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revdorothyl at 06:35pm on 24/06/2003
revdorothyl at 06:35pm on 24/06/2003Continuing my attempt to work through the malaise and writer’s block I’ve experienced since the final episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” aired on May 20, I converse once again with my Freud facsimile.
Freud: Are you prepared to talk about your dreams, now?
Me: I still can’t remember any dreams lately. Maybe it’s—as you say—resistance. In any case, right now I’m more interested in having you explain what you meant, just before you kicked me out of your office last time, about our having made progress. What are you seeing that I’m not?
Freud: What do you—
Me: And DON’T give me that textbook psychodynamic ‘what do YOU think?’ Call it transference, or call it my irrational dislike of being jerked around, but I think you owe me an explanation.
Freud: Hmm. You must have based my programming on the younger Freud; I’m pretty sure I never would have rushed to make an interpretation like that in my prime.
Me: Never mind that. Come on: give.
Freud: Alright. According to my notes, you kept mentioning ‘fear’ as being this determining force in your life, that which keeps you from trying new things, or conversely moves you to take chances, do something different, for fear of worse consequences if you stay where you are. Do you recall this?
Me: Yeah. That’s me: freeze or flee, and only when all other options are closed off, fight. So?
Freud: So, as you’ve described it to me, this television program, this “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” is about courage, about facing one’s worst fears and not being destroyed by them—even when the heroes die in the end.
Me: Well, it’s about a lot of other stuff as well: relationships, building community, growing up, change and redemption. But, yeah . . . I guess what first drew me to the series when it began was the idea of being able to revisit the terrors of adolescence and high school—experiences which I went to great lengths to avoid feeling or being aware of whenever possible when I was a teenager, by keeping my nose buried in regency romances and science fiction—and this time be able to survive and even thrive in the end.
Once I figured out that Joss Whedon and company usually had a good reason for putting my heroes (and through identification with the Scoobies, me) through hell, and that Buffy’s courage and compassion and self-worth would survive even the unimaginable load of misery that got dumped on her at the end of season 2, I started to think of the show as sort of my vaccination against paralyzing fear: a tiny taste of the illness, to allow me to build up some antibodies, figure out how I might deal with such a crisis in real life and develop some coping skills.
Freud: Ah, . . . yes. That’s what I meant. By the way, you might look up my account of the ‘fort’ and ‘da’ game. Anyway, for over six years you followed this series religiously, if I may use that term, using Buffy as an ego-ideal, the hero who protects the weak, battles demons and gods and what I believe you described as ‘snotty cheerleaders and asinine power-trippers,’ and occasionally dies to save the world and is resurrected. Regardless of what I might think of your adherence to an outmoded religious world-view—
Me: Do NOT start with me on that (“The Future of an Illusion,” my ass)!
Freud: If I may finish? Thank you. Regardless of all that, I CAN understand why you’ve been so powerfully affected by this T.V. program. I felt much the same about Grand Opera, in my day, as a chance to experience and begin to work through some of the great tragedies and challenges of human life. Both your childhood indoctrination into Christianity—please don’t interrupt!—and your favorite popular entertainment have in common this preoccupation with facing down humanity’s worst fears, for the sake of some greater good, and ultimately, surviving the battle, in the spirit if not always in the flesh. According to everything you believe, this is redemptive, is it not?
Me: Okay. This is all very interesting, but the immediate relevance to my problems here and now is . . . ?
Freud: Just a possibility for you to consider: could it be that what you’re really afraid of, now that the primary series (we’ll talk about “Angel” some other time) is ended—now that the ‘canon’ of “Buffy” is closed, we might say—is that you’re ready to graduate? IF “Buffy” was for you a school for courage, a series of emotional inoculations against the overpowering fear that keeps you from being able to work and love, then perhaps the real problem is that it has been successful. Perhaps, after so many years of using fear as the ‘engine which drives your life,’ as you said last week, you are simply AFRAID to find out that you can live some other way?
Me: What . . . ? I don’t think I follow you.
Freud: Look at it this way: as long as the series was ongoing, you could consider your studies in fear and courage and redemption a work in progress, waiting for the new information or new exercises offered by the next new episode. No decision was required, as long as you were still ‘in class.’ But now the series is ended, you’ve completed the course work, and it’s time to write your dissertation, you might say, or put what you’ve learned into practice in the real world. Change is never easy to embrace, and this represents a major change for you. But I think you’ll find it’s a good change, and one you’re well able to survive.
Me: Do you really mean that, or are you just saying that because our time is up, again, and you’re trying to get rid of me?
Freud: And that’s all the time we have.
Me: Hmmm.
Freud: Are you prepared to talk about your dreams, now?
Me: I still can’t remember any dreams lately. Maybe it’s—as you say—resistance. In any case, right now I’m more interested in having you explain what you meant, just before you kicked me out of your office last time, about our having made progress. What are you seeing that I’m not?
Freud: What do you—
Me: And DON’T give me that textbook psychodynamic ‘what do YOU think?’ Call it transference, or call it my irrational dislike of being jerked around, but I think you owe me an explanation.
Freud: Hmm. You must have based my programming on the younger Freud; I’m pretty sure I never would have rushed to make an interpretation like that in my prime.
Me: Never mind that. Come on: give.
Freud: Alright. According to my notes, you kept mentioning ‘fear’ as being this determining force in your life, that which keeps you from trying new things, or conversely moves you to take chances, do something different, for fear of worse consequences if you stay where you are. Do you recall this?
Me: Yeah. That’s me: freeze or flee, and only when all other options are closed off, fight. So?
Freud: So, as you’ve described it to me, this television program, this “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” is about courage, about facing one’s worst fears and not being destroyed by them—even when the heroes die in the end.
Me: Well, it’s about a lot of other stuff as well: relationships, building community, growing up, change and redemption. But, yeah . . . I guess what first drew me to the series when it began was the idea of being able to revisit the terrors of adolescence and high school—experiences which I went to great lengths to avoid feeling or being aware of whenever possible when I was a teenager, by keeping my nose buried in regency romances and science fiction—and this time be able to survive and even thrive in the end.
Once I figured out that Joss Whedon and company usually had a good reason for putting my heroes (and through identification with the Scoobies, me) through hell, and that Buffy’s courage and compassion and self-worth would survive even the unimaginable load of misery that got dumped on her at the end of season 2, I started to think of the show as sort of my vaccination against paralyzing fear: a tiny taste of the illness, to allow me to build up some antibodies, figure out how I might deal with such a crisis in real life and develop some coping skills.
Freud: Ah, . . . yes. That’s what I meant. By the way, you might look up my account of the ‘fort’ and ‘da’ game. Anyway, for over six years you followed this series religiously, if I may use that term, using Buffy as an ego-ideal, the hero who protects the weak, battles demons and gods and what I believe you described as ‘snotty cheerleaders and asinine power-trippers,’ and occasionally dies to save the world and is resurrected. Regardless of what I might think of your adherence to an outmoded religious world-view—
Me: Do NOT start with me on that (“The Future of an Illusion,” my ass)!
Freud: If I may finish? Thank you. Regardless of all that, I CAN understand why you’ve been so powerfully affected by this T.V. program. I felt much the same about Grand Opera, in my day, as a chance to experience and begin to work through some of the great tragedies and challenges of human life. Both your childhood indoctrination into Christianity—please don’t interrupt!—and your favorite popular entertainment have in common this preoccupation with facing down humanity’s worst fears, for the sake of some greater good, and ultimately, surviving the battle, in the spirit if not always in the flesh. According to everything you believe, this is redemptive, is it not?
Me: Okay. This is all very interesting, but the immediate relevance to my problems here and now is . . . ?
Freud: Just a possibility for you to consider: could it be that what you’re really afraid of, now that the primary series (we’ll talk about “Angel” some other time) is ended—now that the ‘canon’ of “Buffy” is closed, we might say—is that you’re ready to graduate? IF “Buffy” was for you a school for courage, a series of emotional inoculations against the overpowering fear that keeps you from being able to work and love, then perhaps the real problem is that it has been successful. Perhaps, after so many years of using fear as the ‘engine which drives your life,’ as you said last week, you are simply AFRAID to find out that you can live some other way?
Me: What . . . ? I don’t think I follow you.
Freud: Look at it this way: as long as the series was ongoing, you could consider your studies in fear and courage and redemption a work in progress, waiting for the new information or new exercises offered by the next new episode. No decision was required, as long as you were still ‘in class.’ But now the series is ended, you’ve completed the course work, and it’s time to write your dissertation, you might say, or put what you’ve learned into practice in the real world. Change is never easy to embrace, and this represents a major change for you. But I think you’ll find it’s a good change, and one you’re well able to survive.
Me: Do you really mean that, or are you just saying that because our time is up, again, and you’re trying to get rid of me?
Freud: And that’s all the time we have.
Me: Hmmm.
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