrates on the tension between the manifest and the latent content, between what’s there and what’s not there. In the choreography of foreground and background, one may uncover the dynamic hidden meaning of “Homeland” in its multiple and interrelated subplots. The act of reading either written or visual texts refers to absences, gaps, and silences. Interpreting a work of art resembles a reading of a text (in the case of film, a visual text) with a psychoanalytically informed eye. It may be a misnomer to define film interpretation as applied psychoanalysis. More appropriate would be to regard this endeavor as establishing a dialogue between creative products and psychoanalysis.
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“Homeland’s” manifest content is centered on terrorism and counterterrorism. The latent content reveals (1) the choreography of internal and external reality (that is the question of what constitutes truth, (2) a recurrent theme of longing for home, and for the absent or idealized pre-Oedipal father, and (3) attempts to transform memories of horror. Choreography of internal and external reality
“Homeland” depicts the mind of terrorist and counterterrorist with careful attention to nuances. We learn how Brody and Carrie attempt (and fail) to hold on to absolutist rhetoric of “us versus them.” They display grandiose and omnipotent traits. Narcissism de vie fuses with narcissism du mort. The viewer is made witness to an oscillation between idealization of the object and idealization of the grandiose self, all bathed in manic rather than true reparation. Lacan has referred to the other as the “place or truth” (1969–1970, p. 106), which corresponds to the foreclosed part of the ego, and at the same time that other is able to arouse the subject’s wish to reveal itself. Brody and Carrie could only know themselves through knowing the other. Brody and Carrie provide each other with a surface or mirror for their disturbed internal worlds. Their internal worlds are reflected on the other who becomes a mirror for the self. Brody and Carrie seem to be engaged in a game where self and object representation roam around a co-constructed psychological field. Primitive mechanism of splitting, externalization, projection, and projective identification may be easily identified. Overall, Brody and Carrie resort to projective identification in order to gain some measure of control over disorganizing internal and external experiences. Projective identification comes in many forms, and it is often in the service of communication (i.e. the mother who without words understands her baby’s needs). But unlike this type of positive projective identification, there is a type that is characterized by massive projective identification. It is as if an avalanche befalls the object, leading to a state of confusion that precludes communication. Massive projective identification results in the imprisonment of the other. Who is the hunter? Who is the pray? Brody and Carrie are both persecutor and pray—two sides of the same coin. Self and object representations are interchangeable while boundaries are obliterated. Brody and Carrie reciprocally introject one another, and simultaneously they experience a compelling need to expel the introjected other. Carrie’s “interior” film, that is her own narrative, is projected onto Brody who officiates as surface or screen. She finds in Brody a home for what she is unable to contain. Carrie’s paranoia requires Brody to operate as
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her non-ego. She is casting out what her ego refuses to accept—past failures and their consequences. Unable to find a home (or a container, in Bion’s 1962 term) in her own mind, she transforms Brody into a base. Brody becomes “homeland,” a place where she may store and control her unregulated affect states, and past traumas. Only by this strategy she may be able to exert some control, and ward off the collapse of her psychic life. In Iraq Carrie lost her translator. Carrie’s survival, both physical and psychological, was threatened by the loss of the translator who was also her protector. The translator is a signifier of a link between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The translator has assisted her in mediating between mother tongue and foreign one. Without the translator her world became a confusing tower of Babel. The attack on linking is also a reference to the dead translator. Brody and Carrie suffer from paranoia. Paranoia means behind the noia, the being. Delusions are constructed between what is known and what is not known. Carrie’s perceptions are distorted, yet despite of being colored by her own ghost, they allow some knowledge of Brody. Also, they generate mistrust and suspicions, but also inappropriate trust. Brody and Carrie’s mutual projections appear as a defense against not merely external danger, but also internal—the vampires of trauma that threaten to return. Both Brody and Carrie have a compulsive need to get rid of persecutory guilt, stemming from past misjudgments and acts of omissions. Both want to make up for them, atone, and do good. Yet they operate under the pull of trauma, a vampire that never sleeps. Evacuating and projecting the fragmented dissociated states or manic reparation seem to be the only possible solution. In this regard, their sexual encounter conveys that manic attempt to obliterate the effect of trauma. Carrie invites Brody to her cabin. The erotic allure serves multiple functions: (1) it conceals a wish to “know” the truth, (2) to triumph over trauma via sexualization, and (3) as an attempt to repair the crack of broken emotional container. The latter is suggested by the way Carrie comforts Brody in the middle of the night when he is having a nightmare. By caressing his chest wounds, she is caressing her own. Brody’s subjectivity mirrors Carrie’s. He is also tormented by persecutory guilt for the death of Walker, a comrade. Unable to mourn, he resorts to externalizing his internal persecutors. Just like Brody is to Carrie, Carrie is to Brody, “homeland,” his container. Longing for home, and the absent idealized pre-Oedipal father
Brody is immersed in a form of reverie. It is not maternal reverie but father reverie. While maintaining the idealization of the father protector, he had
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relinquished agency and surrendered to the powerful Isa, establishing a father/son symbiosis. In Iraq, Isa had taken him under his wing providing shelter and offering compassion. His savior’s home became Homeland. Like Freud’s (1911) case, who in his delusion was impregnated by the Sun, so was Brody “impregnated” by his savior. Brody is a captive in a foreign land, hungry for love, a broken man who falls under the spell of the benevolent father figure Isa. Not having access to a Bible, he finds comfort in an Al Qaeda leader who treats him with kindness. He idealized and loved him. Brody confesses to Carrie of having killed his companion because he was told to do so by his protector preOedipal father. “Yes I didn’t have access to a Bible … I was embarrassed to tell you … I met the leader from Al Qaeda because he offered me comfort. I was broken, and this man was nice to me. I loved him.”2 The viewer begins to experience confusion—not unlike the characters on the screen. Is Brody the POW who is a “turn” or is he on a secret mission task? Is Walker dead or alive? What is real? Carrie, Brody’s daughter and Aileen, further point to the “repressed” intratext of the narrative associated to the longing for the absent, once idealized father. Carrie’s battle with mental illness, affect deregulation, and addictions may be traced to her father who suffers from mental illness. Brody’s daughter wants her father back at home. She accuses mother of having abandoned him. The adolescent must mourn childhood, and the idealized image of her father who is present in his absence. Saul, Carrie’s superior, is in charge of going after Aileen, an American raised in Saudi Arabia and hunted on suspicion of conspiring with her Arab lover in planning a terrorist attack on American soil. As a 15-year-old teenager in Saudi Arabia, she fell in love with a “local brown boy.” Up until then she was her daddy’s princess. Eager to break up her love affair, her father sent Aileen away to boarding school. Moreover, Saul’s distance from his own daughter operates as motivator in attempting to apprehend the runaway Aileen. Once again a clear reference to father’s abandonment or absence. Transforming memories of terror
Kancyper (2010), an Argentinean psychoanalyst, has described four types of memory. They are: memory of horror, memory of resentment or rancor, memory of pain, and memory of splendor. He expands on how those memories need to be transformed in order for true mourning to take place.
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Memory of horror Present and future are bogged down in traumatic reminiscences. The present is not experienced as ‘true’ present. It fosters dissociation. The subject is harassed by something that is felt coming from outside. Distrust follows, as well as an inability to establish new relationships. Unconscious, annihilating anxieties rule. Memories of horror render mourning impossible. Memory of resentment or rancor Under spell of rancor, the past outshines present and future. Present and future are “mortgaged” in the hope of vindicating an unfair past that became reinfected because of resentment and remorse. The individual is frozen. This kind of memory may be either secretly preserved for years or generations, latent or disguised, or quite manifest or conscious. Hope for revenge predominates. The individual feels unfairly treated. A victim who feels entitled to complain, demand, reproach, and revenge. Mourning gets paralyzed. The lost object reappears like a vampire. Memory of pain The past is not forgotten, but the individual is able to acknowledge and accept what he or she had lost, and then move to a non-idealized present and future. The past becomes the past and may be useful for present experiences. This kind of memory certainly does not put an end to pain. Pain continues, and must continue. Pain connects the individual with the losses. It evokes castration anxiety—having lost a part of ourselves. The individual admits the loss of vain hope, accepting reality with less idealization, more imperfect and limited. With memory of pain, oblivion becomes possible, thus the memory of pain may become a dynamic force that encourages the reconstruction of meaning. Mourning is easier. Oblivion is a chiseling of memory akin to the work of a sculpture: what is created in a memory worked through oblivion. One reaches a balance between memory and oblivion. They are two sides of the same coin. Memory of splendor Memory of splendor is the kind of memory that strengthens continuity between past, present, and future. The three dimensions of time coexist. The past illuminates the present, and at the same time reopens the future with oceanic and magical feelings. Such a memory is about sheer happiness, beauty, intimations of immortality through work, children, creativity.
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However, this kind of memory also reveals a gap, a lack: that which has been lost—opportunities, unfulfilled wishes, projects, what we were, and what we were not. The memory of splendor forces us to settle accounts and to confront most intimate aspects of our being: what we are, what we shall never be, whom we love, whom we hate, and whose burden is unbearable. In memory of splendor Eros wins over Thanatos. The memories of Brody and Carrie are prone to blur boundaries under the pull of schizo-paranoid anxieties. Memories of past horror lead to persecutory guilt. This bonds them together. It is a type of guilt that torments them both and impedes a mourning process, that is to say, a transformation of memories. At the cabin in the woods, Brody says how difficult is to find someone to talk. He cannot talk to his wife, while he can to Carrie. They both feel safe and at peace in the cabin that stands for a home away from home. Saul’s and Aileen’s boundaries seem somewhat better preserved. Saul does identify with what Aileen experienced. He also paid a big price for wanting to distance himself from parental expectations. He is in touch with his demons. Jewish by birth, he did not want to be different, praying with other kids before a game. Saul owns his memories of pain, and by owning them he remains connected to the past. A subtext of racial tension in both Jewish and Wasp families can be inferred. We witness Aileen’s grief, and her gradual inclination to talk. They seem to be experiencing depressive guilt. In Klein’s (1940) terms, they have reached the depressive position that facilitates mourning. As stated above, memories of terror that resist transformation call for dissociation. Under these circumstances, present and future are bogged down in traumatic reminiscences. The present is not experienced as true present. The subject is harassed by something that is felt coming from outside. Distrust follows, as well as an inability to establish new relationships. Unconscious, annihilating anxieties seem to rule, rendering mourning impossible. Yet the episode’s ending seems to point to a transformation of memories of horror to memories of pain. Carrie and Brody are seen crying, then Brody goes back home, checks on his sleeping children and wife. Is this the return of the prodigal Father? Then on the couch he begins to sob. Are Carrie and Brody beginning to own memories of pain? With memory of pain the past is not forgotten, but the individual may be able to acknowledge and accept what he or she had lost, and then move to a non-idealized present and future. The past may become the past and may be useful for present experiences. This kind of memory certainly does not put an end to pain. Pain continues, and must continue. Pain connects Brody and Carrie with what they lost, a necessary step toward true mourning.
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With memory of pain, oblivion becomes possible, thus the memory of the pair may become a dynamic force that encourages the reconstruction of meaning. Oblivion is a chiseling of memory akin to the work of a sculpture: what is created in a memory worked through oblivion. Brody and Carrie, for that matter all “Homeland” characters, must reach a balance between memory and oblivion so that they may go on. Let us go back to the movies with a final word on “reel” references. B and C? Movie fans may note the allusion: Brody and Carrie, and Bonnie and Clyde. The notorious pair cannot be overlooked. Both B and C are engaged in an interdepending struggle with aggressive and erotic tones, both pairs are always on the run from internal and/or external persecutors. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Brody and Carrie do not fit the familiar, domestic scene. They operate on the fringe. Brody is as an odd ball at home, as is Carrie in her surroundings. After the brawl at the bar, the bipolar thrill and excitement of their fight and flight brings to mind young Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway running for their lives following the assault of a bank in Bonnie and Clyde (Beatty and Penn, 1967). Reel life does not have an ending. The end may open new questions, or point to another track of exploration, or surprise viewers with a discovery. The final ending of the episode takes place in the internal world of the viewer (who is left hungry for the next episode). In the viewer’s internal world is where the fragmented or dissociated aspects of trauma may find a “home.” Films are principally not about what it is shown, the visible, but about the non-visible. They arouse “the experience and the imagination of the viewer through the evocative power of the visible” (Barbash and Taylor, 2001, p. 6). Ultimately “Homeland” manages, through the power of the visible, to convey the trials and tribulations undergone by individuals attempting to process severe trauma.
NOTES 1. On September 10, 2013, “Homeland” actors, Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin visited the C.I.A. headquarters in Washington. Alex Gansa, the co-creator of “Homeland” called the 2-hour meeting “a frank and free exchange about the entertainment business and the intelligence business that revealed a lot of parallels … We both build sets. We both play roles. And we both brainstorm, about operations on their side and storylines on ours.” CIA and Hollywood are both image conscious (Dowd, 2013, p.11). 2. A study conducted by the Ministry of the Interior in Germany on domestic terrorist groups found that the loss of the father was a significant factor in the history of future terrorist (Post, 1998, p. 28) The late analyst, Stein (2009) studied letters left by suicide bombers and came to similar conclusions regarding the idealization of male figures, and the longing for a symbiotic relationship with a pre-Oedipal father.
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REFERENCES Barbash, I. & Taylor, L. (2001). Radically empirical documentary. An interview with David and Judith MacDougall. Film Quarterly, 54(2), 6. Beatty, W. (Prod.) & Penn, A. (Dir.) (1967). Bonnie and Clyde [Motion Picture]. USA: Warner Bros. Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. London: Heinemann. Dowd, M. (2013). My so-called C.I.A. life. Sunday Review, New York Times, September 14, p. 11. Freud, S. (1911). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia. Standard Edition, Vol. 12, (pp.9–88). London: Hogarth. Kancyper, L. (2010). Resentimiento Terminable e Interminable. Buenos Aires: Lumen. Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic depressive states. In Love, guilt and reparation and other works—1921–1945 (pp. 344–369). New York: Free Press [1975]. Lacan, J. (1969–1970). The other side of psychoanalysis. Vol. book XVII, the seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton [2007]. Post, J. M. (1998). Terrorist psycho-logic: Terrorist behavior as a product of psychological forces. In W. Reich (Ed.) Origins of terrorism: Psychologies, ideologies, theologies, state of mind (pp. 25–42). Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Stein, R. (2009). For love of the father. San Francisco, CA: Stanford University Press.
HOME, BITTER SWEET HOME. A PSYCHOANALYTIC READING Isaac Tylim
The paper offers a psychoanalytic reading of the popular TV series “Homeland.” The series’ manifest content centers on terrorism and counterterrorism. From a dynamic perspective, the viewer is invited to mistrust what is represented, and focus on the tension between what is projected on the screen and what remains hidden in the narrative’s intriguing subtexts. These are: the choreography of internal and external reality, a recurrent theme of longing for the absent, idealized pre-Oedipal father, and attempts to transform memories of horror.
KEY WORDS: trauma; projective identification; memory; working through; psychic truth. DOI:10.1057/ajp.2014.11
The critically acclaimed TV series “Homeland” centers on Sergeant Nick Brody returning home after spending 8 years as a prisoner of war in Iraq. CIA agent Carrie Mathison suspects he has “turned” and is conspiring to stage a domestic attack. Throughout the series Nick is referred to as Brody, while the agent assigned to the case is called by her first name, Carrie. The central and ancillary characters have a history of trauma. Homeland’s creators try to represent a “terrorist’s logic” as well as a “counterterrorist’s” one evolving from unprocessed traumatic events in the lives of victims and perpetrators. Good guys and bad guys, all seem to manifest signs associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, the series highlights how
Isaac Tylim, Psy.D., ABPP, Training Analyst, International Psychoanalytic Association; Faculty, and Supervisor, NYU Postdoc and IPTAR, NYC. Co-Founder, Trauma and Disaster Specialization Program, NYU; Co-Founder, Art, Psychoanalysis and Society Project, IPTAR. He has been the Secretary of the IPA Committee in the United Nations since 1997. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the first IPA conference on Psychoanalysis and Cinema, held in Hollywood in 1995. Journalist, Member of the Foreign Press Association, and a regular contributor to the Buenos Aires Herald’s cultural section. Address correspondence to Isaac Tylim, Psy.D., ABPP, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, 128 Wooster Street, New York, 10012
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trauma gets transmitted from generation to generation, from individual to family, and entire communities. The characters’ memories of terror seem to have forced them to live in psychological exile. They long to reach “home,” a place where they can feel safe and in peace. “Homeland” stands for a space capable of containing the unspeakable, that is, memories of terror. Brody has been tortured, and his absence from home has affected the lives of his wife and two children. Carrie appears to suffer from bipolar illness. She was also traumatized by a terrorist attack in the Middle East where her translator was killed. Gradually one learns that Saul, her benevolent supervisor, has lost touch with his only daughter after a bitter divorce. He volunteers to chase after American fugitive Aileen, who, with her Saudi Arabian boyfriend, are believed to be involved with Al Qaeda. Aileen was raised in Saudi Arabia. She was sent to boarding school after her wealthy father discovered that she fell in love with a Muslim young man at age 15. PSYCHOANALYTIC REFLECTIONS
Does “Homeland” imitate reality? Is this series merely a work of fiction, or a hybrid form—part documentary, part fiction? The opening frame is intended to place the viewer in an actual or real sociopolitical and historical context. Audiences are invited to a wedding of the real to the reel.1 Black and white images point to a genre defined by its ambiguity. Portraits of presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Obama, highlight the link of the plot to current external events. Clips of September 11, 2001 with the burning Twin Towers and people running for their lives evoke in the viewer different types of memories. Is this opening scene a device to get viewers in touch with their own memories of horror? Is the scene’s intention to affect the viewers’ internal worlds so it may resonate with Brody’s and Carrie’s respective traumas? Images are texts that reveal while they conceal. One ought to be suspicious of the manifest, that is, of what appears on the screen, since it may operate as a diversion from the latent, unseen aspects of the narrative. The viewer may benefit from a strategy that concentrates on the tension between the manifest and the latent content, between what’s there and what’s not there. In the choreography of foreground and background, one may uncover the dynamic hidden meaning of “Homeland” in its multiple and interrelated subplots. The act of reading either written or visual texts refers to absences, gaps, and silences. Interpreting a work of art resembles a reading of a text (in the case of film, a visual text) with a psychoanalytically informed eye. It may be a misnomer to define film interpretation as applied psychoanalysis. More appropriate would be to regard this endeavor as establishing a dialogue between creative products and psychoanalysis.
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“Homeland’s” manifest content is centered on terrorism and counterterrorism. The latent content reveals (1) the choreography of internal and external reality (that is the question of what constitutes truth, (2) a recurrent theme of longing for home, and for the absent or idealized pre-Oedipal father, and (3) attempts to transform memories of horror. Choreography of internal and external reality
“Homeland” depicts the mind of terrorist and counterterrorist with careful attention to nuances. We learn how Brody and Carrie attempt (and fail) to hold on to absolutist rhetoric of “us versus them.” They display grandiose and omnipotent traits. Narcissism de vie fuses with narcissism du mort. The viewer is made witness to an oscillation between idealization of the object and idealization of the grandiose self, all bathed in manic rather than true reparation. Lacan has referred to the other as the “place or truth” (1969–1970, p. 106), which corresponds to the foreclosed part of the ego, and at the same time that other is able to arouse the subject’s wish to reveal itself. Brody and Carrie could only know themselves through knowing the other. Brody and Carrie provide each other with a surface or mirror for their disturbed internal worlds. Their internal worlds are reflected on the other who becomes a mirror for the self. Brody and Carrie seem to be engaged in a game where self and object representation roam around a co-constructed psychological field. Primitive mechanism of splitting, externalization, projection, and projective identification may be easily identified. Overall, Brody and Carrie resort to projective identification in order to gain some measure of control over disorganizing internal and external experiences. Projective identification comes in many forms, and it is often in the service of communication (i.e. the mother who without words understands her baby’s needs). But unlike this type of positive projective identification, there is a type that is characterized by massive projective identification. It is as if an avalanche befalls the object, leading to a state of confusion that precludes communication. Massive projective identification results in the imprisonment of the other. Who is the hunter? Who is the pray? Brody and Carrie are both persecutor and pray—two sides of the same coin. Self and object representations are interchangeable while boundaries are obliterated. Brody and Carrie reciprocally introject one another, and simultaneously they experience a compelling need to expel the introjected other. Carrie’s “interior” film, that is her own narrative, is projected onto Brody who officiates as surface or screen. She finds in Brody a home for what she is unable to contain. Carrie’s paranoia requires Brody to operate as
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her non-ego. She is casting out what her ego refuses to accept—past failures and their consequences. Unable to find a home (or a container, in Bion’s 1962 term) in her own mind, she transforms Brody into a base. Brody becomes “homeland,” a place where she may store and control her unregulated affect states, and past traumas. Only by this strategy she may be able to exert some control, and ward off the collapse of her psychic life. In Iraq Carrie lost her translator. Carrie’s survival, both physical and psychological, was threatened by the loss of the translator who was also her protector. The translator is a signifier of a link between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The translator has assisted her in mediating between mother tongue and foreign one. Without the translator her world became a confusing tower of Babel. The attack on linking is also a reference to the dead translator. Brody and Carrie suffer from paranoia. Paranoia means behind the noia, the being. Delusions are constructed between what is known and what is not known. Carrie’s perceptions are distorted, yet despite of being colored by her own ghost, they allow some knowledge of Brody. Also, they generate mistrust and suspicions, but also inappropriate trust. Brody and Carrie’s mutual projections appear as a defense against not merely external danger, but also internal—the vampires of trauma that threaten to return. Both Brody and Carrie have a compulsive need to get rid of persecutory guilt, stemming from past misjudgments and acts of omissions. Both want to make up for them, atone, and do good. Yet they operate under the pull of trauma, a vampire that never sleeps. Evacuating and projecting the fragmented dissociated states or manic reparation seem to be the only possible solution. In this regard, their sexual encounter conveys that manic attempt to obliterate the effect of trauma. Carrie invites Brody to her cabin. The erotic allure serves multiple functions: (1) it conceals a wish to “know” the truth, (2) to triumph over trauma via sexualization, and (3) as an attempt to repair the crack of broken emotional container. The latter is suggested by the way Carrie comforts Brody in the middle of the night when he is having a nightmare. By caressing his chest wounds, she is caressing her own. Brody’s subjectivity mirrors Carrie’s. He is also tormented by persecutory guilt for the death of Walker, a comrade. Unable to mourn, he resorts to externalizing his internal persecutors. Just like Brody is to Carrie, Carrie is to Brody, “homeland,” his container. Longing for home, and the absent idealized pre-Oedipal father
Brody is immersed in a form of reverie. It is not maternal reverie but father reverie. While maintaining the idealization of the father protector, he had
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relinquished agency and surrendered to the powerful Isa, establishing a father/son symbiosis. In Iraq, Isa had taken him under his wing providing shelter and offering compassion. His savior’s home became Homeland. Like Freud’s (1911) case, who in his delusion was impregnated by the Sun, so was Brody “impregnated” by his savior. Brody is a captive in a foreign land, hungry for love, a broken man who falls under the spell of the benevolent father figure Isa. Not having access to a Bible, he finds comfort in an Al Qaeda leader who treats him with kindness. He idealized and loved him. Brody confesses to Carrie of having killed his companion because he was told to do so by his protector preOedipal father. “Yes I didn’t have access to a Bible … I was embarrassed to tell you … I met the leader from Al Qaeda because he offered me comfort. I was broken, and this man was nice to me. I loved him.”2 The viewer begins to experience confusion—not unlike the characters on the screen. Is Brody the POW who is a “turn” or is he on a secret mission task? Is Walker dead or alive? What is real? Carrie, Brody’s daughter and Aileen, further point to the “repressed” intratext of the narrative associated to the longing for the absent, once idealized father. Carrie’s battle with mental illness, affect deregulation, and addictions may be traced to her father who suffers from mental illness. Brody’s daughter wants her father back at home. She accuses mother of having abandoned him. The adolescent must mourn childhood, and the idealized image of her father who is present in his absence. Saul, Carrie’s superior, is in charge of going after Aileen, an American raised in Saudi Arabia and hunted on suspicion of conspiring with her Arab lover in planning a terrorist attack on American soil. As a 15-year-old teenager in Saudi Arabia, she fell in love with a “local brown boy.” Up until then she was her daddy’s princess. Eager to break up her love affair, her father sent Aileen away to boarding school. Moreover, Saul’s distance from his own daughter operates as motivator in attempting to apprehend the runaway Aileen. Once again a clear reference to father’s abandonment or absence. Transforming memories of terror
Kancyper (2010), an Argentinean psychoanalyst, has described four types of memory. They are: memory of horror, memory of resentment or rancor, memory of pain, and memory of splendor. He expands on how those memories need to be transformed in order for true mourning to take place.
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Memory of horror Present and future are bogged down in traumatic reminiscences. The present is not experienced as ‘true’ present. It fosters dissociation. The subject is harassed by something that is felt coming from outside. Distrust follows, as well as an inability to establish new relationships. Unconscious, annihilating anxieties rule. Memories of horror render mourning impossible. Memory of resentment or rancor Under spell of rancor, the past outshines present and future. Present and future are “mortgaged” in the hope of vindicating an unfair past that became reinfected because of resentment and remorse. The individual is frozen. This kind of memory may be either secretly preserved for years or generations, latent or disguised, or quite manifest or conscious. Hope for revenge predominates. The individual feels unfairly treated. A victim who feels entitled to complain, demand, reproach, and revenge. Mourning gets paralyzed. The lost object reappears like a vampire. Memory of pain The past is not forgotten, but the individual is able to acknowledge and accept what he or she had lost, and then move to a non-idealized present and future. The past becomes the past and may be useful for present experiences. This kind of memory certainly does not put an end to pain. Pain continues, and must continue. Pain connects the individual with the losses. It evokes castration anxiety—having lost a part of ourselves. The individual admits the loss of vain hope, accepting reality with less idealization, more imperfect and limited. With memory of pain, oblivion becomes possible, thus the memory of pain may become a dynamic force that encourages the reconstruction of meaning. Mourning is easier. Oblivion is a chiseling of memory akin to the work of a sculpture: what is created in a memory worked through oblivion. One reaches a balance between memory and oblivion. They are two sides of the same coin. Memory of splendor Memory of splendor is the kind of memory that strengthens continuity between past, present, and future. The three dimensions of time coexist. The past illuminates the present, and at the same time reopens the future with oceanic and magical feelings. Such a memory is about sheer happiness, beauty, intimations of immortality through work, children, creativity.
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However, this kind of memory also reveals a gap, a lack: that which has been lost—opportunities, unfulfilled wishes, projects, what we were, and what we were not. The memory of splendor forces us to settle accounts and to confront most intimate aspects of our being: what we are, what we shall never be, whom we love, whom we hate, and whose burden is unbearable. In memory of splendor Eros wins over Thanatos. The memories of Brody and Carrie are prone to blur boundaries under the pull of schizo-paranoid anxieties. Memories of past horror lead to persecutory guilt. This bonds them together. It is a type of guilt that torments them both and impedes a mourning process, that is to say, a transformation of memories. At the cabin in the woods, Brody says how difficult is to find someone to talk. He cannot talk to his wife, while he can to Carrie. They both feel safe and at peace in the cabin that stands for a home away from home. Saul’s and Aileen’s boundaries seem somewhat better preserved. Saul does identify with what Aileen experienced. He also paid a big price for wanting to distance himself from parental expectations. He is in touch with his demons. Jewish by birth, he did not want to be different, praying with other kids before a game. Saul owns his memories of pain, and by owning them he remains connected to the past. A subtext of racial tension in both Jewish and Wasp families can be inferred. We witness Aileen’s grief, and her gradual inclination to talk. They seem to be experiencing depressive guilt. In Klein’s (1940) terms, they have reached the depressive position that facilitates mourning. As stated above, memories of terror that resist transformation call for dissociation. Under these circumstances, present and future are bogged down in traumatic reminiscences. The present is not experienced as true present. The subject is harassed by something that is felt coming from outside. Distrust follows, as well as an inability to establish new relationships. Unconscious, annihilating anxieties seem to rule, rendering mourning impossible. Yet the episode’s ending seems to point to a transformation of memories of horror to memories of pain. Carrie and Brody are seen crying, then Brody goes back home, checks on his sleeping children and wife. Is this the return of the prodigal Father? Then on the couch he begins to sob. Are Carrie and Brody beginning to own memories of pain? With memory of pain the past is not forgotten, but the individual may be able to acknowledge and accept what he or she had lost, and then move to a non-idealized present and future. The past may become the past and may be useful for present experiences. This kind of memory certainly does not put an end to pain. Pain continues, and must continue. Pain connects Brody and Carrie with what they lost, a necessary step toward true mourning.
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With memory of pain, oblivion becomes possible, thus the memory of the pair may become a dynamic force that encourages the reconstruction of meaning. Oblivion is a chiseling of memory akin to the work of a sculpture: what is created in a memory worked through oblivion. Brody and Carrie, for that matter all “Homeland” characters, must reach a balance between memory and oblivion so that they may go on. Let us go back to the movies with a final word on “reel” references. B and C? Movie fans may note the allusion: Brody and Carrie, and Bonnie and Clyde. The notorious pair cannot be overlooked. Both B and C are engaged in an interdepending struggle with aggressive and erotic tones, both pairs are always on the run from internal and/or external persecutors. Like Bonnie and Clyde, Brody and Carrie do not fit the familiar, domestic scene. They operate on the fringe. Brody is as an odd ball at home, as is Carrie in her surroundings. After the brawl at the bar, the bipolar thrill and excitement of their fight and flight brings to mind young Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway running for their lives following the assault of a bank in Bonnie and Clyde (Beatty and Penn, 1967). Reel life does not have an ending. The end may open new questions, or point to another track of exploration, or surprise viewers with a discovery. The final ending of the episode takes place in the internal world of the viewer (who is left hungry for the next episode). In the viewer’s internal world is where the fragmented or dissociated aspects of trauma may find a “home.” Films are principally not about what it is shown, the visible, but about the non-visible. They arouse “the experience and the imagination of the viewer through the evocative power of the visible” (Barbash and Taylor, 2001, p. 6). Ultimately “Homeland” manages, through the power of the visible, to convey the trials and tribulations undergone by individuals attempting to process severe trauma.
NOTES 1. On September 10, 2013, “Homeland” actors, Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin visited the C.I.A. headquarters in Washington. Alex Gansa, the co-creator of “Homeland” called the 2-hour meeting “a frank and free exchange about the entertainment business and the intelligence business that revealed a lot of parallels … We both build sets. We both play roles. And we both brainstorm, about operations on their side and storylines on ours.” CIA and Hollywood are both image conscious (Dowd, 2013, p.11). 2. A study conducted by the Ministry of the Interior in Germany on domestic terrorist groups found that the loss of the father was a significant factor in the history of future terrorist (Post, 1998, p. 28) The late analyst, Stein (2009) studied letters left by suicide bombers and came to similar conclusions regarding the idealization of male figures, and the longing for a symbiotic relationship with a pre-Oedipal father.
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REFERENCES Barbash, I. & Taylor, L. (2001). Radically empirical documentary. An interview with David and Judith MacDougall. Film Quarterly, 54(2), 6. Beatty, W. (Prod.) & Penn, A. (Dir.) (1967). Bonnie and Clyde [Motion Picture]. USA: Warner Bros. Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from experience. London: Heinemann. Dowd, M. (2013). My so-called C.I.A. life. Sunday Review, New York Times, September 14, p. 11. Freud, S. (1911). Psycho-analytic notes on an autobiographical account of a case of paranoia. Standard Edition, Vol. 12, (pp.9–88). London: Hogarth. Kancyper, L. (2010). Resentimiento Terminable e Interminable. Buenos Aires: Lumen. Klein, M. (1940). Mourning and its relation to manic depressive states. In Love, guilt and reparation and other works—1921–1945 (pp. 344–369). New York: Free Press [1975]. Lacan, J. (1969–1970). The other side of psychoanalysis. Vol. book XVII, the seminar of Jacques Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton [2007]. Post, J. M. (1998). Terrorist psycho-logic: Terrorist behavior as a product of psychological forces. In W. Reich (Ed.) Origins of terrorism: Psychologies, ideologies, theologies, state of mind (pp. 25–42). Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Stein, R. (2009). For love of the father. San Francisco, CA: Stanford University Press.
