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Hitchcock's
Vertigo Previously
published in The International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 1997, 78,
Summary:
The paper presents an interpretation of Hitchcock's Vertigo,
focusing on the way its protagonist's drama resonates with the analyst's
struggle with deep unconscious identifications, with the impossibility of
maintaining detached objectivity or guaranteeing one's role as a
reparative good object, and with the dangers of grandiosity, omniscience,
and illusory control. The protagonist's 'countertransference love'
crystallizes around a rescue fantasy, in which he is Orpheus, striving to
bring Eurydice back from Hades; or a Knight, determined to behead an
obscure Dragon endangering Beauty. Initially these key roles are sharply
differentiated, through splitting and disavowal, which deprive the
participants from their conflictual three-dimensionality. Eventually,
however, the valiant Knight turns out to be as helpless and lonely as his
Beauty, and in the final scene - as ruthless and lethal as the Dragon.
This interpretation is compared to numerous other views of the film
offered in the literature. The survey and comparison of the various views
leads to fundamental issues in the psychoanalytic study of art.
Interpretations can be seen as unavoidably coloured by the (counter)transference
of viewers. It is suggested that a film has no hidden true meaning, and a
new individual significance emerges in the transitional space opened up by
each viewer's encounter with the emotional universe of the film. A
defensive emphasis on the pathology of artists and their work may alienate
us from art, and blind us to to ways we could learn from it, as persons
and as analysts. Just as, in the end, the detective is revealed to be the criminal,
the doctor-therapist, the would be analyst, herself turns out to be
an analysand. The Turn of the Screw in fact deconstructs all these
traditional oppositions; the exorcist and the possessed, the doctor and
the patient, the sickness and the cure, the symptom and the proposed
interpretation of the symptom, become here interchangeable, or at the very
least, undecidable. A
personal view John
'Scottie' Ferguson, the protagonist of Vertigo, is a detective
haunted by his human frailty: his vertigo. The way this film activates
audience involvement is a crucial aspect of its power: as viewers, we
become deeply identified with Scottie's vulnerability. We follow him in
his heroic but miscarried quest to overcome it. Remembering - when we can
- that Scottie and the other figures we watch are actually fictional film
characters, we are forced to realize that what we are trully exploring are
our own fears, fantasies and identifications as enthralled viewers. In the opening scene of the film, trauma occurs: we encounter
Scottie's impotence (and our own) while his colleague - attempting to
rescue him - falls from a rooftop to his death. From now on, Scottie I came to realize that Scottie's drama richly resonates with my own
experiences as a psychoanalyst. In my imagination he becomes an analyst
grappling with his unavoidable deep emotional involvement and unconscious
identifications; with the impossibility both of maintaining detached
objectivity, and of guaranteeing one's role as a reparative good object or
selfobject; with the dangers of grandiosity, of omniscience, of illusory
control. In my personal viewing of the film - coloured, naturally, by my
own psychic reality - it is a tale of 'transference love' but also of
'countertransference love', which crystallizes around a rescue fantasy.
Rescuing Madeleine from drowning, The first part of the film strongly establishes this fantasy,
accurately corresponding to its most ancient mythical portrayals.
Madeleine is Beauty, captivated and endangered by an obscure,
unseen Dragon. Whether this Dragon will turn out to be
psychological (neurotic fantasy or childhood experience), metaphysical
(the spirit of Madeleine's ancestor Carlotta Valdes, who had been ditched,
deprived of her child and driven mad) or criminal (a possibility raised
much later in the film), Scottie is willing to fight it: he assumes the
role of the Knight, determined to find the Dragon and behead it. At
this stage, as in the classical rescue legend, these three key roles are
sharply differentiated, through splitting and disavowal, which mask any
potential concordant or complementary identifications between the figures.
This defensive mythmaking necessarily deprives the participants from their
conflictual three-dimensionality: the valiant, masterful and
self-sacrificing Knight is utterly different from lost, confused and
helpless Beauty, and could have nothing in common with the mortal enemy,
the vicious Dragon. But here we are confronted with the film's first cruel turnabout:
at the crucial moment Scottie is incapacitated by his acrophobia and
vertigo, cannot follow Madeleine up the bell tower's steep staircase, and
rather than fulfilling his and our fantasy wish by rescuing her (and
himself) he is confronted with a second traumatic fall, Madeleine's fall
to her death. At this horrifying moment the first element of splitting and
disavowal in the rescue myth crumbles: we painfully come to realize that
our Knight is as helpless, lonely and desparate as his Beauty. This is
soon underlined by the guilt-enhancing pronoucement of the investigating
official, an unrelentingly harsh superego representative, as well as by
Scottie's nightmare, in which he is now the one falling into the
open grave, he is himself beheaded, it is he who is plunging to the roof
below, then into a void. We fully experience now both the yearning to fall
and the terror of falling, combined in vertigo. Yes, 'someone out of the
past, someone dead, can enter and take possession of a living being'.
Hospitalized for his acute melancholia and guilt, Scottie appears for a
while to be swallowed by his loss, to be mentally dead, as he Eventually discharged, Scottie looks for Madeleine in the streets
of San Francisco, just as Carlotta, Madeleine's unfortunate ancestor,
reportedly looked for her lost daughter (and as Hanold looked for Gradiva
in the streets of Pompeii). He finally appears to discover her in the
person of Judy, a lonely young woman who left home after the Now we realize how naive was Scottie's romanticized view of the
situation and of his role. The understanding which he had reached had been
so partial that it blinded him to the deeper truth. The further
discoveries we make later on make this realization even more poignant and
tragic. Knowing now the actual history, we are finally allowed to be the
insightful analysts, the successful detectives. Aware of Judy's real love
for Scottie, and of her moving anguish, both established in the scene in
which she writes him a confessional farewell letter but then destroys it
and decides to stay, we now abandon our full identification with Scottie.
Through the film's conclusion we find ourselves identified with both
Scottie and Judy, and therefore in constant conflict between their points
of view, and in full awareness of the pain involved in a deep relationship
between two individuals with divergent subjectivities. Having no longer a
Knight to rely on, we become ourselves the fantasied Knight, wishing to
rescue both our vulnerable protagonists from the emotional aftermath of
Elster's vicious scheme. The process is tantalizing. Scottie, dominated by a tenacious
Pygmalion fantasy, obsessively and fetishistically attempts now to mold
Judy into Madeleine, in spite of her reluctance and fear. Fear of being
found out, fear of being exploited once more, but also fear of losing her
identity, of being forced to maintain permanently the elevated fantasy
persona of Madeleine? Eventually, her love for Scottie has the Shortly afterwards comes Orpheus's forbidden look which will send
Eurydice back to hell. Judy - out of an unconscious urge to confess her
guilt and atone for it? because living and loving deceptively is
unbearable? or due to her longing for the persona of Madeleine, which
fulfilled her own potential? - absentmindedly wears Carlotta's and
Madeleine's necklace. Scottie, in a split second, guesses the truth. And now, in the heart-breaking final scene, the last Maginot line
of splitting and disavowal also falls, and with it the mythical rescue
fantasy completely collapses. Scottie comes to see the similarity between
him and Gavin Elster, the exact parallel between the two stages of
creating and recreating (as film directors do) the fetishistic romantic
object, the make-believe phantom figure of Madeleine: 'He made you over
just like I made you over'. The woman who was his object of compassion and
passion turns out to have been the creation of another man (we are
reminded of Nathaniel and Olympia in 'The Sandman'). He now finds himself
dragging Judy up the bell tower's staircase with enraged, ruthless
cruelty, almost choking her. He may be overcoming his vertigo, but he is
losing his humanity and the meaning of his life. His identification with
the distressed woman has been transformed into sadistic and vengeful
domination. In his By ultimately destroying the illusory Madeleine, Scottie is also
terrifying the real Judy, his flesh and blood beloved and loving Beauty.
Their final hug arouses dim hopes of reparation, but the sudden appearance
of a nun at the bell tower makes Judy stumble to her fall and death. As we
hear the bell, we are reminded of John Donne's lines: Now, this Bell
tolling softly for another, saies to me, Thou must die... No man is an
Iland, intire of it selfe... And therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (Devotions, 1624, xvi-xvii) A
review of the literature Perhaps the greatest weakness in the psychoanalytic studies of
literature is that they rarely acknowledge that several interpretations
may all plausibly reveal something about a work of art. Vertigo is one of the most intensely debated films in the
history of cinema (White, 1991). Although the vast literature analyzing it
is not usually written by practicing analysts, most of it deals with
psychoanalytic issues, being part of a unique trend in contemporary
academic film scholarship, strongly influenced by Freud and Lacan, as well
as by Marx, Althusser and particularly feminist thought (Kaplan, 1990, p.
9). A central figure within this tradition is Laura Mulvey, who opened
the debate in her 1975 paper, 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema'. She
interprets Scottie's pursuit of Madeleine as an erotic obsession based on
castration anxiety, stating: Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he
follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally
blatant... Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break
her down and force her to tell by persistent cross- questioning. Then, in
the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement... He
reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to
the actual physical appearance of his fetish... in the repetition he does
break her down and succedes in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins
through and she is punished (Mulvey, 1975 [1988], p. 66). While harshly accusatory towards Scottie, Mulvey judges Judy
severely as well: 'Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal
passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism' (ibid). A very different view of the film's dynamics was soon offered by
the interrelated works of Spoto (1976) and Wood (1977, 1989). Spoto views
the film as dealing with the attraction towards death, as well as with
'psychic vertigo - the desire to let go, to fall, to float through space,
combined with the fear of falling' (Spoto, 1976, p. 308). He examines
empathically Scottie's predicament: his increasing lack of freedom, his
identification with his idealized love object, his panic The film conveys... the struggle between the constant yearning for
the ideal, and the necessity of living in a world that is far from ideal,
whose people are frail and imperfect. It is a film of uncanny maturity and
insight, and if its characters are flawed, that is, after all, only a
measure of their patent humanity, and of the film's unsetimental yet
profound compassion (Spoto, 1976, p. 337). Wood (1977) shows how the original story of Pierre Boileau and
Thomas Narcejac, D'Entre les Morts, with its 'easy pessimism that
is as much a sentimental self-indulgence as its opposite' and characters
that are 'either helpless devitalised dupes... or the ingeniously
malignant intriguers who trap them' (p. 77), is transformed by Hitchcock
into a tragic portrayal 'of the immense value of human relationships and
their inherent incapacity of perfect realisation' (p. 78). He analyzes the
newly added figure of Midge, 'devoid of mystery or reserve', though 'one
senses... a discrepancy between what she is and what she might be' (p.
79), and its contrast to the figure of Madeleine, 'so much more erotic
because of its combination of grace, mysteriousness and vulnerability',
who 'becomes our dream as well as Scottie's' (p. 82). Wood (1977) traces
the way in which, in the second half of the film, our consciousness
becomes split between the points of view of Scottie and of Judy, and the
pain aroused by Scottie's inability to see the 'real' Judy due to his
clinging to 'the ghost of Madeleine that lurks within her' (p. 93).
Eventually, Wood suggests, 'Scottie's vertigo is cured... by finally
learning the whole truth' (p. 94), 'yet his cure has destroyed at a blow
both the reality and the illusion of Judy/Madeleine, has made the illusion
of Madeleine's death real... Triumph and tragedy are indistinguishably fused' (p. 95). Returning to Vertigo with added perspective, Wood (1989)
analyzes the opening of the film (the chase and the policeman's fall) as
'the most Wexman's (1986) perspective is Marxist. She criticizes Mulvey's
psychoanalytic ideas, seeing them as representing 'an idealist position,
which... can obscure the workings of more culturally specific codes within
the cinematic text' (p. 36). She discusses the commercialized eroticism of
the American film industry, and the way its demands led to controlling Kim
Novak's image and to harrassing the actress during production. She
unearths 'buried references to issues of class and race' (p. 38) in this
film: 'Madeleine's upper-class image entails its opposite: the lower-class
Judy' (p. 37); Elster's nostalgia for the days men had 'freedom and power'
glorifies exploitative chauvinism and imperialism, whose victims are
personified in the Spanish Carlotta Valdes. Wexman concludes that
'Hitchcock has masked the ideological workings of racism and xenophobia
beneath a discourse of sexuality which is itself idealized as romantic
love' (p. 40). In another challenge to Mulvey, Keane (1986) contests the view that
the camera in Vertigo allies itself exclusively with a male point
of view. While Mulvey views voyeurism as purely active and sadistic, Keane
suggests - with the help of Freud's work on scopophilia - that Scottie
also suffers in his voyeuristic position, is acted upon, is in a way a
passive character. The Orphic allusions of Vertigo are elaborated by Brown
(1986), who notices that in the original novel the hero, Roger Flavieres,
repeatedly calls the heroine 'my little Eurydice'. The Orphic story is
doubled here, and in both rounds Scottie loses his beloved by 'looking' at
her, by too zealously pursuing her secret. Through an analysis of the
sequence of scenes, Brown demonstrates how the battles in the film In Brown's analysis, Scottie is also 'the third in a line of men...
who were able to exercise the power of life and death through the
sacrifice of three women - Carlotta, Madeleine Elster, and Judy Barton'
(p. 37). They are all Apollonian combatants struggling with the
female-dominated forces of the Dionysian. In this vain, and in the context
of the film's Christian symbolism, Brown interprets the final scene as
Scottie's mythic victory over death through the sacrifice of Judy. Burgin (1986), discussing the film viewer's experience (see Berman,
in press), relates Scottie's urges to the Oedipal rescue fantasy toward
'fallen women' analyzed by Freud: 'A man recuing a woman from water in a
dream means that he makes her... his own mother' (Freud, 1910, p. 174). Goodkin (1987) relates the story of Vertigo to central
themes in Proust, including the centrality of a 'Madeleine' (the pastry,
in Proust's case) as an embodiment of a central experience of reliving the
past; both works portray controlling and freezing the passage of time by
turning life into art. In both, he suggests, the world of men is
singularly unkind to the protagonists, who crave maternal support. Palombo (1987), on the other hand, interprets Scottie's fainting in
Midge's apartment as revealing his 'raging fear of his dependence on Palombo notices how the viewer's identification with Scottie is
disturbed by the flashback scene; from that point on we watch his stuggle
'from the viewpoint of a parent, perhaps, but no longer from that of
another self' (p. 55). Contrary to many of his other films, here
'Hitchcock declined the role of benevolent overseer, leaving Ferguson and
Judy to fight the demoralizing effects of Elster's plot with their own
limited emotional resources' (p. 61). While Palombo discusses Scottie as dream interpreter, Rothman
(1987) appears to be the first to speak of 'his role as investigator, but
also as therapist' (p. 66). His project in the first part of the film
'becomes a calling... on which he stakes his entire being. By explaining
everything, he... will save and win this damsel in distress' (ibid). In
analyzing the second part Rothman emphasizes that 'no matter how violently
Scottie treats Judy... his goal is to liberate this woman's self, not
suppress it. Furthermore, he is acting out of love for this
woman... [who] wishes for Scottie to bring Madeleine back' (pp.
71-72). Rothman does not believe Hitchcock indicts Scottie's project:
'what gives rise to Scottie's monstrousness is his heroic refusal to let
his love be lost and his equally heroic willingness to plunge into the
unknown. His failure is a tragedy' (p. 72). Rothman's (1987, p. 71) view of Judy as 'unfinished, uncreated' and
therefore longing to be allowed to develop into 'Madeleine', is echoed in
Poznar's (1989) interpretation: 'Scottie knows Judy can become
Madeleine, that what is most beautiful in her can only be realized if she
has the courage to accept the potential Madeleine in her' (p. 59).
Poznar's admiration of Scottie and Madeleine makes him judge some figures
- and some scholars - severely: '[Midge] is as imperceptive and unfeeling
as Elster... And no less imperceptive and brutal are the comments of the
coroner who utters the kind of judgment on Scottie found in some critics
who are as convinced as the coroner that Scottie is the victim of an
abnormal and dangerous weakness' (p. 60). 'To renounce the Madeleine in us
is to renounce our deepest self' (p. 61). Hollinger (1987) points out that the film works through a female
Oedipal drama, and the desire it portrays for unity with a powerful
maternal presence (Carlotta) subverts its masculine premises. She views
Scottie as striving to break off his relationship with the maternal. Modleski (1988) returns to the question of the film's supposed male
viewpoint, and suggests that 'the male spectator is as much
"deconstructed" as constructed' by Hitchcock, due to his
'fascination with femininity which throws masculine identity into question
and crisis' (p. 87). Scottie's 'desire to merge with a woman who in some
sense doesn't exist... points to self-annihilation' (p. 94). At the same
time, his 'very effort to cure her, which is an effort to get her to
mirror man and his desire, to see (his) reason, destroys woman's
otherness' (p. 95). In his nightmare, 'Scottie actually lives out
Madeleine's hallucination... and he dies Madeleine's death. His Brill (1988) focuses on 'the failure of Scottie to discover himself
in love', in contrast to Hitchcock's romantic films in which quests lead
'to the creation (or recovery) through love of the protagonists' personal
and social identities' (p. 207). 'No greater horror can occur in a
Hitchcock movie than the failure or exploitation of the instinct to love
and heal, on which the recovery of innocence ultimately depends' (p. 211).
He points to the antiredemptive meaning of the Christian images in the
film, and to its ironic 'tendency toward self-deconstruction... the
incorporation in every proposition of its contrary' (p. 214). 'The desire
to possess one's lover is closely bound... to a passion for knowing, for
formulating and fixing reality... [but] Scottie and Judy need love, not
knowledge' (p. 218). White (1991) summarizes many authors who view Vertigo as
dealing with the impossible position into which the woman is placed, with
her unknownness and her eerie knowledge; as arousing sympathy for her
plight. 'Judy, like Scottie, may be looking for a replacement for a lost
loved one, in this case her father' (p. 915); Scottie risks death, but it
is the woman, 'his more vulnerable other, the part of him that is
umbilically tied to the mother, who dies' (p. 919). White, however, calls
for an allegorical reading of the film, emphasizing 'the non-self, the
divided self, what de Man, after Baudelaire, calls the ironic self'
(p. 931). Challanging certain feminist idealizations, she points out that
'the desire to merge with the mother is... extraordinarily threatening to
the daughter, too' (p. 926). Cohen (1995) describes Vertigo as transitional in
Hitchcock's abandonment of the legacy of Victorian culture, and
particularly of the Victorian notions of character and of gender
complementarity, moving towards his later 'character effacing' films.
Cohen compares the Carlotta story to novels of George Eliot or Thomas
Hardy, and describes the film's reversals (constant 'spiraling back upon
itself') as 'a deconstructive insight... into the way nineteenth-century
male novelists can be said to have constructed female subjectivity and
then passed it on to filmmakers like Hitchcock as the real thing' (p.
139). After
realizing Madeleine was 'constructed' we want Scottie to love the 'real'
Judy, which in many ways is no less a construction. Cohen expresses 'a
postmodern recognition... that experience is, by definition, constructed
and hence delusionary' (p. 141). Gabbard's (1995) analysis of the film emphasizes the defensive side
in the objectification of women, often involved in men's sexuality. He
underlines 'the need for omnipotent, and even sadistic, control of the
love object to deal with the terror of object loss at the core of male
desire'. Contempt, he suggests, lies underneath the surface of Scottie's
symbiotic needs and idealization of women. Gabbard relates this theme to
Hitchcock's own 'lifelong struggles with dependency, women and sadism',
documented by several biographical episodes. Quinodoz (personal communication, 1996) applies to the film her
object relations interpretation of clinical vertigo (Quinodoz, 1990), seen
as a warning system preventing the patient from being overwhelmed by his
or her split-off infantile part. In the first part of the film, she
suggests, the spectator - like Scottie - is overwhelmed by contradictory
information: 'What is real? Are the events happening to Madeleine real?
Magic? Madness? Are they fantasies? Lies? A plot?' In the last scene,
Scottie overcomes his vertigo when he is sure of being in a realistic
world, while Judy - who was throughout the film reality-oriented, and free
of vertigo - is overwhelmed by the magic world, and by sudden (and lethal)
vertigo, when she sees the nun. An
overview Our reading of The Turn of the Screw would thus attempt not
so much to capture the mystery's solution, but to follow, rather,
the significant path of its flight; not so much to solve or answer
the enigmatic question of the text, but to investigate its structure; not
so much to name and make explicit the ambiguity of the text, but to
understand the necessity and the rhetorical functioning of the textual
ambiguity. Comparing the divergent interpretations offered to Vertigo
is intriguing (see Werman, 1979). We may notice contradictions related to
changes in zeitgeist. Mulvey's militant feminism, in which males
are mostly exploiters, contrasts with the subtler feminism of Modleski or
White, in which men and women alike are damaged by rigid role models.
Similarly, earlier interpretations taking the plot at face value, differ
from Cohen's postmodernist skepticism, highlighting the film's
deconstruction of its own narrative. Other contrasts can be traced to the
way theory is utilized: Mulvey mobilizes Freud's work on perversions for
her ideological purposes, missing its subtleties, while Keane reads Freud
much more carefully, enriching our understanding of the film's nuances. On
an additional level, many variations in the way Vertigo is seen can
be related to (counter) transference reactions of the writers to the film,
to its protagonists, and to its creator. My use of the atypical term (counter)
transference conveys my view
that the deeper experiences of analyst and analysand are not inherently
different, in spite of their distinct roles and goals in the analytic
encounter; distinguishing transference from countertransference may be
superficial. This view originates in a long tradition within
psychoanalysis, starting with Ferenczi (Berman, 1996) and culminating in
the recent contributions of Ogden, Mitchell, and numerous other authors,
who conceptualize the analytic situation as inherently relational or
intersubjective (Berman, 1997). This development accounts for the growing
realization within clinical psychoanalysis, that the patient's
transference often involves genuine attempts to interpret the analyst's
personality (Gill, 1982; Aron, 1991), while the analyst's interpretive
work is often coloured - and potentially inspired - by countertransference
(Racker, 1968; Renik, 1993). This new frame of
reference has given valuable inspiration to the
psychoanalytic exploration of literature and art (Berman, 1991, 1993a).
The reader's, viewer's and listener's experience, whether they are laymen
or professional critics and scholars, can also be conceived as combining
an attempt to uncover and spell out the work's meanings with unavoidably
personal emotional reactions and identifications. The return of
subjectivity (and then intersubjectivity) into psychoanalysis coincides
with recent trends in literary and art scholarship, such as Reader
Response Criticism and Deconstruction, both moving away from assuming
'objective' meanings as fixed properties of works of art. The question of Vertigo's 'real' meaning becomes pointless,
if we assume that the film acquires a unique meaning for each viewer,
influenced by her or his inner world. In other words, we are now talking
neither of a hidden true content which can be objectively deciphered (an
assumption inherent in classical versions of 'applied analysis'), nor of
interpretation as 'merely a projection' of the viewer, but rather of a new
individual significance emerging in the unique transitional space opened
up by the viewer's encounter with the emotional universe of the film. While in literature we may speak of an intersubjective exchange
between author and reader, mediated by the text and by the transitional
space created by reading, in arts such as theater and film the process is
more complex. 'Written drama, on its way to the viewer, meets several
readers - director, actors, designers, musicians - each of whom develops
out of his or her inner world an interpretive understanding of the play'
(Berman, 1991, p. 8). In a parallel way, we could explore the way
Hitchcock reacted to the original story and transformed it (Wood, 1977;
Spoto, 1983), or attempt to study the impact on the film of his complex
interaction with actors James Stewart and Kim Novak, hoping to transcend
the one-sided (counter) transferential focus of Wexman (and Gabbard) on
Novak as Hitchcock's victim. My choice to write in this context of (counter)
transference also
hints at an inherent conflict between two potential reactions, neither of
which should be taken for granted. The reader's or spectator's response
may be experienced mostly as an analyst's countertransference, when
figures, work of art or artist are primarily viewed as enigmatic, as
needing to be explained, and at the extreme end as being pathological.
Alternately, the reader's or spectator's emotional set may be closer to an
analysand's transference, when the work, its protagonists or its creator
are primarily experienced as valuable and a source of insight. These
different starting points usually lead towards opposing views. (Counter)
transference is only rarely spelled out by critics (Cohen
describes her 'wave of irritation that that necklace gave it all away';
Cohen, 1995, pp. 140-141), but it is omnipresent. Its role can be
detected, for example, in the divergent ways in which Midge is portrayed
by various authors. When Midge paints her own face into Carlotta Valdez's
portrait, this is seen as a brave demistificatory act by Modleski (1988,
p. 90) and as 'a travesty, a degradation... a (Counter)transference also colours the way Scottie and
Judy/Madeleine are portrayed by the critics, in ways too numerous to be
listed. In her brilliant meta-analysis of the critical readings of The
Turn of the Screw, Felman (1982) demonstrates how the debate around
the story recreates many of its basic emotional themes. Similarly, the
rescue fantasy, a central motive in Vertigo, is recreated when
various scholars strive to rescue Judy from Scottie, rescue both from
Elster (who appears to be forgotten in analyses emphasizing Scottie's
pathology) or from constrictive gender roles, rescue Judy from 'Madeleine'
or vice versa, rescue Scottie from the coroner's wrath and from other
scholars, or rescue Kim Novak from Hitchcock. (The latter instance is
particularly revealing, as one wonders: what will Beauty/Novak do when
rescued from Beast/Hitchcock - go back into playing Miss Deepfreeze in
commercials, as Novak did shortly before creating, in collaboration with
Hitchcock, this role of a lifetime?) My own basic interpretation, outlined earlier on, was initially
formulated and presented after viewing the film and reading only Spoto
(1976) and Wood (1977). It undoubtedly expresses my own (counter)transference,
as evidenced by my life-long preoccupation with the impact of rescue
fantasies (e.g., Berman, 1988, 1993b) and their role in our work. While Freud first spoke of rescue fantasies in 1910, it was
Ferenczi who described a parallel phenomenon in analysis, when 'the doctor
has unconsciously made himself his patient's patron or knight' (Ferenczi,
1919, p. 188). Only half a century later the word rescue fantasy was
directly applied to analysts, by Greenacre (1966, p. 760). Contrary to
Freud's oedipal focus (an underlying wish to rescue mother from father),
my own interpretation of the rescue fantasy, spelled out in the first
section of the paper, emphasizes the object of rescue as a projected
version of the rescuer's own disavowed vulnerability, and the danger from
which rescue is needed - as a split-off version of the rescuer's
aggression. The resultant interaction I describe can be compared to a
mutual transference-countertransference enactment, of the kind which can
be used therapeutically if brought to consciousness and understood (Renik,
1993), but may also be destructive when it remains unconscious, when its
significance is denied or rationalized away. Reading more recently the rest of the literature on Vertigo
gave me a sense of validation, enabled me to refine several formulations,
and made me aware of problematic aspects of others. One of the latter was
my initial confidence that 'real Judy' resents the role of 'Madeleine',
and agrees to assume it anew only as a way to find Scottie's love. My
contemplation of the paradoxical nature of 'seeming' and 'being' for the
protagonists of Graham Greene (Berman, 1995), helped me realize that for
Hitchcock in this film, as for Greene in The Comedians, the nature
of the subject is enigmatic and far from firm certainty. I found Cohen's
comment about the viewer's yearning to find an authentic self (Cohen,
1995, p. 139) a good description of my initial experience. Cohen's (1995) analysis of the major difference between the firm 'victorian'
identity of L.B. Jeffries in Rear Window and the shaky identity of
Scottie (both played by Stewart) points to the risk in While Gabbard (1995) rejects Mulvey's emphasis on castration
anxiety, offering object loss as the film's emotional core (a view closer
to my own), he shares Mulvey's tendency to pathologize the film and its
figures, adding to it a focus on Hitchcock's own pathology. Due to this
unacknowledged global (counter)transference (artist and figures seen as
sick patients), this interpretation, similarly to Almansi's (1992),
belongs to the pathographic tradition in the psychoanalytic study of
literature and art. Spitz (1985) comments: 'Pathography... assumes that
creative activity does not represent for the artist a real "working
through" of basic conflict... This view severely limits the
pathographer's capacity to deal with aspects of creating that are
relatively conflict-free... [and] fails to deal with those aspects of the
artist's intention that arise in response to the reality of the developing
work itself' (pp. 51-52). In addition, I would argue, pathography alienates us from works of
art studied, allows a defensive distancing in which work and artist alike
are 'not us'. (Hitchcock or his envoy Scottie have voyeuristic needs; we
don't). Therefore, it blinds us to the ways we could - as psychoanalysts -
truly learn from art, rather than offer it our preconceived understanding.
Of course, creative and unconventional art has a better potential to
'become our analyst' rather than 'our disturbed patient'. (When using
these codes we should not forget how often we 'learn from the patient', so
that roles are reversed in the clinical situation as well). The comparison
of Spellbound and Vertigo is useful here. Spellbound (1945), while excellently crafted, is a deeply
conventional film. We cannot learn much from it, because it learned too
dutifully from us - namely, it offers a simplified version of an analytic
cure through effective dream interpretation, all 'by the book' (those
books popular in the U.S. in the 1940s, in which psychoanalysis was
glorified as a cure-all). The destructive potential of the therapeutic
encounter is split off into the demonic (male) figure of 'the mad doctor',
which leaves the idealized version of the (female) analyst-rescuer-lover
pure, effective (with the help of an omniscient father figure) and
victorious. It's great entertainment, but a far cry from the complex
emotional realities of actual analytic practice. Vertigo (1958) is in some ways its negative. It represents
Hitchcock's artistic maturation, a freedom to cast doubt upon conventional
wisdoms, including the power of psychoanalytic interpretation as a method
of establishing objective reality, as well as a vehicle of rescue. Like
its predecessor, interpretation plays a major role, but - as I portrayed
in the first part of this paper - a role which is illusory. In
deconstructing our rescue myth, Hitchcock gets closer to the subtle
emotional paradoxes and dilemmas which haunt all helping professions.
'Hitchcock's apparent loss of faith in the Interpretation, of course, was not invented by Freud. In an
intriguing study comparing change processes in psychoanalysis and in
drama, Simon (1985) offers the following definition: Tragedy is that art form which, by means of representation of
significant human actions... progressively analyzes and, by means of
continuous interpretation of those actions, painfully lays bare their
range of meanings and implications... The inexorable and irreversible
aspects of the tragedy are the correlates of the process of continuous
misinterpretation (Simon, 1985, p. 399). Simon gives several examples in which inexact and unempathic
interpretations (e.g., by the chorus in Antigone, by the Fool in King
Lear) push the protagonists towards disaster. Indeed, Midge's
interpretation of Scottie's love to Madeleine can be seen as exactly this
kind of inexact unempathic interpretation, which alienates him from her
and makes him utterly lonely; while Scottie's illusory omniscient
interpretation of Madeleine's dream plays a role in the process
culminating in Judy's death. Related questions are raised by Jacobson (1989) in his reevaluation
of Freud's and Jones's views of Hamlet. While casting doubt on the
search for the play's hidden a priori 'meaning', Jacobson points
out the preoccupation of the play with the problems and pitfalls inherent
in the mutual interpretations offered by its protagonists to each other: All the men and women in it do their best to understand the actions
of those with whom they are involved, as they have to. But what they most
effectively reveal to us in their attempts is - themselves... This... is
true not only for the characters in the play, but also for each of its
readers... It is because we know our understanding to be so partial that
we are bound to attend as closely as we can to whatever is before us; and
in so doing to attend also to the terms in which we try to comprehend it
(Jacobson, 1989, pp. 270-271). So, while we will never reach a definitive interpretation of Vertigo's
meaning, this fascinating film can help us interpret ourselves, and
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