“You are not what happened to you, you are what you choose to become.” Carl Jung
If only cultivating and integrating our memory was as easy as eating a madeleine cake like Proust! According to Carl Jung, one way to access repressed personal memories, is through the collective consciousness found in works of art. Since film can represent the non linear terrain of the psyche, there are two films that stand out in my mind in terms of illustrating the negative emotional valence of nostalgia. The ways in which the “bitter” of the “bitter sweet” manifest in repressed memories, longing for something that could have been (but never was), the loss of families and cultures in collective memory, and how we can apply these concepts to our own “stories”. Relating to the fictional characters’ emotional struggles, traumas, and restoration, we can better understand aspects of ourselves. By recounting our own story, we can embrace our past and become the author of the next chapter. As Brené Brown notes, “Storytelling is an act of courage”, which leads to healing.
“The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”, the film adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s elegiac novel, drenches the screen in nostalgia. This is thanks in part to director Vittorio DeSica, who quipped, “The pictures I direct are nearly always melancholy. This comes from the contrast between my love and my disillusion.” Bassani, like Proust, was an author of memory….his semi autobiographical narrator is reflecting 14 years after the historical horrors of 1943. In all of his novels, the main character is the city of Ferrara…this “lieu de mémoire” where time and space intersect into memory, is ironically where he never felt he belonged. In the tradition of many authors (Adler with Prague, Joyce with Dublin, Faulkner with Mississippi, Ferrante with Naples ), Bassani’s novels revisit memories in an effort to retrieve that visceral experience of childhood and one’s formative years. The novel’s epigraph is a quote by author Manzoni, “Certainly the heart has always something to tell about the future to those who listen to it. But what does the heart know? Only a little of what has already happened.” Of the 183 Jewish citizens of Ferrara, only one survived and that was Bassani himself, who happened to have been imprisoned for his anti fascism when the deportation round up occurred ( which included his father). Through the point of view of the narrator Giorgio, the author transmutes the memories of this vanished world into a monument of words .
In a series of flashbacks, DeSica’s film captures the desire of the characters to freeze time. Rather than orienting the viewer visually, the scenes within rooms of the aristocratic villa behind the high walls of an edenic garden, mimic the sense of claustrophobia and an enclosed state of mind. The clinging to the way of life they know (strolling and bicycling through manicured gardens, chatting with friends at the private tennis courts), the false sense of security, the genteel seclusion, the light hearted ways of defending from reality, and finally the fatalistic acceptance of their doomed fate, creates an anticipatory nostalgia. It’s the nostalgia for time itself when you can sense it slipping away and you’re already missing what you haven’t yet lost. The narrator who has been drawn to the mysterious, aristocratic family of the Finzi-Contini since childhood, has always felt like an outsider…a middle class kid, suddenly subjected to the Racial Laws in 1938. As exclusion from the library, the public tennis courts and other restrictions and indignities pile on, he is also falling in love with the dazzling but aloof Micòl. Her character is one who embodies nostalgia, preferring the “dear, the sweet, the sacred past” to the present moment. He makes several clumsy and desperate romantic overtures but is rebuffed each time. She explains that they were childhood friends and she refuses to sully the perfect shared memories of innocence, “You and I are not normal people. For the two of us, what counts more than the possession of things, is the remembrance of things, the memory of things.”
For Micòl, the past is far more precious than the present, and she adamantly resists change. Her refusal to confront reality, and a creeping sense of death is exemplified by her protest against her family’s desire to refurbish the estate, rather than letting relics “decay with elegance”. Her emotional defenses against the darkening political tides, take on the form of denial, while her brother Alberto’s is one of willing withdrawal from the outside world. He remarks that he has no need to leave the walls of his enclave since everything he could possibly need is there. It’s as if he chooses to fade away, dying of a terminal illness before the war breaks out. Alberto will be the only one in the family buried in the family tomb, whose shadow looms over the golden days of youth..tennis, flirting, bicycling, listening to music, and dreaming of university. Giorgio’s intense pain from unrequited love and expulsion from the illusory garden, turns to self exile and resistance to larger forces bearing down on the country. Whereas Micòl serves as an example of the harmful effects of nostalgia …a waste of the present and even a danger, Giorgio’s hindsight of a lost paradise is a different kind of nostalgia and arguably more useful. Historical events overshadow the magnitude of personal heartbreaks and traumas, but the novel and film serve as “containers” of memory and they remind us our shared humanity.
In order to integrate our own pasts so that we can move forward in the mindbody journey, we need to apply this kind of mourning and bearing witness for ourselves and our own lives. Following Jung’s lead, a powerful way of doing this, is writing our own story in a way that captures who we are with self empathy and new self talk that will propel us into a brighter, more peaceful future. If you balk at the prospect of writing, fear not! The 3 paragraph core narrative devised by Dr. Dan Ratner has proven to be an effective tool with many coaching clients. Before I outline the core narrative, I’d like to examine some features of memory and the unconscious illustrated in another film, “Wings of Desire” directed by Wim Wenders. Heavily influenced by Freud and Jung, Wenders tackles the topic of the unprocessed past, (referred to in German as “Vergangenheitsbewaltigung’’), and the importance of not allowing our memories or emotional repression to block our present. Since our narrators in this case are angels, the film offers a way to perceive the world through an atemporal, spiritual lens.
Once again memory and history, the individual and the collective, intersect , this time in the city of Berlin in 1987. The wall which entombs East Berlin and the remaining ruins, is a persistent reminder of WWII. It is a city trapped in the past. The angels who long to become humans, travel through space but not in time. The original title of the film was “The Sky Over Berlin” which foretold the unification despite its history and the bad memories symbolized by the wall. Two years after the film release, the wall was torn down and along with it, its shameful memory. The angels intently listen in on the thoughts of individuals. To the angels, the historical point of view is trivial, while the thoughts of ordinary people warrant attending and remembering. Every person and every thought is of equal importance to them. Wenders fills the screen with mystical skies and seemingly empty spaces. As we “stroll” down memory lane with the angels, similar to the strolling through the gardens of the Finzi-Continis , Wenders uses desolate areas and “no man’s lands” as sites where the angels gather. They know that these sites hold meaning. The angels fill these spaces and act as keepers of the repressed memories. As Freud would say, it is these blind spots of the mind, these gaps in memory that result from repression. Just as the angels listen to the fragments of memory within individual minds, we must contemplate our own fragments of memories. If we want to connect with our identity and build up a new one, we have to remember, but also to forget. In other words, we look at the past, we take it into account of who we are now, and then abandon it.
One of the characters in “Wings of Desire” is Marion, a trapeze artist who finds herself alone, displaced, and in search of a new identity. The angel is able to communicate with her directly and he helps her through the process of re evaluating her past memories, not in a linear sequence, but in fragments. He helps her see that her past is not her identity, but certain memories can be used to fit them into a new narrative and an evolving identity. As philosopher Henri Bergson wrote, “The brain’s function is to choose from the past, to diminish it, to simplify it, but not to preserve it.” Part 1 of our own stories, we had no control of. As Micòl in “The Garden of The Finzi-Continis” says to Giorgio, “Children are always prisoners of grownups.” Childhood is a hostage situation but we get to take ownership of Part 2 and author the second chapter.
Our memories are connected to our humanity and identity. We are not only what has happened to us, but also the way we interpret those experiences, as well as what we dream of for our future. Jung understood how important it was for each one of us to tell our own story. We can do this is a variety of ways…in therapy, confiding to a friend, recording it verbally, or writing it down. By doing so, the subconscious is brought to the surface. This leads to integration and what Jung called “individuation”…in other words understanding ourselves. Writing it down helps us shape our mythology where we are in control. Dr. Dan Ratner has designed a simple but brilliant way to do this by writing a 3 paragraph “core narrative”, an emotional mantra of sorts that encapsulates our core suffering self . The first paragraph is for the purpose of embracing the fullness of our trauma. Write down the emotional themes that capture your childhood and the false beliefs that stemmed from the early part of your life. Paragraph 2 should describe how that impacted you as you matured and how it carried over into your adulthood. Paragraph 3 is what you can do to change the narrative and find your path to power. By recording our self story, we can reach a state of wholeness in which our potential is brought to consciousness. By creating a new narrative, we ultimately reach self understanding and self awareness. Most of all, we can attain self appreciation. As Jung put it so poetically, “We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.”
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