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Double Indemnity and Jung

12 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in Psychology

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Anima, Double Indemnity, Jung, Jungian Psychology, Literature analysis, Movie, shadow

Double Indemnity, a film noir of 1944 directed by Billy Wilder concerns two sets of doubles. There is the “double indemnity” of the insurance policy: in the case of certain rare forms of death, the accident insurance policy will pay double the face value. In the case of this story, a $50,000 policy will pay $100,000 if the death occurs on a train. There is also a second, psychological and moral doubling of the characters.

Briefly, the story concerns a plot by insurance salesman Walter Neff and discontented second-wife, Phyllis Dietrichson  to murder Phyllis’s husband on a train to collect the double indemnity payment. But the real point of the story is the judgment upon Neff.

The story is framed by the wounded Neff struggling into the insurance headquarters in the middle of the night. Neff comes to his office and there dictates a confession to insurance fraud examiner Barton Keyes.

This creates an interesting doubling in the structure of the story. At the primary level, the story concerns the confession and judgment of Neff’s fraud and murder. Keyes suspects fraud and murder, but Keyes has failed to suspect his friend Neff as the criminal. (In fact, Keyes has even invited Neff to join him as a fraud investigator.)

At a secondary level is the play-out of the plot. The story is told from the perspective of Neff. Most of the movie consists of watching the characters play-out Neff’s confession.

The doubling begins prior to the opening of the action. “Mr. Dietrichson” was previously married. Phyllis attended the late wife as the wife’s nurse. After the wife died, the widower married the nurse.

Our story opens with Neff coming to the Dietrichson house (a “$30,000 house” in the Los Feliz district of Los Angeles). Neff is there to obtain a renewal on the Dietrichson car insurance policy.

While there, Phyllis asks if Neff sells accident insurance.  This starts the plot moving.

The perplexing thing about this plot is how quickly and easily Neff advances on this plot. Phyllis has had the opportunity to develop bitterness toward her admittedly difficult husband. But Neff instantly sees the plot and moves the scheme along even more quickly than Phyllis. Phyllis presents the opportunity to commit the crime, and also draws out Neff’s lust.

The lack of development of Neff’s joining into the plot is curious. In the first meeting with Phyllis, he comes onto her with remarkable aggressiveness.  The meeting ends with her telling Neff to come by in the evening, but then leaves him a message at work to come by Thursday afternoon.

At this meeting, Neff accuses her of wanting the accident policy so that she can murder her husband and take the money. The exchange reads as follows:

            NEFF

       Who’d you think I was, anyway? A guy

       that walks into a good-looking dame’s

       front parlor and says “Good afternoon,

       I sell accident insurance on husbands.

       You got one that’s been around too

       long? Somebody you’d like to turn

       into a little hard cash? Just give

       me a smile and I’ll help you collect.”

       Boy, what a dope I must look to you!

              PHYLLIS

       I think you’re rotten.

              NEFF

       I think you’re swell. So long as I’m

       not your husband.

              PHYLLIS

       Get out of here.

              NEFF

       You bet I will. You bet I’ll get out

       of here, baby. But quick.

Shortly thereafter, Phyllis shows up at Neff’s apartment (his address is in the phone book). Just before she arrives, Neff makes the following confession:

            “It had begun to rain outside and I watched it get dark and didn’t even turn on the light. That didn’t help me either. I was all twisted up inside, and I was still holding on to that red-hot poker. And right then it came over me that I hadn’t walked out on anything at all, that the hook was too strong, that this wasn’t the end between her and me. It was only the beginning.”

After she enters, they are overcome with passion. Each says to the other, “I’m crazy about you.” And crazy they are.

Neff knows it is wrong. He knows that Keyes will figure it out – and also that he can outsmart Keyes.  But what are we to make of this double, Neff and Phyllis?

She seems to be functioning in the story as “The Shadow” of Jungian psychology (one does not need to subscribe to Jungian psychology to see its forms being used in a narrative; many writers deliberately incorporated Jungian forms into their writing; e.g., Star Wars):

The shadow is a moral problems that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.  To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance…. Closer examination of the dark characteristics—that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow—reveals they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality. Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. (The Portable Jung, Hull, Campbell, Penguin, p. 145)

Neff’s discussions with Phyllis proceed in such a manner as if he already knows all that she wants and is leading her out even as he desires her.

Phyllis and Neff will eventually murder Mr. Dietrichson and throw his body from the train.

The dead husband functions as a sort of double to Neff. He is what Neff should have been (Keyes and Neff even discuss why neither has ever gotten married). Neff disposes of domestic structures when he murders a husband along with a wife who murdered a wife.

Another double comes to the fore after the murder. The daughter of Dietrichson’s first marriage, Lola (a rival of Phyllis) and Neff take up a sort of relationship. This one is not romantic and certainly not lustful. It is more of a father for a daughter. In Jungian terms she is the “anima”. She is a sort of soul, and “possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being.” (151)

Lola is thus a double to Phyllis, a double of innocence in contrast to the seduction and murder of Phyllis, but also a double to Neff. Lola interestingly discloses two important facts to Neff. First, from Lola Neff learns that Phyllis acted to kill the first wife by leaving the windows open during a storm when the first wife was dying from pneumonia in her bedroom. Second, Lola tells Neff that Phyllis was trying on mourning attire prior to the murder.

And thus, one aspect of Neff’s double informs on the other aspect of Neff’s double.

There is one other double to Neff, Nico. Nico is Lola’s boyfriend. From Keyes, Neff learns that Nico has been visiting Phyllis at her house at night ever since the murder: this is also when Neff had stopped seeing Phyllis so as to avoid suspicion.

Nico is sort of a stunted version of Neff, and also a more naïve Neff.

On the final night of the story, Neff confronts Phyllis in her house. Phyllis shoots Neff but does not kill him. Neff approaches and she says she loves him.  Neff takes the gun and kills Phyllis. Outside the house, he waits for Nico. He stops Nico, tells him to leave and go back to Lola

            “She’s in love with you. Always has been. Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t even guess.”

And thus, he rescues Nico. It is now, when a wounded shoulder that he returns to the insurance office and there begins to dictate his confession to Keyes.

In Jungian terms, Neff integrates and then dispatches his Shadow by receiving help from his Anima. He also redeems by the whole by presenting his integration to a sort of Father who judges and in a last act then shows mercy to Neff.  (In the final scene, Keyes shows up at the office, having been tipped off by the janitor. It is still night. Neff makes his confession. When Neff collapses due to loss of blood, he takes out a cigarette. Neff has repeatedly provided a match for Keyes whenever he smokes a cigar. This time, Keyes in an act of kindness lights Neff’s cigarette.)

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.3

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Uncategorized

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Adler, Fee, Freud, Jung, pyschoanalysis, Socialism, Therapy

The last post concerning this book may be found here:

In the last section of the chapter In Defense of the Analytic Attitude, Rieff comes to the questions of Freud’s “children,” those who followed after him. This question of Freud’s descendants will comprise the majority of the remaining book. At this point, Rieff looks generally at psychoanalysts, with some mention of Adler and Jung. Jung will also get an entire chapter of consideration.

Rieff notes some basic elements of a system. There is a canon, or a source of authority: “Every science has its established body of authoritative makers of opinion.” (69) There is also a system of conveying that knowledge through education. Rieff notes the poor quality of the education, which rather than delivery intellectually inquisitive analysts who can quarrel with their “father,” “Those post-Freudian analysts who remain orthodox never have had that healthy bout of rebelling which sharpens orthodoxy.” (84)

He lays a great deal of the trouble to analysis being made a branch of medicine. The discipline thus took on a non-productive empiricism and reductionism which was counterproductive to the process of analysis.

There is also the tendency to fall away from Freud’s anti-commitment. In the Freudian there are simply powerful psychic forces which seek for place in the functioning of the human being; there are also countervailing forces which seek to limit the demands of the id. There is then a negotiated peace of the ego.

Freud’s work was to merely lay bare the process of these competing forces: one welling up in the individual; the other pressing down from the outside, mediated by an internalization in the individual. To maintain an objective distance, and to prevent the patient from being brought into a more intimate relationship with the therapist, there is the necessity of the fee. The fee acts to “guarantee the essential impersonality behind the ostensibly intensely personal character of the psychoanalytic relationship.” (87)

But the pressure will always be present to select a new system of symbolic commitment to make such a competition of forces and the resolution of such forces into a meaningful whole. 

Freud’s goal was to make men “free”: you could do what you wanted with your own forces welling up and forcing tapping down. There was a need for strength to understand these forces and to not succumb to any system which would soften the blow and make the resolutions on its own terms. 

But the power of such knowledge proves too much, oftentimes, “For inevitably, at a certain point of societal power, knowledge seeks to transform itself into faith.” (83)

Jung did this by means of a “God [] rendered completely interior. The ‘Thou’ term becomes a function of ‘I.’” (83) But since Jung will receive a chapter, he is presented briefly. 

Here Rieff directs some attention to Adler’s political theory of analysis. Rather than deal with the ambiguity of a multiplicity of forces and turns in the individual life, Adler however sought a single master narrative, an explanation which gathered up all the individual examples into a single force and competition. 

Adler’s theory of an “inferiority complex.” Rieff explains Adler in terms of Adler’s socialism and class war. The feeling of “organ inferiority.” The North American Soceity of Adlerian Pyschology summarizes it thus:

Adler photo
Alfred Adler

“In his youth, Adler was a sickly child, which caused him embarrassment and pain. These early experiences with illnesses and accidents probably account for his theory of organ inferiority and were the foundation for his theories on inferiority feelings. According to Adler, each individual has a weak area in his or her body–organ inferiority, which tends to be the area where illness occurs, such as the stomach, head, heart, back, lungs, etc. Adler said that to some degree every emotion finds expression in the body. From his understanding of organ inferiority, Adler began to see each individual as having a feeling of inferiority.”

Rieff explains this in terms of Adler’s transformation of psychoanalysis into politics.

“Viewed thus, Alder’s psychology reveals the quality of his socialism; it was, said Freud, characterized by (1) protest and (2) self-assertion, the aggrandizement of personality. Here is a sudden swoop down into the very bowels of the socialist dynamic, with its inevitable cult of personality wherever it triumphs.” (81)

Rieff quotes Freud further on Adler’s system, “The view of life which is reflected in the Adlerian system is founded exclusively on the aggressive impulse; there is no room in it for love. It might surprise one that such a cheerless view of life should meet with any attention at all.” (82)

Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.2

14 Tuesday Jul 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Freud, Psychology

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Freud, Jung, Psychology, Rieff

(In Defense of the Analytic Attitude)

In the remainder of the chapter, Rieff distinguishes Freud from what came after.  The distinction which Rieff draws is between Freudian “freedom” and a “cure.” Freud offers no solution, only a “technology” which will allow one to understand the working of their subconscious. The end game, as seemingly proposed by Rieff would be the freedom from the “residues of religious compulsion.” (79) This may be achievable with a combination of Freudian analysis and behavioral technique. (Ibid.)

Freudian analysis “is the aim of science – power; in this case a transformative technology of the inner life….This is ultimate technology.” (79)

The purpose of “faith” is to mitigate suffering: “all religions have a therapeutic function.” (76) Jung sought to scoop up all religions with his theory of archtypes. An interesting observation is how Rieff sees Jung and Freud as inversions of one another. Freud understood “erotic instinctual forces” sublimate themselves into the “highest ethical and religious interests of man.” While Jung saw the process going in the other direction. (77)

Freud’s aim of “freedom” comes at a cost:

“What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility.” (79)

This freedom is of course something which is at issue. It is taken by everyone that Freud’s theories of pscyho-social development and dream analysis and slips of the tongue – however interesting – are unquestionably not “scientific.” His technology is simply untrue. 

What is strange is that his basic proposition that your sensation of ethical constraint is a trick society has played upon, that restraint is what is holding you back, mixed with Rousseau and Hegel and whatnot and developed by his followers (some who – as we shall see – were criminally insane) has become a default argument over against the “illusion” of religion and God. It is a curious sort of position to occupy. 

But on the same ground, by what basis do Hegel’s thesis-antithesis, Rousseau’s sociology, Marx’s economic history still have currency? It seems that people pick bits and pieces of ideas without ever well-understanding either what they believe or why. They could never articulate their axioms much less their conclusions. 

We live too easily in cages built of the thought of others. Freud in his effort to bring a technology of freedom foisted insupportable conceits upon the world. When his conceits proved to be nonsense, the conceits remained.  

Jung’s Proof for the Existence of Archtypes

11 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Philosophy, Psychology, Thesis, Uncategorized

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Archtypes, Jung, Philosophy, Psychology, Rebirth, Thesis

Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind. These primordial affirmations are based on what I call archetypes. In view of the fact that all affirmations relating to the sphere of the suprasensual are, in the last analysis, invariably determined by archtypes, it is not spring that a concurrent of affirmations concerning rebirth can be found among the among the most widely differing peoples. There must be psychic events underlying these affirmations which it is the business of psychology to discuss–without ever entering into all the metaphysical and philosophical assumptions regarding their significance.

C.G. Jung, “Concerning Rebirth,” in Four Archtypes, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Press, 1973), 50. That is, since certain images, concepts exist among divergent people groups, there must be a common source for this psychological structure: that common source is the realm of archtypes.

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