The Color Purple
Greetings at last, for these long spring days!
March news and headlines from varied venues in America and around the world have noted Women’s History and Equality Month.
Winding that up from newShrink perspective, today’s edition tracks the psychological — archetypal or universally human — feminine, in both the light (conscious) and shadow (unconscious) ways it shows up.
Three very different current stories and their key characters brought my attention, repeat-visits and focus to this.
Two are from the week’s local and national news headlines, ranging widely from great progress to unimaginable violent tragedy:
🔷 4 highest-ranking women in U.S. military speak about obstacles they overcame in the quest for gender equality. (CBS News)
🔷 Arrest warrant issued March 15 for suspect in Shanquella Robinson’s October 29 death (The Charlotte Observer, first reported on ABC News)
The 25-year-old Charlotte woman died while on vacation with five friends in Cabo, Mexico. Authorities there from the start defined the death as murder — a femicide. According to the warrant and explicit viral video shot live during the violent attack, the “direct aggressor” suspect is female — one of Robinson’s travel companions.
Third is a close look at a family of near-mythical figures from more than a generation in American arts and entertainment:
🔷 In ‘The Fabelmans,’ Steven Spielberg Himself Is the Star (New York Times movie review).
The three stories are detailed in discussion, pictures, video- and text-links below.
Here is some general history and background on Women’s History & Equality Month. The history.com piece includes references to more recent origins of the local Sonoma, CA, official celebration along with earlier American and international ones.
And a remimder on terms and concepts:
Depth psychology or psychotherapy, sometimes called psycho-dynamic, is one that in addition to conscious thought, feeling and action takes into account the unconscious soul, the psyche in psychology. From the depth perspective psychological masculinity and femininity are universal human functions with both conscious and unconscious aspects. Psychologically speaking we are all both masculine and feminine, regardless of our biology, physical traits or gender-identity and roles.
🔵
In today’s opening illustration above, the Greeks’ Amazon (at left) and Hindu Kali (at right) provide context from Jung’s depth/soul psychology with its use of myth to describe how our human psyche works. As symbols of equality and feminine strength, each is a character who demonstrates both powerful, even fierce, and warmly nurturing, loving and protective femininity.
In terms of myth…
Previous editions have discussed such Greek figures as Athena, Odysseus, and Lady Justice among those of other traditions. Looking at archetypes in this way — as they’re portrayed through myth, story, art, and religions across history and cultures — can be useful.
Such characters’ signature traits and patterns provide us with an external screen or map to understand how the same patterns become activated, appear and behave internally within our own psyches and lives. This enables us to relate more consciously to, take on new roles and tap energy from, the archetypes influencing us — like Mother, Lover, Father, Friend… the Daughter, Son, or Warrior, for a few examples. Equally or more important, this frees us from the enormous power that unconscious — therefore unrestrained — archetypes can have to control, utterly possess, even erase our deepest sense of who we are, our authentic Self beneath the many roles we play. Jung described this possession as our ego-self becoming identified with — confusing and losing our broader, deeper soul-Self sense of who we are to the roles and functions of the bigger universal archetype. (I think of this figuratively as when a role we are in starts to have a capital letter! As when brides become Bride… or Bridezilla.)
Here are a couple of resources for more on these figures:
Warrior women of the ancient world: 5 Amazon myths debunked (CNN)
Far from the man-haters of stereotype, and significant for today’s gender-equality theme:
Amazons translates as "the equals of men." And Greek poets called the warrior women "man-lovers." In fact, there were as many love stories about Amazons as there were war tales.
(As for Amazons’ legendary “removal of one breast, the better to shoot a bow and arrow,” it was known even in the ancient world as utter nonsense, result of an absurdly bad translation. In my view the translator must have been male; someone with breasts would not likely imagine this a good idea even in myth!)
On the Hindu tradition’s Kali (World History Encyclopedia):
Kali is the Hindu goddess of death, time, and doomsday. She is often associated with sexuality and violence but is also considered a strong mother figure and symbol of motherly love. Kali embodies shakti – feminine energy, creativity and fertility – and is an incarnation of Parvati, wife of the great Hindu god Shiva.
Kali, A Most Misunderstood Goddess (Kashgar.com)
In the eyes of westerners, Kali is a goddess dark of mind, body and soul, a mysterious goddess of death and destruction. However her story is far more complex and far-reaching; she cannot be easily fitted into a typical western narrative of good verses evil, and in fact transcends both.
A third archetypal pattern shows up in today’s stories and subjects.
The Eternal Child is also what Jung termed Puer (Puella, when surfacing in a woman, though Jung’s near-entire discussion and focus of the archetype was in men.) Puer is a good reminder that archetypes are not gendered, either in how they behave or in whom they are activated.
The mythological story and character on this is far more widely familiar, often embraced, and more recent than ancient Greeks or Hindu. For more than a century in both the United Kingdom and American culture and beyond, from our own childhoods we know Puer/Puella quite well: it’s Peter Pan.
Scotsman J. M. Barrie’s 1909 novel, not published until 1929, ultimately became a stage play, musical, film, TV, animation and child-audience fare. Interestingly, like the archetype the character embodied, often the original stage and screen title character part of Peter Pan was played by women — famously Mary Martin, wearing that signature pixie haircut, for example.
(For full disclosure, a key research theme for my dissertation a decade ago was initiated, ie. psychologically mature, adulthood in a perpetually adolescent, Peter Pan/puer-fixated American culture. This week my close veteran-journalist friend and reader happened to spot and send this piece that rather had my name on it. If you can get past distraction from the constant strobe-like bouncing pop-up pleas to sign up, there’s good information and perspective, especially from the psychoanalyst quoted:
Everyone needs to grow up (from James Greig in DAZED digital)
Whether it’s people who mention their Hogwarts house on their Hinge profile or literal white supremacists, culture is awash with adult babies.
🔵
3 stories
Pictured above at center: CBS Evening News Anchor Norah O’Donnell (dressed in civilian fuschia) honors Women’s History and Equality Month March 6 at the Military Women’s Memorial in Arlington, VA. With her from left are: Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan; Commander of U.S. Transportation Command Air Force, Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost; Commander of U.S. Southern Command Army, Gen. Laura Richardson; and Vice Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Admiral Lisa Franchetti.
Top U.S. military women say they were told they would fail as they rose through the ranks (NPR affiliate KRPS)
All four of the Department of Defense’s four-star generals or admirals who are women — including Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, who is based at Scott Air Force Base — said at one time in their career their superiors told them they would fail.
As moderator O’Donnell pointed out, only 10 women have served as four-star generals or admirals in U.S. history. All four at this forum have served at least three decades, including deployment in areas and cultures where gender-equality remains a more distant aspiration. Their remarks in both stories from the forum are interesting.
🔵
The next story, the horrific murder of Black 25-year-old Shanquella Robinson while vacationing with “friends” in Cabo, warrants a caveat and possible trigger warning. The long-viral, graphic video of the attack has been taken down and is not posted here, though I have seen it previously.
Among its psychological and archetypal themes, the case is a gruesome example of how from a psychological standpoint both masculinity and femininity — when unconscious, therefore powerfully unrestrained — are toxic. From the beginning while a lot of facts and information remained clouded, Mexican authorities have publicly labeled this case a femicide. According to the United Nations definition:
Femicide is the gender-motivated intentional killing of a woman or girl stemming from: Stereotyped rigid gender roles; culturally accepted discrimination against women and girls; unequal power relationships and dynamics between women and men; and/or harmful social norms that facilitate or simply deny-by-overlooking violence against women.
This definition doesn’t mention — and while long apparent, it wasn’t stated until this week in this case — that women, as well as men, commit femicide. Systems and circumstances with rigidly separate gender roles and unequal power position woman-against-woman — consciously or unconsciously — in competition for male attention, power, protection, money and other resources. The extent to which internalized misogyny of this competitiveness is unconscious, its destructiveness can be internally and/or outwardly explosive, violent and even lethal.
Here’s some more general resource data on worldwide femicide, from the November 2022 updated United Nations studies: Five essential facts to know about femicide, internationally and in the U.S
On the Shanquella Robinson case, kudos for relentless journalism by Kallie Cox, Anna Douglas and others at The Charlotte Observer, ABC and CBS News nationally and affiliates WSOC-TV and WBTV. Efforts since October by Robinson’s family, especially her mother Sallamonda Robinson, to untangle international red tape and get answers, arrest and justice have mobilized activists including the Rev. Al Sharpton and others. A joint letter from case attorneys enlists President Biden’s help.
With most recent developments on top, here is how the Shanquella Robinson murder case has unfolded in a terribly slow trickle of information and action between her death October 29, 2022 and March 15 last week. While it was a party-spot vacation, contrary to claims by her travel companions that Robinson died of alcohol poisoning, an autopsy report states a spinal cord injury with broken neck as the cause of death. The video of the attack shows the woman, identified widely as Jackson, forcefully beating Robinson. One of her onlooking travel-mates is heard scolding Shanquella by name, for “not even fighting back.”
It’s a scene at which it seems impossible not to ask, even while drinking and partying on vacation, what powerful force could have so possessed these young people, supposedly friends, toward such brutality by one with the frozen collusion by the others? Like a scene from novel and film Lord of the Flies, it’s been imagined. But only an unconscious power, the archetypal shadow unknown, unclaimed and unchecked, seems close to explaining it.
All stories from The Charlotte Observer, with embedded video from WSOC-TV news.
March 16 Update: Suspect Daejhanae Jackson in Shanquella Robinson’s death named in letter sent to White House (The Charlotte Observer with WSOC-TV embedded video)
First from ABC News reports March 15: Arrest warrant issued for suspect in Shanquella Robinson’s October 29 death (The Charlotte Observer)
Shanquella Robinson Death Investigation: The 25-year-old Charlotte woman died while on vacation in Cabo, Mexico.
And the overview,
Shanquella Robinson case: Timeline of Charlotte woman’s mysterious October 29 death in Mexico
🔵
For a needed change of tone and topic, this final piece brings us to beloved mega-star movie director and creator Stephen Spielberg and the story of his family — especially his enchanting mother, the late Leah Adler who died at 97 in 2017. After recognition with other awards this season, his “semi-autobiographical” movie The Fabelmans had been nominated for seven Oscars in major categories, among them Director, Picture, Screenplay, Supporting Actor and Actress, and music by his legendary decades-long collaborator John Williams. Astonishing recognition, even for Spielberg.
More astonishing, and rather a first, was the film’s utter flop with zero wins on Oscar night. This could of course just be strong creative competition from a field of contenders with fresh appeal to expanding, diverse as well as younger audiences.
By the time the film came out in late 2022 I had an unavoidable psychological take on Spielberg, his mom and dad. There had been so much early promotion with heavily biographical interviews and news features on the real family. Given that, I have wondered about the poor Oscsr showing. For some, perhaps the sort-of-biographical film might have been too real vs his popular creatively imaginative fare. Or maybe for others, it wasn’t biographical enough to feel true, only enough to seem Spielberg-movie-sentimental.
Here is where I need to confess that I haven’t yet, but probably will, see this fictionalized Spielberg stab at his own memoir-movie. Since the November, then other, interviews (linked below), I set it aside past glowing award-season hype. I haven’t yet mustered motivation for it.
Back in November I’d happened to catch the Leslie Stahl interview with Spielberg on CBS Sunday Morning. The movie sounded like a great addition to the biopic fare, which I so favor for the psychological dimensions and insights that the genre usually delivers.
Watching, I’d been touched as this very accomplished, talented, by many measures candidly self-aware and disclosing 75-year-old Spielberg reflected on his personal growth and development as expressed through his movies. One powerful example was how he’d overcome and moved far past his long childhood and teenage rejection of his own Jewishness. The aversion, he had come to realize, was in large part a response to having been bullied as a “nerdy Jew” when an awkward outsider kid. Spielberg’s maturing on this — a healing expansion in awareness — came through in his body of work in such films as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.
As its title suggests, The Fabelmans movie is primarily entertaining story; it’s not journalism or an interrogation (much less a therapy session.) So on that front the old journalist in me noticed, but wasn’t turned-off by, a lot: Multiple interviews’ many timelines that are off the biographical facts, by decades... Spielberg’s casually tossed-out facts that don’t fit together… and some eyebrow-raising breezy rationalizations left unquestioned beyond slightly, even by usually skilled Leslie Stahl. She’s interviewed Spielberg, as well as his still-living parents, in previous venues more journalistic than the current magazine-style feature. Here she comes across nearly as spellbound by Leah as Stephen (and as Arnold had in the 2012 interview.)
Then came a stream of quotes in Spielberg’s reflections, on that first November Sunday morning. Had the moment been in the psychotherapy room, not while standing speechless in my kitchen, it was the point in the narrative where similar shivers and prickly raised hair on the back of my neck announce things still not-quite-conscious that are surfacing but not being said or dealt with.
In therapy, these are the points where the real story, and the deeply difficult yet soul-nourishing work of getting to it, begin. In the Spielberg interviews these pivots are when the subject turns to his creative-supportive real-life mother Leah and her ex-husband, his once long-estranged workaholic father Arnold. Here this 75-year-old distinguished genius of a creative talent suddenly morphs. He is wide-eyed 16- or 17-year-old, utterly enchanted by the long-departed mother he blissfully recalls thus with Stahl:
She was Peter Pan, she refused to grow up. My mom didn’t parent us as much as big-sistered us… My mom always wanted more. She was the more mom. Enough wasn’t enough for my mom, you know. [when nudged by Stahl on whether that is good or bad, or perhaps both?, for a kid]: Oh, that’s good, it’s great… She didn’t believe in guilt. My mom used to say, “Steve, guilt is a wasted emotion.”
The interview continues with context of his parents’ split when Spielberg, eldest with younger sisters, was 19. Left out of the movie, which ends at the divorce, were supposedly multi-layered secrets among Stephen, his late mom and dad.
Yet from multiple interviews, some even televised with both still-living parents, some facts are clear and not at all secret.
With one another, both parents had played-out their prescribed, very separate, post-World War II roles in the era of Leave It To Beaver. Dad Arnold was a solid-though-workaholic, somewhat an early computer-age whiz, engineer. Mom was an intelligent, artistically talented woman stifled like many of her time in limited expected roles of housewife and mother of four.
It’s not surprising, or since the late ‘60s much of a secret, that Leah, like many of the time and situation, found her needed escape. Ultimately her more fulfilling, self-expressing fit of a life began as an extramarital love affair, with close family friend Bernie Adler.
In real life after the movie-ending, soon after the split from Arnold when Stephen was 19, Leah moved with two of their daughters and married Bernie. By all accounts, including Stephen’s, she joyously ran a popular LA restaurant along with Bernie for the next 28 years until his death in 1995. (Arnold’s long second marriage endured too, until he was widowed in 2016. Leah died at 97 in 2017. Arnold lived on to age 103 in 2020 — only reconciled with his son since 2002 after long estrangement.) Leah and Arnold did become later-life friends who shared vast beloved family. But they were not reconciled as a couple or married, as Stahl vaguely suggests in the current interview. (This like a sentimental attempt at a Spielberg-esque happy ending that doesn’t quite land.)
Spielberg reveals a “secret” now, he says for the first time: At 16 he had privately discovered his mother’s affair with the man who would become his stepfather. He never disclosed this later, to either parent before their deaths.
Despite this early discovery, Stephen didn’t just go-along with Arnold’s made-up cover story, of having sought and initiated the divorce himself, in order to “protect” and mask Leah’s accountability in it. Spielberg’s long-silent collusion with his mother also became decades-long blaming of and estrangement from his father. He says this even inspired his vilification of the archetypal Absentee Workaholic Father through the father characters in his films , most notably ET.
Even in widowhood after Bernie’s 1995 death, Leah still kept father and son estranged, herself effectively remaining the center of their triangle... and of still-enchanted attention from each of them. According to Spielberg it was his wife Kate Capshaw, not his mom, who urged and facilitated his reconnection and remaining 18-year relationship with his dad.
These kinds of triangulation, enmeshment, collusion — and most of all, weaponization of one child and children against the other parent, sometimes throughout their adult lives — are enormously common psychological patterns in all kinds of families. They can sometimes be even more pronounced and intractable in ostensibly intact, successful families, where they remain unmentioned, unaddressed, unconscious, than in post-divorce or otherwise fragmented ones.
What’s disturbing, and profoundly sad, with this family of so many lovely, gifted people, is how very long and enduring the pattern was — far beyond much awareness and growth of those involved. Spielberg, mom and dad didn’t so much share or hold a “secret,” as silently agree-on and live according to a falsely made-up script of a story —chosen over truthful depth and connection.
With Stahl, Stephen says: “It was a secret we [he and mom] shared for most of our lives… [and] I never had that conversation with my dad.”
At Stahl’s gentle suggestion that his mother “let you carry that,” he refers to how he had buried the memory himself — still minimizing her adult accountability. Then, to me chillingly, he deflects with another sunny description of his mom’s “holding court” at her and Bernie’s popular restaurant:
We used to call this my mom’s stage, ‘cause the patrons, the customers were her audience. She was performing for them all the time. [In photos still in her Peter Pan collar and pixie haircut long into her dotage. I keep wondering what this gifted dynamo of a puella woman could have become, had such important men in her life as Arnold and Stephen not only required her — but also allowed and freed her — to grow into a fully developed adult.]
Spielberg goes on to describe, despite his fundamental optimism, his capacity and appetite for “deeper dives” with the shadow sides of human experience, as reflected in such films as Schindler and Private Ryan. Yet the deeper dives he seems as-yet to make are with shadow depths much closer to home and Self.
Neither this late mother, nor the dad, is a monster, a paragon or a villian. Needing them to be renders them caricatures, erasing their fully fledged rich humanness from the story. The story with that is the Spielberg film I want to see.
Here are some links.
Steven Spielberg on making "The Fabelmans": "It was cathartic for me" (CBS Sunday Morning, November 2022. Both text and embedded video link included)
From psychological perspectives, much as I enjoy and revere his talent and entire body of work, which will continue, for now my take is: not cathartic enough — at least, not yet.
Spielberg: A director's life reflected in film (2012 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl). Text here. Parts of video are embedded in the above 2022 CBS Sunday Morning, also with Leslie Stahl.
As a point of contrast I found poignant about his father-figures, here’s a lovely interview that reveals Spielberg’s decades-long warm, creative relationship with the senior musical giant John Williams. I’m reminded here of James Hillman in The Soul’s Code, who notes that our parent-figures — whose primary task is biologically putting and keeping us safely on the planet — often are not the ones who best and most deeply nurture the “acorn” of our original, emerging and individuating soul Self.
Just one more…
Steven Spielberg's 7 Children: Everything to Know
Steven Spielberg is the proud father of seven children — some of which have followed in his footsteps
Winding this up, like millions of others I have seen, enjoyed and also hopefully matured some over decades of Spielberg movies, and I hope there will be many more. The psychologist in me is pulling for a future take on his own life, one that begins with the truthful eulogy-version story he cheerfully says he halted at the end of Fabelmans.
I long for Spielberg-magic here that’s more the memoir clearly trying to emerge. And less… fable.
🔵
Whew. With that at last out of me I’ll leave you now with that balloon from the opening…
Seeing purple
Repeated dream-glimpses of that shiny purple balloon in recent weeks had inspired today’s title choice.
The title image and color are of course from the 1982 novel by Alice Walker, the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Literature and the National Book Award in 1983. Here’s more on Alice Walker (pictured above at left).
The book’s 1985 movie adaptation by Stephen Spielberg, starring Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover in major roles, was enormously popular. And Winfrey’s production, along with Quincy Jones, of the musical version has had repeated award-winning runs and revivals on Broadway stage and in film, TV and children’s versions.
The above quote from Shug to Celie in the novel strikes a personal chord I had forgotten about before choosing it here. It brings to mind a bit of my late dad’s spirit and observant eye. By the time of his memorial service over New Years 2000 weekend, my parents’ officiating pastor was one who had not known dad, or mom very well. Neither did my minister friend, who created and presented a eulogy from a few of my random descriptions, no suggested content. Somehow this senior pastor-Old Testament scholar wove in surprising material like this quote, in what was an image-rich, spot-on capture of my dad.
One more thing… I discovered purple as the official color for Women’s History and Awareness Month only after this edition was well underway. My graduate institute had posted notice and photos in honor of the occasion. There, in the photos, were balloons.
Purple ones, of course.
🔵
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week, likely with a short-take after brief midweek theater-visit to NYC.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
🔵