Diamonds For Breakfast
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Diamonds for Breakfast
Saturday, 31 March 2007
By Dr Frigmund Pseud
Say what you like about our troubled times: at least it’s OK to like Moon River again. Last decade in Sex and The City, Henry Mancini’s Oscar-winning theme to Breakfast At Tiffany’s was ruled mawkish by zeitgeist-monger Carrie Bradshaw. But then, that whole series pitted romance against cynicism. If Breakfast’s famous opening scene on the footpath outside Tiffany’s jewellery store in Manhattan was in a Sex and The City episode, Audrey Hepburn would be hitching up her Givenchy gown to avoid piles of dog poo.
Although Truman Capote’s novella had much of the dog poo factor rinsed out for the big screen, there’s still that romance vs cynicism tension. The main character, Holly Golightly is given an elfin weightlessness by Audrey Hepburn - no mean feat considering the literary character’s drug use and prostitution – but weightless can mean transcendant or it can mean rudderless. Films that remain in the public consciousness are usually condensed into one image, in this instance Hepburn’s waifish girl-woman. The cynic in you sees the rudderless girl, exploited by the harsh city. The romantic sees the transcendant woman in the great frock. In the end, the male lead gathers both in his arms. That act of containment is the money shot, in which the audience is comforted by the integration of the two Hollies, the resolution of her tension. You walk out of the cinema humming Moon River and promptly forget everything but the girl and the tune, and that bittersweet lovely ache they left in your belly.
I have often seen Holly Golightly in an everyday clinical incarnation, lying slumped but wide awake on an emergency department trolley after a threat or minor act of self-harm. She is attired to seduce, probably because adult sexual behaviour was brought into her life far too soon and remains as one of few modes of engagement of others of which she can be momentarily confident. The same clothes on the same body hours earlier might have spelt out sex or love or something in between to someone else, somewhere else, like on a footpath outside a jewellery shop, or in a bar, or in bed. But now this lump of limbs and smeared cosmetics that is in my care is to my mind a kid. She will raise her head and see not me but what she imagines ‘the doctor’ to be, and within her all the unchecked forces of love, anger and fear will square off. Her version of me is likely to be loved or hated; she will either reach out and ask of ‘the doctor’ more than one person could give her, or (perhaps following a realisation that I cannot give what she asks for) she will hiss and kick and push me away. This happens every day, in emergency departments throughout the western world.
Trainee psychiatrists are taught that that the challenge for all of us is maturation. I imagine this as a process of integration of our divergent strands of being so that we can stop dashing from one to the other. Object relations theory frames it as graduation from splitting (paranoid-schizoid position – a black and white worldview in which you and those around you are either good or evil, loved or hated) to object constancy (depressive position – in which you understand that it’s not that simple! People are shades of grey). Although it’s hard to like a theory in which the pinnacle of human development is called Depressive (cheery that), I see enough of its sense in both my practice and in our culture to find it helpful. Affective regulation – feeling alright – is engendered by a realisation that life isn’t like a box of chocolates (sorry, Mr Gump). You do know what you’re going to get. Some of it will suck, some of it will rock. People will let you down and hold you up approximately as often as you do the same to them. Whatever happens, most of the time, you’ll cope.
Also pertinent is Attachment Theory’s connection of early life child-parent attachments with later life romantic and parent-child relationships. I think this is where much of Holly Golightly’s dramatic intrigue and attraction originates, as it does with so many of the big screen’s great characters (from Sunset Boulevard to Lost In Translation). Inside the Givenchy is a glamorous woman whose every outward element from posture to hair and make-up conveys sexual knowing. Inside the woman, though, is a girl running away from the father-like Doc Golightly, her ex-husband. What sort of parents did Holly have, such that she wants diamonds for breakfast? What went on at her family breakfast table?
The miracle of good parenting is that children can love then hate, reach out then hiss and kick, and it’s OK. Kids ask for more than can be given, and refuse much of what they are offered. And it’s OK, because the good-enough parent is wired up to be equal to the task, day-in day-out, they are the object of their child’s raging emotions and they show the kid they are constant, that they can weather whatever storms may come. That’s real love, good-enough care.
The tragedy of these fractured adult-children is that real love never came close. Having been abandoned with their fear and rage, or become the subject of another’s, their bodies have left their selves behind. Time and the law say they are adults, but our society demands that adults ask of each other certain things at certain times, forgoing ancient impulses, delaying gratification, enduring frustration. Still, these patients of mine ask of those around them what a child asks of a parent – to be everything, everywhere, to bookend the day’s waking and make safe the night’s dreams with presence in all things. There was one chance, many years ago, for that to be provided by one or maybe two people, and it went begging; now partner after partner leaves, or else they stay and exploit my patients’ needs to meet their own, usually through violence. This is the tragedy – no one with the emotional balance to provide for someone like this would dream of getting involved with such a mess.
Well, almost no one. For whatever reasons of our own, we that choose to provide therapy choose to deal with the mess. Of course, the rules are different – we can’t gather up our Hollies for a rain-soaked embrace to bring about a happy ending, but then, most of our patients have had a run of rain-soaked embraces dissolve into sodden messes before the last chord of Moon River faded. So we meet under rooves, in the dry, with the light on. We do not set out to provide what our adult-child cries out for; they learned some ways of being long ago that led them to expect metal and stone at the breakfast table, and dream of diamonds for breakfast. We cannot even give them breakfast for breakfast. But I suppose what’s important about breakfast is its element of routine. Routine we can show our patients –gentle, predictable availability. Routine might the natural enemy of cinematic romance and glamour, but it’s crucial to good-enough care.
Let the spontaneous combust, I say, like old celluloid in a hot projection room. That’s entertainment. What I hope to provide is containment.