Prospero and Olive Kitteridge

“Psychoanalytic theory gathers up, and draws upon, insights that have found poetic form, indeed artistic form more generally, and have been expressed in literary term over the centuries.” Margot Waddell.

What I want to say is simple: older people can and do change, and sometimes without therapeutic input or more accurately with the therapeutic interactions that ordinary life and ordinary people, provide. In the two quite different characters I’m going to talk about we see psychodynamic forces at play: one is in a psychic retreat, the other on the edge of withdrawal into depression but for both something happens that enables them to be in touch again with good enough internal objects. I hope to put into words what that something is. I also want to talk about the importance of remembering in older age, an idea that is introduced by the first character I’ll talk about. I say characters - they are characters- though I find it difficult to think of them as anything other than people especially as I’ve got to know them even better through writing about them. The first is someone who lived in extraordinary circumstances in exile on a remote island where he found himself in a bitter and depressed internal place for many years – I am talking of Prospero, an older man and displaced duke- in Shakespeare’s final play “The Tempest”. By the way, Shakespeare was 52 when he wrote it : in an age when the life expectancy was the early 30s this can be considered old age. Interestingly Shakespeare and Prospero were probably of a similar age.

 Prospero was the Duke of Milan, an intellectual who immersed himself in his esoteric research while the everyday running of his dukedom was left to his brother Antonio. Perhaps understandably Antonio tired of this position of responsibility without power and authority,  overthrew his brother and usurped the dukedom. Prospero and the three-year-old Miranda were saved by the loyal and good Gonzalo who secreted them on a boat which took them to a Mediterranean isle, uninhabited except for Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax, now deceased, and the spirit Ariel whom Sycorax had imprisoned in a tree. So – the original residents of the island were Prospero and his daughter Miranda, Caliban son of a dead witch and a spirit called Ariel.

Some thirteen years later Antonio the usurper, along with his supporter the King of Naples, Alonso and his son Ferdinand are on a boat in the vicinity of the island, on their way home to Italy from Tunis where they have been attending the wedding of Alonso’s daughter. Using his magical powers Prospero creates a fierce storm which shipwrecks the travellers who are washed up on his island and therefore in his power. The revenge that he has longed for is within his grasp but we may suppose that the close proximity of the enemies from his past life generates intense anxiety too.

I find the Prospero of acts 1 and 2 an unappealing figure, autocratic, vengeful, and using unflinching control in his interactions with Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda. He constantly reminds Ariel of his debt to him – remember he released him from a tree - and his response to the most minor misdeed it to threaten to imprison him once more. Caliban has it much worse: he is constantly tormented and disparaged and is utterly enslaved. We learn that Caliban made sexual advances towards Miranda, and it is for this that he is punished. Caliban shows no remorse: perhaps harsh punishment and humiliation make that impossible.

Part of Prospero’s plan is to have Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, fall in love with his daughter Miranda. Over her too Prospero has absolute control, making her sleep when he wants her to and presiding over her relationship with Ferdinand. He comes across as cold, zealous in protecting his daughter’s virginity and again harsh when she tries to intercede on Ferdinand’s behalf.

“Silence! One word more

Shall make me chide thee, if not hate thee.”

In refutation of John Donne’s words, “No man is an island” he IS an island, represented by the island on which he finds himself, controlling others, even his daughter, rather than interacting with them, burying himself in his studies from which, we assume, he derives some kind of raison d’etre. In Bion’s important differentiation he seeks to know about things but when it comes to learning from experience he is a complete beginner. His state of mind suggests unresolved grief: as we know, without the work of mourning the legacy is often one of bitter grievance. This deep resentment is present in Prospero as well as being more flagrantly displayed by Caliban.

Shakespeare is describing – brilliantly- a man in a psychic retreat, which is challenged when he learns that his old enemies are at his mercy.  

Steiner defines a psychic retreat as a place where “phantasy and omnipotence can exist unchecked and where anything is permitted.”

Its function is to prevent contact with pain and anxiety, and it is an area where “perverse relationships (like Prospero’s with Ariel and Caliban¹) and perverse thinking are sanctioned. Steiner thinks that “Traumatic experiences with violence or neglect in the environment lead to the internalization of violent disturbed objects which at the same time serve as suitable receptacles for the projection of the individual’s own destructiveness.” Hence the usefulness in a psychic sense of Caliban to Prospero. He is also useful as a hewer of wood and fetcher of water!

 Steiner also sees the retreat as a “resting place” that gives some kind or relief from pain but stresses that no development can occur; that can only happen as the person emerges from it.

When we see Prospero in Act 4, he is more mellow, taking an altogether different tone with Ferdinand.

If I have too austerely punished, you.

Your compensation makes amends; for I

Have given you here a third of mine own life,

Or that for which I live.

 

 

What has made the difference? What has enabled his emergence from his metaphorical as well as his literal cell? He has been a hidden onlooker over all the love scenes between Ferdinand and Miranda and I think finds himself unexpectedly moved by the tenderness between them. His cold detachment begins to thaw, and he becomes more like a father that a manipulating puppeteer. Miranda is forth right and plain spoken in her declaration of her love for Ferdinand. Just as her guilelessness delights audiences so its freshness and innocence melt her father’s heart. Does it remind him of the love between him and her long dead mother in a way that revives his more loving feelings? The psychic retreat – intensified on the island- into an esoteric intellectual life in Milan may have related to unresolved grief over the early death of his wife.

I wonder if the news that his enemies were entering his ambit painfully revived these times. Perhaps as well as stimulating hopes of vengeance also it also, at an unconscious level, caused a crack in the carapace of his psychic defences.

 “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” sings Leonard Cohen.

It made a window through which he could begin to see and be affected by the love, both innocent and passionate, of Miranda for Ferdinand. Very significantly I think he moved from omnipotently regarding this as a courtship he had orchestrated as part of his plan for revenge to something that was theirs, that had its own life that was nothing to do with him.

When later he hears of the perfidy of Caliban and his conspirators plotting against his life, he is angry, then weary and then philosophical.

” We are such stuff.

As dreams are made on, and our little life.

Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.

Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled.

Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

If you be pleased, I’ll retire into my cell

And there repose. A turn or two I’ll walk.

To still my beating mind.”

 

 

 

 

This is a solemn acceptance of himself as an old man, struggling to process a maelstrom of emotions. As he moves out of the retreat, he is clearly embarking on the difficult task of facing the reality of aging and death. Money Kyrle comes to mind. He describes the facts of life (which I will paraphrase) as follows:

First, we are the product of two people having sex( in the sense of ovum and sperm coming together); second, we will all get older and die and third we rely on the help other people can give us.

These were so clearly disavowed in the Prospero we saw in the first three acts of the play: he did not convey that he was aging, he seemed a perverse protector of his daughter’s virginity and he was utterly omnipotent.

Miranda and Ferdinand recognise his need for contemplation and perhaps of his tormented inner conflict when they respond.

“We wish your peace.”

Left with Ariel his mind returns to Caliban who has intrigued with the drunken sailors’, survivors of the shipwreck to overthrow Prospero and possess the isle. When the Ariel tells him this Prospero is filled with fury and the desire for vengeance. In his outrage he cannot of course see that he too is a plotter like them! We see him oscillating between a paranoid/schizoid

 

“I will plague them all,

Even to roaring.”

and a more depressive state of mind.

 

 

Act 5 reveals a much-altered Prospero. His period of quiet contemplation has done its work. Ariel recounts the sufferings of the shipwrecked nobles and adds.

“Your charm so strongly

Works ‘em

That if you beheld them, your affections.

Would become tender.”

This has a powerful impact on Prospero who responds:

P “Dost think so?”

A “Mine would, sir, were I human.”

Ariel is holding up a mirror to Prospero who responds.

“And mine shall.

Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling

Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,

One of their kind”

And in the same speech

“Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury

Do I take part. The rarer action is.

In virtue than in vengeance.”

We could frame this as Ariel encouraging Prospero to mentalise.

I remember when I was a student a wise academic saying to us that Prospero is the agent of his own regeneration. This is both true and not true. There are deep changes in his inner world that mean he is emerging from his cell, his psychic retreat. As I have said my view is that the love between Miranda and Ferdinand touches him at a profound level: it puts him in touch with the loving relationship he has lost and with it a part of himself, the capacity to love in a non-narcissistic, possessive way.

Steiner again, “The process of regaining parts of the self lost through projective identification involves facing the reality of what belongs to the object and what belongs to the self, and this is established most clearly through the experience of loss.”

 In this Act Prospero’s words are beautiful and the tone is elegiac, solemn, and loving. In this frame of mind, he can give up his reliance on magical powers (magical thinking) in favour of the vicissitudes of life.

“But this rough magic

I here abjure……

I’ll drown my book.”

He can let go of his reliance on a powerful defensive structure and is on the brink of finding something that he has lost, the self he was. This theme is taken up by the prosaic but good Gonzalo who says, of the island.

It is a place where

(And) Ferdinand her brother found a wife

Where he himself was lost, Prospero his dukedom

In a poor isle; and all of us ourselves

When no man was his own.

I think he is unwittingly making a particularly important point here: for maturity to develop an individual must survive a time of being lost and confused and the fear and sadness which comes with it.

And so, the play moves to an end, with Prospero forgiving his enemies - even the treacherous Caliban. He tells the court figures that he will recount his history and talks of his plans – this casts a sombre note.

“And so, to Naples

Where I hope to see the nuptial of our dearly beloved solemnized.

And thence retire me to my Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave.”

 He is prepared to go back to the beautiful, flawed real world where life is finite and part of the work of later life is making one’s peace with the life one has had and coming to terms with death.

I think of Freud’s lyrical paper “On Transience” in which he says “Mourning, as we know, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has consumed itself, and our libido is once freer (in so far as we are still young and active) to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.”

I am interested in the parentheses – what happens if we are not young and active? – and what of Prospero’s other two thoughts (“Every third thought will be my grave”)? Perhaps, when he is back in his dukedom, he will have to face the pain of acknowledging that he did not rule well, and he will have to process that. Seeing a love that was both innocent and sexual (between Miranda and Ferdinand) meant he had at last to fully mourn the loss of his wife and seeing Milan may mean his failure as the protector of his small realm has to be faced..

And I wonder ---- what did the writing of the play mean for the aging Shakespeare?

I think in older life, if mourning has been able to be lived through and, importantly, there is safety in the immediate environment, there is an intense turning to the inner life, to memories, recollections, musings. This capacity to be in two worlds is beautifully conveyed by the poet Norman McCaig. I see the two places, Assynt, and Edinburgh as metaphors for states of mind, past and present, inner, and outer. Assynt is an area in the far north west.

Assynt and Edinburgh

From the corner of Scotland, I know so well
I see Edinburgh sprawling like seven cats
on its seven hills beside the Firth of Forth.

And when I’m in Edinburgh I walk
amongst the mountains and lochs of that corner
that looks across the Minch to the Hebrides.

Two places I belong to as though I was born
in both of them.

They make every day a birthday,
giving me gifts wrapped in the ribbons of memory.
I store them away, greedy as a miser.

 And so, I hope, back in Milan, in some of his thoughts Prospero will imaginatively inhabit the isle of his exile but with some feelings of appreciation. After all it was the place where his only daughter grew up, where he had the company of the enchanting Ariel and where ultimately, he found his more loving self. Perhaps in these recollections the island will become what it was, a place in time and space, and internally, less of a psychic retreat.

 

 

 

 

 

This theme of remembering, contemplating the past and coming to terms with regrets and disappointments is movingly explored in Elizabeth Strout’s novel, “Olive Again.” Strout has said that her preoccupation as a writer is exploring the interior worlds of ordinary people and Olive is one of these not so ordinary ordinary people. As we follow Olive from her 70’s into her 80’s the trials and indignities of growing older are vividly and sensitively described.

 When we first meet her, in her early 70’s, she is a retired Maths teacher and a widow – forthright in her opinions, blunt but honest and very curious. She is in the midst of an uncertain courtship with a widowed Harvard professor. She has lived all her life in a small town in Maine and he is a more recent and reluctant arrival there. Despite their differences they are happy until Jack dies suddenly, and Olive is once more alone and now about 80.

 Some years later she endures a catastrophic heart attack which leaves this independent, confident woman very afraid. Strout places great emphasis on the professional kindness, but kindness none the less, of Olive’s doctor with whom she falls in love, in a rueful kind of a way, at some level perhaps herself recognising this as transference. But his interest in her, his belief that she will recover is a huge factor in that recovery. It is not a straightforward process.

At first Olive has carers living in and is forced to depend on the kindness of strangers including the Trump supporting Betty. Despite her frailty and vulnerability Olive can still be interested in others and takes Betty to task for her unkind, racist treatment of a Somali fellow carer. Later, she can ask “What is your life like, Betty?” and convey a genuine interest in the answer. This frank questioning, sometimes too frank, accompanied by a strong wish to know, has been Olive’s hallmark throughout her life and it is a relief to the reader to see it still alive in her. That essential curiosity is what Klein called the epistemophilic impulse, and Bion referred to as the K drive. Its huge significance has been taken up by Philip Stokoe and is the subject of his recent book “The Curiosity Drive. “He has this to say

“Our predicament is both remarkable and terrifying. If we engage with life from the position of benign enquiry, we can never be bored or disengaged but we might see things that have no meaning, or we might see things that are terrifying. In the face of such discoveries human beings will seek a way out. ……….It is important to remember that certainties belong to the P/S universe and have absolutely no discourse with truth. Indeed, any search for truth is dangerous because it will lead us back to the very things that triggered the anxieties in the first place”

This is very helpful when thinking about Olive whom we see moving from a p/s knowing to a much more profound thoughtfulness.

 When the carers leave, because she is deemed well, she becomes more depressed and fearful in her own home, so fearful that she is persuaded to move into sheltered housing where at first, she meets many older people she doesn’t like before she meets the few she does.

Olive must survive the ignominy of “poopie panties” which she collects in the early morning from the store in a nearby town so that no one will know her secret. But she also makes a new friend, someone with whom she can have real exchanges as together they muse on their relationships. Their burgeoning friendship is described with all the tenderness of a romantic love affair, though it is not that. Their inner lives are active, full of people from the past and there is a touching care for one another. They are of course mutual containers in that their attentive listening to each other enables a processing of experiences. They have in common a rueful sense of not having been very good mothers. There is a painful honesty in their acknowledgment that while their son and daughter (only children both) love them they have had to live at some distance from their mothers. This is no longer a source of bitterness for Olive because reflecting with her friend helps her understand why this is essential for her son.

Their friendship reminds me of my dementing mother in law’s friendship with another dementing older woman in the Psycho-geriatric ward of the Western Isles Hospital. Before I went there, I imagined “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” would be emblazoned over the door of the ward but I was so wrong : it was a haven for her, a place where she could emerge from the psychic retreat of bitter grievance and feel and receive affection, something she’d not been able to accept from or to give to her family for some time. As she and her friend walked arm in arm along the corridors, they had the blitheness of two young women walking through their Hebridean village.

 I want to sneak in a poem I wrote about her.

Here she is, Christianne, before the loneliness of widowhood arrived, but old and struggling. Easter is peat cutting time on the islands, a two person job: one cuts the turf while the other lifts the slabs on to the bank. Backbreaking work!

For Christianne

I am cutting her peats

Standing for hours in the sleety rain

Plunging the blade in the black mud moor

Down, jerk, up, down, jerk, up

As once she churned butter on a summer’s day.

I see white in the hair of her son’s bent head

As his still strong hands lift the cold peat slabs.

Each has a hollow where his thumb has held.

The sky is grey, the gulls fly low.

Her kitchen is smoky, steamy warm.

She opens the small stove door and thrusts

Another fibrous parcel into the dull red ash.

I like to see her there, moving lightly

From kettle to broth pot to hot fire flames

Rearranging her pattern of spouts and handles and sticking up spoons

Not shivering through a cold wet morning

Bowed with peat buckets in the wind and rain

While her old man weeps that he is weak and she an aged queen.

 

Back to Olive. When she has been in the sheltered housing complex for some time Olive asks her son, from whom she had been quite estranged before her heart attack, to bring her rosebushes and a typewriter. She spends a lot of her time thinking, remembering, and typing out her memories. It is very clear that this is for herself, her coming to terms with what her life has been, a contemplative activity. Though frail, she is very much alive. I remember Winnicott’s words “I hope I am alive when I die.”

The end of the novel, not the end of Olive who is now in her mid-80s, is beautifully elegiac and I will read it to you. I would like to let her words end my presentation.

“But it was almost over, after all, her life.”

“And so, she sat, watching the clouds high up there, and she looked at the roses, which were pretty amazing after just one year. She leaned forward and peered at the rosebush – why, there was another bud coming right behind that bloom! Boy did that make her happy, the sight of that fresh new rosebud. And then she sat back and thought about her death, and the sense of wonder and trepidation returned to her.

It would come.

…………

Then she writes-

“I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”

Olive stuck her cane to the ground and hoisted herself up. It was time to go get Isabelle for supper.

 

 

 

[1] but Ariel is also a container