"JIMMY P: PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A PLAINS INDIAN": A Review

del Toro and Amalric

“Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” is not a movie about Indians.  It is about human beings.  It is also a big lovable mutt of a welter of trauma, forces and questions that are always left by a war, at least the kind of war that WWII was.  This movie explores both the Indian and the psychoanalyst George Devereux, who is sort of inventing his work out of anthropology, philosophy, and ancient Greek assumptions, plus his own issues from a Hungarian Jewish family with a lawyer father and a mother at odds with him.  Edward Teller was his cousin.  His brother committed suicide.  He studied with VERY high level founders of sophisticated thought (Marie Curie!) and was never quite accepted by the Americans except Menninger, always a man with foresight and tolerance, perhaps a precursor to the Third Force psychology of the Sixties and Seventies.  

Devereux wrote 400 manuscripts, not all of them published.  “In "From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences" Devereux proposes to rethink the question of the relation between the observer and the observed. Devereux takes his guidance from psychoanalysis. According to him, the classical methodological principle which prescribes to the researcher to make his observations from a strictly objective point of view is not only impossible to put into practice but outrightly counterproductive. Instead the observer should place himself in the middle of the process and keep in mind that whatever he may observe is always influenced by his own activity of observing.”  This is a principle of particle physics, quantum mechanics.

Devereux wasn’t Procrustean (Freud’s dark side), but rather formed himself against the boundary of the person who presented and learned from that.  (Technically transference and countertransference.)  He was wrestling with the scientific requirement of being absolutely objective (impossible) versus the poet’s yearning to inhabit the revelation of another person’s life (dangerous).  But he was able to move successfully in and out of the other person’s experience, using empathy as much as analysis.  Writing everything down helped him to externalize it; long walking talks helped him share Jimmy P’s world, though he never came to the rez as did the film-makers.  He did previously have two years on the Mohave rez.

I agree with Roger Ebert , who said, "the movie offers the most psychologically complex screen portrait of a Native American character in at least twenty years, probably more" and "those who have undergone such treatment will appreciate how accurately the film portrays the process, never simplifying anything, never going for the easy dramatic epiphany, always respecting how analyst and patient circle around and around the edges of meaning". 

Desplechin was active in composing the script, with the help of Julie Peyr and Kent Jones.

Desplechin

Desplechin goes back and forth over his subjective/objective boundary by using an alter ego, Mathieu Amalric, who has been his representative often enough to move into it smoothly.  He also depicts the dreams as they are presented.  The result is a simple, clear, graceful portrayal of the relationship between two very different people. This film is already a classic because of this dimension: that it is accessible but not stupid.  

A few little flourishes from more recent scholarship than what was in the original book are helpful.  Clearly someone read the anthro scholarship about Blackfeet.  (“Manly-hearted women.”  And there’s Cyn Kipp!  Well, Mary Ground has gone on ahead, right?  And a lot of others.  But there are plenty left and they’re getting impatient!)

Hungarian Manly-Hearted Woman?

You should not go to see this movie because you dearly love and idealize Indians, not that they are put down, but because they are not treated as a separate species.  There are no feathers.  But to my heart’s joy, the land that made Siksika into a tribe is well-portrayed.  To my irritation and sometimes amusement, Benicio del Toro is about as Blackfeet as a Taiwanese playing a Korean.  The unfamiliar are not likely to notice much, but to those who know the difference, it will be a bug.  The compensation is that he’s an excellent actor and does a fine job with the dynamics of the character.

Another issue that needs to be acknowledged and then dismissed is del Toro’s attempt to speak in what some call the Indian drawl or brogue.  At your peril say “guttural” because to the unsophisticated it implies “the gutter,” though it really means words pronounced in the back of the throat.  Blackfeet language had a lot of consonants spoken against the soft palate and throat.  (Modern Blackfeet speakers tend to have accents because they can’t make those sounds anymore.) Their singing is falsetto, nasal, almost like throat-singing, but that is changing, too.  Del Toro ends up sort of halfway between Tonto and a Jamaican.

Upham and del Toro

The real Jimmy P. was from a family called “Everybody Talks About Him.”  Usually around here we leave off the “Him.”  Or even just say “Talks About.”  The name is not in the 1907 Blackfeet census but Devereaux is.   No relation.  Jason Devereaux was an art teacher here.  I didn’t know that George Devereux was actually György Dobó, but that clue begins to explain why the lives of Blackfeet would become relevant to him.  Both men had translated names because both had been culturally overrun.  Devereux was evading the Jewish danger (he converted to Christianity in 1933) and Talks About was living out an imposed culture.

Despite the fantasies of some, many tribes were very strict and closely prescribed behavior.  An unfaithful woman could have her nose cut off.  The last “Nosie” in Browning had died only a few years before I came in 1961.  Beatings were approved, a root of present violence.  The people who were friendly to Jesuit Catholicism were the same as those who had derived their sense of themselves from rule-following in the old way, just a matter of reframing the rules a bit.  To be thrown into a chaotic “anything-goes” situation like WWII meant a major change in the most basic assumptions.  

Almaric and McKee

For the Devereux character, it meant accepting a “Swedish” sort of tolerance in which loving someone unavailable (married to someone else) and losing them was simply necessary, a matter of rueful acceptance.  For the Jimmy P. character, faithlessness was intolerable and deserved punishment to the point of death.  He had been a warrior, he had been displaced, he had been robbed -- all of these things brought up unresolved issues from boyhood.  With a harsh mother and tough sister, a dead wife, a deserting wife, the only figure of female reconciliation in the movie that’s possible is the teenaged daughter, who is Catholic, raised by nuns.  Eventually, Jimmy could accept their ceremonies of confession and forgiveness and internalize them, which is what the psychotherapy was anyway.

There are a few loose ends, mostly the other Indians:  Gary Farmer, A. Martinez, Misty Upham, Michael Greyeyes and background extras.  None of their stories are pursued and only Misty is Blackfeet, but they give a sense of “group” which is very important when dealing with tribal people.

This film fits into the brain research issues I’ve been following.  If the level of challenge presented by things like war, esp. when the moral dimension is high enough, it becomes necessary to find a way to rebuild one’s world-view from the deepest, earliest levels.  One way is psychotherapy, but ceremonies can also work.  A previous icon of PTSD recovery has been Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel “Ceremony,” also about WWII.  In that book, the man goes back to his tribe and accepts the old ways.  If this kind of work is not done, either people will be assaulted and even killed, or gentle persons like Jimmy will turn the rage on themselves, blindly, painfully.

ATTACHMENT THEORY: Aria or Torch Song

This story is about “attachment,” a psychological concept about early infant forming.  It draws on two sources: the wikipedia entry for Sandor Ferenczi and an article by R. Chris Fraley at http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~rcfraley/attachment.htm  The story is invented.  There are footnotes: lyrics and informal tests to take.  This is a fantasy, not realistic.

___________________

The woman was an opera singer who wished to expand her career to singing in jazz clubs.  She discovered to her dismay that her throat stiffened and closed when she sang in such intimate settings. In an opera role or a concert setting, in spite of the huge audience out there in the dark, she was fine because she couldn’t see faces.  But in a club, with nearby people at tables, she locked up.  At first the thought was that she was affected by the smoke, but that didn’t seem to be right.  Then others theorized that if she would just knock back a stiff whiskey before she sang, she would loosen up.  But that didn’t work either because she lost some of her skill at phrasing, even pitch.

Reluctantly she came to the shrink.  He was known to work within a set of theories known as “confusion of tongues.”  That sounded about right for a singer.  When she told him that, he laughed -- not mockingly but warmly.  Then he explained.

Sandor Ferenczi

“This is the theory of Sandor Ferenczi, who began as a Freudian analyst but broke with him over the issue of incest.  Freud felt all these women were making up accusations against their fathers, but Ferenczi believed them.”

Blushing, the woman turned her head away.  She was not lying down but in a comfortable chair facing the analyst.  She wore a formal suit and pearls with her dark hair up in a French twist.  The suit was bright red and expensive.  Her posture was excellent.  “I was never the victim of such a thing,” she said.  “My father was an honorable and protective man.”

“Well, it’s not about actual sex, nor even tongue kissing!  The idea is that adults and children speak different languages and therefore misinterpret each other, which can lead to trouble.  The language -- not words but body language -- of a caregiver is similar enough to that of a lover that the two can easily be confused.  

“An example given in the pop source Wikipedia is that of a little girl who wants to play “house” with her father and gets into bed with him, as she knows her mother does.  Suppose this is early in the morning and the man is still half-asleep.  The little girl caresses her father and kisses his face.  He embraces her and holds her against him, but -- well . . .   He is passionate and she is merely affectionate.  His response is too much and she is overwhelmed, freezes and then flees soon enough that nothing really happens except her emotional reaction.  But that can be indelible.  A conscientious father then wakes and becomes properly paternal.  But maybe not.”

“That strikes me as totally bizarre.  I find it completely unnatural.”

“The problem of misunderstanding, confusing “tongues” in the sense of language as though one person were speaking French and the other Chinese, is part of a larger field of thought about things like borderline personalities, narcissism, and anxiety.  At the most basic level it is a mammal response.”

“You mean, ANIMAL?   I don’t think I’m in the right place.  I speak several languages in order to sing them but I am not an animal.”

“It’s not exactly being an animal.  It’s called “ethology,” the study of the underlying evolution of the animals that has carried over into human behavior, embedded in our bodies and brains.  For a baby to survive, it has to relate to its caregiver, whether that baby is a cat or a horse.  Humans are no different.  

“Experiments suggest that about sixty per cent of babies easily attach to their caregiver in this particular way:  if the mother leaves the room where the baby is, the baby will cry for them, search, call, and be entirely distressed.  When the mother returns, about 60% of babies will hurry to be comforted.  About 20% will be angry and approach the mother but scold or strike her.  Another 20% will turn away as though they didn’t even care.  These are the ones who may have parents who don’t attach, get things wrong, don’t respond.  Some of these babies seem genuinely not to care or be concerned.  Others, when attached to physiological monitoring equipment, show telltale signs of emotional reaction like fast heartbeats or increased tension.

“The suggestion is that relations between lovers is similar enough to childhood intimacy for the reaction to persist in adults.” 

“How do I know anything about it at all?  As far as I know, I had a perfectly typical childhood.  My parents took good care of me.  I never lacked for anything.  In fact, they were major supporters of my singing career.”  But her eyes filled with tears.  It was a giveaway.

He handed over the tissue box and they sat in silence for a few moments.  Then he said softly,  “Could we try an experiment?”

“I suppose.”

“Would you sing something for me?  But don’t sing it to me.  Open that window and sing it to the birds out there.”  And truly, there were house finches in the tree outside caroling away.  “They’re all crazy in love with each other, you know.  Pairing off. They will welcome your voice.”

“What should I sing?”

“You choose.”

She began a little haltingly, but it was a soft day with enough breeze to make the tree sway and the birds joined her.  Her throat opened, her tongue relaxed, and her lungs filled.  The therapist was amazed at the choice of song, the "Habanera" from Carmen, and even more amazed at the change in her.  It was as though a bright shawl had been thrown over her, transforming her into a passionate powerful being.  In French she sang,  

“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle

Que nul ne peut apprivoiser,

Et c’est bien in vain qu’on l’appelle. . .

(Love is a rebellious bird that nobody can tame, and you call him quite in vain. . .)

The therapist interrupted.  “Please look at me!”  She turned.  As soon her eyes met his, her throat clutched and she stopped.  All the confident power dropped from her shoulders.  She sat down again.

Only the sound of the therapist scribbling.  “Are you in any relationships?”  She was not.  She had never married nor did she have siblings.  Her parents had died a few years ago, basically of old age.  She had been a late child, much wanted and closely managed.  The parents had come from a background of achievement in the face of hardship and did not belong to any circle of friends but delighted in music, particularly opera which they had known in Europe.  Though they were happy to be in America, they tended to always look to their first home.  They were loving but strict.  Dating was not approved.  After school she practiced her singing.  Luckily, she was gifted.

Over many weeks, they talked.  Her life was isolated, with her friends limited to her manager and a few other singers.  Opera roles at a high level meant going from a company in one major city to another so she was often living in hotels.  The therapist sympathized, sharing that if he didn’t make an active effort to maintain contact, his friends wandered off, and he could hardly make friends with patients.  There were many tears.  

It was one thing to see what was going on in her life, but much harder for her to FEEL it and even harder to risk changing.  Gradually she did change.  Even singing something so sexy and passionate as Carmen was protected on a stage, a role in a fantasy.  Singing on a platform into a microphone was real, in a human context.  As weeks went on, partly by imagining, partly by experimenting, she came into the circle of friendship, learned to speak the language of love.

One day the therapist felt she was ready to sing for him again.  This time she chose a torch song:  “That old black magic has me in its spell, that old black magic that you weave so well . . .”  She was not singing it to the therapist, but it was clear that she had someone in mind.  Her throat did not close.  She was relaxed, her arms open, ready to receive, in total control of herself.  He was mesmerized.  “The lover I have waited for . . .”

“Is this about the person I think it is?”  Of course it was.  It was about her.

_______________

“The Habanera” from Carmen:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ_HHRJf0xg

“That Old Black Magic”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rxpcZ6RrA

What’s your attachment style?

http://www.web-research-design.net/cgi-bin/crq/crq.pl

Your style in close relationships:

http://www.yourpersonality.net/relstructures/

RHIZOMES IN THE GRASS

What is a catastrophe for buffalo is a bonanza for humans, but only if they go to work at once and know how to efficiently cooperate.  The tasks, once dealing with a dead animal, are how to skin, eviscerate, de-bone, render out marrow, and slice the flesh into thin sheets that will dry efficiently.  Organs have uses (brains are fat for tanning, bladders are containers for liquids), appendages (hooves, tail) have uses.  It’s hard work that takes muscle and manual skill, especially before the acquisition of metal.  Even then, as Bob Scriver discovered when skinning the bull bison for the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife, even though he was equipped with a bucket of knives one of the three man team had to stop to sharpen them now and then.  Obsidian doesn’t need sharpening.

Now let’s leave the busy Blackfeet with their survival-driven tasks, preserving the materials at hand to nurture the future, and turn to the lessons of the alluvial meadows where rhizomes grow in the grass and trees line the watercourse.  The first lesson is floods.  If a culture expects occasional floods, tsumanis, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and so on, they can plan for them.  The problem is that the predictability is weak and the intervals are wide.  Americans cannot grasp the reality of floods or droughts, either one, and build their homes and business expectations on the presumption that everything will stay just the same.  

Something meant to be a cure -- building of dams, diversion of water courses, and economic compensation systems like flood plain insurance -- are taken to be rock solid facts, reinforced by the conviction that human industrial power can do anything.  In fact, they confer short term gains and long term massive risk, maybe interfere with the ability to recover and go on.  Possibly, as with the giant dams of China, actually alter the turning of the planet.  The development and release of every new molecule carries the possibility of starting a chain reaction that will reorganize the terms of life.

A “deep experience” can have an effect in the intense moment that dissolves fear so that courage lingers afterwards, as well as opening consciousness to all of existence and merging with it enough to know that single dots kindle and die all the time, but that each one is a participant crucial to the whole.  Only humans wrestle with this problem of knowing they will die, but not when or how.  It is harder to answer the questions less often asked:  “Why am I here?”  What does it “mean”?   And what does “meaning” mean anyway?  These are usually addressed with pre-frontal cerebral forebrain thinking, but if these are not underlain with the primal mid-brain “felt concepts” nor confirmed by the basal ganglia connections formed by the growing infant -- issues of anxiety or comfort -- no thought-out philosophical system will really take root.

This is all part of the in-skin system, managed by the brain but extending throughout the body, including guts and toe muscles.  We are only trying to create a virtual construct in-skin that will fit the out-skin world well enough to be a map to survival.  But this is not always possible.  The out-skin world changes all the time.  What worked for Blackfeet two hundred years ago will not work for them today.  The problem is that the patterns that work for people in other places don’t work here either, and if people live here, they can find themselves pushed over the cliff without any idea of how to process what remains into a new way of living: new rhythms, new foods, new shelters, fitted into old ways of various kinds.

Groups form, sometimes by affinity and maybe genomic families.  We could call these rhizomes, dense centers that extend slender stolons carrying ideas, making connections.  It’s the same pattern as neurons reaching out for each other in the brain and the same pattern as the scattering of the stars across the cosmos. 

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term "rhizome" and "rhizomatic" to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation. In A Thousand Plateaus, they oppose it to an arborescent (branching like a tree) conception of knowledge, which works with dualist categories and binary choices. A rhizome works with planar and trans-species connections, while an arborescent model works with vertical and linear connections. Their use of the "orchid and the wasp" is taken from the biological concept of mutualism, in which two different species interact together to form a multiplicity  (i.e. a unity that is multiple in itself).

"As a model for culture, the rhizome resists the organizational structure of the root-tree system which charts causality along chronological lines and looks for the original source of 'things' and looks towards the pinnacle or conclusion of those 'things.' A rhizome, on the other hand, is characterized by 'ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.' Rather than narrativize history and culture, the rhizome presents history and culture as a map or wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis, for a 'rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.' The planar movement of the rhizome resists chronology and organization, instead favoring a nomadic system of growth and propagation.

"In this model, culture spreads like the surface of a body of water, spreading towards available spaces or trickling downwards towards new spaces through fissures and gaps, eroding what is in its way. The surface can be interrupted and moved, but these disturbances leave no trace, as the water is charged with pressure and potential to always seek its equilibrium, and thereby establish smooth space."

This means that oppositions like white vs. Indian or men vs. women or democrat vs. republican are not relevant.  Winners vs. losers may also be illusions.  Things unfold by themselves and find their own level of comfort.  Small affinity groups or partners can be as valuable as major data-driven movements.  There needn’t be pressure to get to some goal: the journey is as valuable as the destination.  There is not one "turning point" but many.  The aspen growing along the Rockies are a good example of rhizomatous growth: a cluster of trees, all connected under the ground so that some people say the whole grove is one tree.

It might take a month to process the jumble of fallen buffalo, but in that month a lot is happening in terms of relationships and growing skills among the people.  Children are drawn into work, men are needed to do final kills and heavy work, women form alliances and friendships.  People who generally travel in small groups are together for this time.  Romance blossoms.  Unexpected things might happen.  Babies.

At some point -- a layer of charcoal suggests -- the pile of bones and offal was set afire and the people who had been working hard watched the sparks fly up in celebration before they separated again to find their own ways.