Conclusion (Dreamcatchers, Hallucinogenic Drugs, Alternative Medicine)

There are implications to things that are not text driven in American society that can be filtered through the psychoanalytic lens.
 For example, dream catchers.

 The tradition of dream catchers originally stemmed from Native American culture. They were made from, usually, a hoop of willow (a shape which symbolized strength and unity), small bits of beading, feathers and arrow heads placed decoratively and then hung over the head of the bed board. The dream catcher was intended to protect a sleeping individual from unhappy or threatening dreams that move through the air, catching those in the center webbing, and allowing happy dreams to pass through. The negative dreams that get stuck in the webbing and are unable to pass through to the individual's unconscious are destroyed when the sunlight touches them at dawn. Lore dictates that "the good dreams know how to pass through the dream catcher, slipping through the outer holes and slide down the soft feathers so gently that many times the sleeper does not know that he/she is dreaming. The bad dreams not knowing the way get tangled in the dream catcher and perish with the first light of the new day." Now, I'm not sure about everyone in the audience, but I do know that when I was a child and I had bad dreams that would keep me awake, my parents gave me a dream catcher, telling me it would help me to sleep and protect me from the scary things that were terrorizing me in the night. I was so excited when I received it, and immediately put full faith into it. And you know, it worked. But maybe not for the reason I thought it did or the Native Americans thought it did. It's a psychological trick of sorts. When I did experience bad dreams with the dream catcher hanging, my mother would come into my room to hear me crying, would blow on the dream catcher and move it to a different location, saying that the door was blocking the good dreams from entering, or the cob webs just needed to be shaken off to make it as good as new. And again I believed this. A dream catcher works because someone told you it would. We tend to place faith in wives' tales or folk lore, things that have been continuously stated. It gives us something to believe in, something to put faith in, and ultimately makes our resolve stronger. A dream catcher is a mind trick, a tool used to instill faith in a material object that might "keep the demons away", and there is where the true power of a dream catcher is, in your head. Mind over matter, you believe it and thus it is so. A dream catcher works on a subconscious level to ease the mind and provide an outlet of belief therefore because the child believes it keeps the bad dreams away and has faith in it, it works.

 Another example of something easily psychoanalyzed is hallucinogenic drugs, such as mushrooms.

  "Magic mushrooms" have been used for as far back as 9000 BC in North African indigenous cultures. The Aztecs used a substance called teonanácatl, which means "flesh of the gods," that many believe was magic mushrooms. Clearly, there is a connotation involved with magic mushrooms, they are highly illegal and do cause impairment called "trips". However, what really becomes psychoanalytical is the reason mushrooms are taken by users, the euphoria they provide. With the increased boost in serotonin, the brain is elevated to a state that is quite unlike our uninhibited conscious. Experiences generally last 3-8 hours although can feel like days in length. Most users experience "waves of intoxication with feelings of inner warmth, and colors appearing unusually vibrant or beautiful. Perception feels enhanced and people feel able to interpret reality in a new and different way." Intensity of thought as well as expansion of the conscious is noted.The anterior singular cortex as well as the hippocampus (both are responsible dreaming) are also activated. In a college conducted study, 1/3 of the people given the mushrooms said they had the best and single most spiritual experience of their lives, while 2/3 of the participants said they would do it again(statistics taken from above video). So clearly, there is a psychoanalytical aspect behind shrooms. People choose to take them for the dreamlike state they can enact, for their ability to escape the reality and retreat to the surreal and enhanced recesses of their brain, unlocking the unnatural to experience the otherworldly. They find that mushrooms give them the ability to answer existential questions about themselves and their lives that they otherwise would not be able to touch base with. Thus mushrooms are popular in their ability to allow individuals to disconnect with the real world, and imagine a dream-like scape in which their mind wholly paints on its own the reality it conjures. The mind altering state that people wish to achieve with the use of mushrooms makes it a very psychoanalytical concept.

Our last metatextual topic includes alternative medicine.
Types of Alternative/Complementary Medicines

Alternative medicine, also known as holistic therapy, is an approach to medicine beyond that of mere prescriptions and pills. Holistic doctors believe that to achieve true health, there must be a balance between the physical and mental state of the patient. Specifically here, we will focus on holistic medicines aimed at the mind.
Both standard and holistic medicine recognizes the gravity between a balance in the mind and body for the overall health of an individual. Studies have concluded that healing is directly attuned to good emotional and mental health. Now, there are tons of different types of of medicines designed specifically for the mind, but three of the most popularly used ones include: meditation, hypnosis and biofeedback. Hypnosis and meditation are actually fairly similar as well, and have been recognized as meritable treatments, and extensive research has actually proven that hypnosis is no joke, although it is still a phenomenon not totally able to be explained. The simple way to explain it is that in both hypnosis and meditation, fast-brain wave activity (which deals with thinking and processing) is slowed, and the slow wave activity results in increased focus as well as relaxation. Most often, hypnosis is prescribed as treatment for chronic pain conditions. During an EEG scan of a brain under hypnosis, the therapist asked the person to imagine the difficult pain they were feeling wasn't painful at all, that it was more just bothersome. Immediately the receptors in the brain that process pain decreased, and the patient experienced decreased pain. So basically what happened was, the meaning of "pain" in that part of the brain, as the brain was reading it, was almost reassigned. Mind over matter. A simple switcheroo in the brain during a relaxed state brings pain down to just a manageable nuisance. The malleability of the brain is what makes it able to conform and accept the change, and it is remarkable. Once mental pain is fixed, it benefits the whole body and adds to overall health, physical or mental, a statement accepted by physicians of an discipline.
When we feel pain, that can lead to stress. Stress can lead to anxiety which can lead to lack of sleep, decreased performance in activities and therefore cause strain on our entire bodily unit. Starting at the source of the pain, in this case, improving the mental health of the patient that leads to decreased pain, the entire body is helped. It also starts in the mind.

Like that of a dream catcher, a trick of a mind relieves a child's nightmares, they believe and therefore it works. In the case of the hallucinogenic drugs, becoming elevated and outside of reality to answer existential questions that cannot be found in the real world, is an attractive factor to those seeking a surreal mental experience. And with health, as physical can effect mental, the vice versa is also correct, mind and body must be united in order to truly live a happy and healthy life, when the two are not united and a change is made in mental state, improvements follow shortly after in overall health.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of Radiohead's Karma Police (1997)

Karma police
Arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He's like a detuned radio

Karma police
Arrest this girl
Her Hitler hairdo
Is making me feel ill
And we have crashed her party

This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
When you mess with us

Karma police
I've given all I can
It's not enough
I've given all I can
But we're still on the payroll

This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
When you mess with us

For a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself
Phew, for a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself

For a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself
Phew, for a minute there
I lost myself, I lost myself

Biography and History on the Band Radiohead

OVERVIEW:

The song "Karma Police", released by Radiohead in 1997, features six stanzas of four and five lines apiece. Throughout the lyrics and in the song, repetition of lines and key points can be noticed such as "this is what you'll get", "I lost myself". The music video itself creates an interesting perspective on the lyrics as well, as the audience is put into the driver's seat of a car. The car drives for a while on a dark, dirt road, and the headlights illuminate a man, fuzzy at first, fleeing from the car which appears to be running him down. The first time "this is what you get" is sung by Thom Yorke, is when the man initially appears clearly, his face one of fear as he sprints from the catching car, which interestingly enough seems to be moving fairly slowly. Once he begins "phew for a minute there, I lost myself" the view zooms from the back of the running man to his actual face, the first time we see it so far in the video. Nearly right after this, the man stops running, walks, then drops to the ground. The car continues to move, stops, abruptly pulls away revealing an oil trail. The runner promptly picks a lighter from his pocket, proceeds to light it and the fire blares toward the car which reverses again trying to escape the flames. The video ends with this scene and the deconstruction of the music itself.

ANALYSIS MICRO

After watching the video with the music, the meaning behind the text itself becomes clear. Here we have a man, seeking revenge on these people, the man who "buzzes like a fridge" and the girl with "the Hitler hairdo". They wronged him in some way, so he calls upon the Karma Police, a figurative term. However karma is defined as "the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences." Thusly, Karma police takes on the meaning of those who enforce fate, or set into motion a series of events trigger by a specific act. Yorke is asking for help from the Karma Police to indict some kind of ultimatum they brought upon themselves by doing him wrong. He seeks revenge for these people in their acts that caused him some sort of harm or anger. It appears though, in the video, the speaker does not get their revenge, but rather the runner. We can't really tell what happens to either us in the driver's seat or the runner who stops to watch the flames catch and run down the car, but we can guess that the runner escaped and revenge was not heeded.

ANALYSIS MACRO

With the additive of the video, lyrics and definition of karma itself, the text can be read psychoanalytically. Here we have someone so caught up in the destruction of others and revenge against them for their wrongdoings to him, the man actually "lost himself" in the process of seeking payback. His own sense of self and identity is challenged with the introduction of blind anger as well as vengefulness. When reading something psychoanalytically, one of the big things you look for is ego, or strong emotions set in place to harm. Our singer certainly is feeling strong emotions that bring him to the point where he resorts to what looks to be a murder attempt in order to set things right between himself and wrongful act the runner must have committed. This causes him to lose himself, lose his own life and his own sense of self getting caught up in ruining other people's lives for his ultimatum. Blind emotions caused the ultimate crash and burn here.

The music and chords themselves at the end of the song symbolize the deconstruction of the singer as a person when the music deconstructs down to simple discord. His strong willed emotions and desire for payback end up ultimately causing him to relinquish part of his own humanity, his own sense of reasoning, and by chasing down the runner or the girl, attempting to exact his own method of treatment that he sees fit for their crimes against him, he becomes almost unrecognizable to himself. He ultimately suffers in the end for his attempts, not so much those he wishes to harm. His confrontation and fixation on their revenge becomes all consuming to the point where he has to step back and stop himself, realizing that it has gone to far and he lost control over himself and unchecked emotions that drive him to the point that he would actually consider hurting another human being outright to satisfy himself. This unconscious drive appears scary to the speaker once he realizes what he's doing, and he steps back from the situation considering himself lucky that he did not in fact exact his revenge because that would have resulted in him losing himself, his morals, his identity. The "phew" indicates that it must have been a close call once he realized what he was doing and the implications that would follow not only for the subject of his warring, but to his own character, would be devastating. The speaker's position and loss of self identity eventually seeps through his conscious as he sits back and thinks "what am I doing?" He ultimately realizes that his blind revenge, which he previously seemed unaware of, is undoing him as a person, reducing him to something he doesn't even recognize as himself.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979)

Learn More About Giger and His Work

OVERVIEW:

Alien, a film by Ridley Scott, is quite possibly one of the most iconic sci-fi horror films ever portrayed. It follows the crew of Nostromo, a large commercial starship floating around in deep space. The members aboard the ship are awakened from cryo-sleep in order to answer a rogue distress call from a nearby alien vessel. This is where things begin to go wrong for the unsuspecting crew. Upon being awakened, the crew hears continuously receives the distress calls, and upon reaching the alien ship, finds a nest of eggs inside the vessel. Upon sending one of the crew members, Kane, into the ship's holding where the eggs are found, an organism attaches itself to his face, rendering him comatose. When brought back to the ship it is found that the parasite is supplying Kane with oxygen and removing it would cause his immediate death. Kane is left in quarantine. Later the creature is found dead, and Kane is left alive. All appears well until a creature bursts from Kane's chest having been layed inside of him by the first creature. He dies, and the horror continues for the crew.

ANALYSIS MICRO:

Pictured above are drawings of the alien in the film as created by artist H.R Giger. When Scott first pursued a designer for his creature, he had in mind a certain aesthetic that came with Giger's work. For his work on Alien, Giger has won multiple awards including "Best Achievement for Visual Effects", and his mix of surreal, with organic and mechanical forms helps greatly contribute to a psychoanalytical reading of Alien. When looking at the prototypes for Alien, sexual imagery is clearly portrayed in the creature itself. The shapes are, well, penile, including the head and tongue extension, and it's organic figure is not something of beauty, but is fairly hypersexualized in the positions in the above images. The erotic view on the Alien, which combines natural with the unnatural, is only spurred with the impregnation of Kane with it's offspring. However, Giger did not only work on the adult alien pictured above, he designed the rogue ship which was filled with the eggs, Kane's original face-hugging alien, and the serpent like chest bursting alien offspring as shown in the top video. From infancy and birth from Kane's chest to the fully grown adult creature, the erotic aesthetics of the aliens and Giger's art work hyper sexualizes the alien and adds a sense of organic to the mechanical and parasitic alien that causes the crew so much grief. 

ANALYSIS MACRO:

The alien is not the only part of the film that lends itself to psychoanalysis. The rogue ship itself is packed with biological looking forms, that lend themselves to the reproductive cycle . When Kane first finds the eggs, he enters into a ship which seemingly resembles a womb-like state (a tight, dark room with the eggs attached to the floor) which is opposed to the figure of the adult alien who also appears more of a male. The ship is layed out seemingly as a uterus, where the eggs are incubating. It's dark, compact and filled with various caverns and tunnels, or tubes, that house the eggs. Much like fallopian tubes that carry eggs to the uterus to grow. The egg chamber, once Kane finds it, also does something fairly curious when touched. The covering of the eggs react to touch, it bursts, revealing the eggs inside violently. When Kane does this, it's like he has fertilized the eggs, entering the womb like room to them. His example, finding the room, touching the veil, the veil retracting to reveal the eggs, he is the sperm to the situation. He's done something he cannot undo, and has set into motion the course of events to follow where he himself becomes impregnated. Here we have another insertion of a Freudian theory, the Oedipus Complex, stemming from the Greek tragedy. When later in the film, the alien, in it's slithering serpent form bursts forth from Kane's chest, we have the idea that the son murders the father, one half of Oedipus Rex, when later the son goes on to marry the mother, which never really happens in the movie. Freud's theory of a child having an attraction to a parent of the opposite sex and thusly having a poor or treacherous relationship with the other parent is applied. Kane dies at the hand of "his son", the infant alien in the chest burster scene. Aha, child sabotage, kid murders his father. 

Now, there's another type of relationship that deals with Ripley, the main female character of the Alien series, and MU-TH-UR 6000 (Mother), the ship's computer motherboard that acts as a guiding factor to the crew. Ripley disagrees with the computer when it puts capturing the hostile alien invader above the lives of the crew members on board the ship. Female to female relationship in which the computer is named Mother, it seems we have another tumultuous offspring to same gender parent dealing here. It only becomes more clear when another crew member, Ash, who is employed to care for Kane in his comatose state appears to be on opposite ends of the spectrum with Ripley and agrees with Mother. He follows out the initial request to capture the alien, and if need be at cost to the crew member's lives. Ash is a male, a son, and has a positive relationship with mother relating back to Oedipus Complex again. When he is discovered to be nothing but a machine himself, he really becomes a son figure to the Motherboard, machine to machine. 

All this is done to imply rape of some sort. From the rogue message like that of a 911 dispatcher, to Kane forcibly entering the womb-like chamber of the rogue ship and inciting fertilization where he was not welcome, to the parasitic creature intubating him and starving him of oxygen for its own gain, to the violent birth of the infant alien from Kane's chest, to Ridley running throughout the film from the masculine phallic adult alien, rape is portrayed in an unnatural, powerful, otherworldly and terrifying way from both the male and female perspective
Exchange between Mother and Ripley:

[Ripley has tried in vain to disengage the Nostromo's self-destruct]

Ripley: Mother! I've turned the cooling unit back on. Mother!

Mother: The ship will automatically destruct in "T" minus five minutes.

Ripley: You... BITCH!

Between Mother, Ash, and Ripley:

Ripley: Ash. Any suggestions from you or Mother?

Ash: No, we're still collating.

Ripley: [laughing in disbelief] You're what? You're still collating? I find that hard to believe.

Ash: What would you like me to do?

Ripley: Just what you've been doing, Ash, nothing.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road official movie trailer, 2009.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy PDF Book

OVERVIEW

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, features a post apocalyptic world stuck in a nuclear winter. A father and son are the main characters, and they are forced into constant survival mode in the harsh environment, fearing death at every waking turn. The boy, born into the world after its destruction, poses a unique set of morals for all living things, which is seemingly opposed to the father who is immediately on edge facing any other living member of the destroyed world. His mode of action is threatening and always points to the pistol he carries, while the boy seeks to save those they stumble across, as hopeless or hateful as they may seem.

ANALYSIS MICRO

The Road features an interesting moral dilemma between the father and son, who often disagree on moral issues, which curiously enough do not seem to mirror their beginnings. The man, who grew up in the flourishing world, versus the boy who was born just after the onset of the nuclear winter. Aside from this opposition in morals, the man and the boy both dream. The man's dreams are often filled with his wife, who left them at the start of the world's destruction because she believed that their survival was futile. The dreams often placate her features, nipples, breasts, slender frame with which her dress clung to, slightly sexualized and very Freudian. He also dreams of beautiful things, the world as it once was and this scares him further, for he believes the only dreams for a man in peril to be having are perilous dreams. The boy, on the other hand, does not so much dream as have nightmares. Nightmares that haunt him and cause him to cry out for his father. He seems less focused on his mother who he barely mentions and more so focused on the realities of their life. Interestingly enough the boy with the kind heart has the most fear, which the constantly on edge father imagines beautiful landscapes and his wife who deserted them both.

The dreams in the text play a significant role in the storyline. Nights where the man does not dream worry him almost as much as the beautiful dreams he wakes himself from, and express his sexual tension toward his wife who is dead, though he seemingly cannot forgive or forget. The boy's dreams are never fully described yet are always in the form of nightmares, fear for their current situation that he does not express during the waking day. Both the man and the boy's dreams express their inner fears or turmoils, the man's however being the most hyper sexualized and harboring the most psychoanalytic meaning.

ANALYSIS MACRO

The man clearly harbors some unresolved feelings for his wife, though not in the way one might primarily expect. We are given a brief perspective into the wife's coldness with a scene of her leaving. He begs her to stay, to fight for the boy and himself, to try to survive in the ugly and ravished world as best as they could as a family. You can feel the stabbing agony the man feels when the wife tells him she wants to die, that there is no point in  try to salvage anything because they will all perish. For such a cold and harsh relaying of reality, the man dreams of her very fondly. He dreams of her in her thin cotton dress, of her breasts and her nipples, her physical features who are described very attractively, in a very wanting way. He loved her very clearly, so much so that even in the current state of affairs the man faces with the boy, his dreams of her are colorful and vivacious, full of youth and beauty as well as desire. The descriptions are very hyper sexualized and outline the man's need for her love, attention and companionship in the desolate landscape which is devoid of all of these things. This only elevates the certainty of the man and the boy's terrible current situation, and seeks to above all show what the man desires most, which is not a paradise of survivors or a inherently a bunker full of food, but the woman. Her touch, her essence, what he lost when the world turned dark.  His dreams of her elevate him, and mirror his subconscious desires that waver often from mere animalistic survival.

The man also dreams about nature before its destruction. Of the flower and trees, small things that are taken for granted today, that were gone in their world. It is perhaps this that proves why the man is so angry and hasty when it comes to other survivors. Unlike the boy, he remembers the world in its prime. He also remembers those responsible for its destruction: humans. Mankind's role in the now desolate world is what makes him bitter, what shapes his dreams and fuels his anger. He dreams of the beautiful things of the old world, and this thusly fuels his fire and hatred toward those he meets upon the road, those so capable of destroying nature. The dreams seek to unlock his unconscious morals, they create an anger in him that he directs at others, an anger for what once was but what was taken from him. The dreams are a receptacle throughout the text. They show the power of the subconscious over actions, in this case morals, and also deeply rooted desires and man's need for love and desire in the form of companionship. These dreams throughout the text also keep the man moving foreword and fighting, when he finds himself thinking of the past he awakens with a new stronghold on forgetting the old world and moving forward with the boy for safety. When he does not dream, it is at the worst parts of the text, such as when the boy is dying. The dreams act as a motivating factor, illuminating his purposes, his subconscious desires, and his reason for continuing on down the road.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of Akira Kurosawa's Dreams: Sunshine Through The Rain

An Interview with Kurosawa on His Work

OVERVIEW:

Kurosawa opens his work "Dreams", which features recurrent dreams he has experienced throughout his life, with Sunshine Through the Rain. This particular segment features a young boy, probably aged around ten, who is presumed to be Kurosawa himself. The dream is almost fairytale-like, and follows the formalism of a dream with bright colors, and a wandering michevious child. The short scene begins with rain, that the boy watches outside beneath a beam. His mother scurries around in the back picking up items off the table that may become soiled with the downpour. The boy doesn't move. There's an old Japanese folk myth that "magical things happen if there is sunshine when it rains." This is precisely the situation in the dream. It's bright, yet pouring. The mother, who was given special stage instructiosn to act just as Kurosawa's mother did, approaches the boy and tells him that he mustn't wander off in these conditions. That "foxes hold their wedding processions in this weather. And they don't like anyone to see them. If you do, they'll be very angry." A very indescrite warning coming from Kurosawa's mother, and yet the first thing the boy proceeds to do is go out and find such a procession, get caught by the foxes, and face an ultimate dilema, shunning his family and putting himself in line for death if they do not accept his apology. In face, when he makes it back home following being caught, his mother already knows what he has done that has brought great dishonor upon himself and their household. "You saw something you should not have seen." She hands him a large knife, which he says he must kill himself with for his actions, and that she cannot let him back into the house unless he begs their forgiveness and recieves it. If he does not, he must use the knife on himself and pay the ultimate price for his disobedience. The segment ends here, as the boy walks to meet his sure death, as his mother says the foxes almost never forgive. We never find out whether he is granted leniency or dies at his own hand, as he follows the path to the end of the rainbow and the screen goes black. 

ANALYSIS MICRO

The entirety of Kurosawa's work in "Dreams" can be viewed psychoanaltyically if not simply for the fact that they are all dreams he has experienced on multiple occasions, as if his subconscious sees to reveal something to himself expressly. However, I feel Sunshine Through the Rain could have its own full length anaylsis done on it. A boy goes against his mother's wishes and does not heed her warning to stay out of the forest and away from the fox wedding procession. Instead, he defies and heads immediately from this warning to woods. A tumultuous relationship with his mother may be derived from this as a secondary understanding ass he knowingly disobeys her although she grants him adequate warning as to what will happen if he does go looking for the procession. "They'll be very angry."

Also, after being caught by the foxes and upon his return home, the incomplete hero's journey is observed. His mother already knows what he has done, and appears to shut herself out from the boy, not allowing him to re-enter the home or even cross the threshold because he has shunned their family and brought dishonor upon himself. The archetypal protective mother here becomes non-existant as she hands him a knife and tells him he must kill himself for his disobedience, or otherwise beg the foregiveness of the foxes who more than likely will not heed him. The potency of this scene can only suggest deep guilt on Kurosawa's part that must have come from disobeying his mother.This dream was recurring because of the strong guilt he carried after committing his shameful act. 

ANALYSIS MACRO

Dreams are seen as, in Freud's words, "a disguised fullfilment of a supressed or repressed wish."(1990, The Interpretation of Dreams).Kurosawa's dream is extremely potent on not only symbolism, a young boy who represents innocence, and an archetypal relationship between mother and son in which she tries to protect him. But, like many young and curious children, Kurosawa wanders and finds himself exactly where he should not be.The sequence iteself seems to reflect on Kurosawa's own demons as a child which manifested in his curiousities and anxieties that ultimately led to a rocky relationship with his motehr, and overall his family, whom the rest we do not see here. Often times, psychoanalyis comes from childhood experiences, as covered in the introduction, and childhood events stem into larger conceptions that shape the author. Perhaps this is why Kurosawa's unconscious chose a young boy facing intangible odds. 

Guilt is another strong factor of Sunshine Through the Rain. Immediately upon seeing the procesion, it's clear the boy knows he did wrong in being there, and he doesn't appear overly surprised at the reaction of his mother, which is cold and heartless. Pent up feelings for her might have been seen here, frustration that could not protect him from his own deeds as many mothers try to do when their children are accused of an action. She breaks the mold of an archetypal mother in handing her young son a knife shamefully. She also appears to take some of the blame on herself as she turns her back and shuts him, and she repeats to him "I can't let you in." Her expression is unmoving, yet reveals disappointment in his actions. It seems that with the very direct stage instructions that Kurosawa gave to the actress to mirror his mother, Kurosawa must have seen that face once or twice before, and was haunted by it seeing as he had this dream multiple times throughout his life. 

The real crux of Sunshine Through The Rain explores forbidden curiousity and disobedience of the law, natural or otherwise, that forces the offender to face the consequences that are derived from these actions. In this case, a very severe punishment with a very bleak outlook on turnaorund was observed, for something that may seem to the viewer, trivial. A young boy faced with the task of suicide due to simply not listening to his mother. It would appear that in Kurosawa's conscious world he may have committed some crime or caused some harm that strained his relationship with his mother, and this was carried into his surreal dream sequence because of his strong feelings of guilt on the matter. At the end of the dream, we never find out whether Kurosawa was able to smooth out relations with the fox and spare his own life, or if he was ever able to come home and be welcomed again by his mother. Ironically enough, at young Kurosawa's fate rests at the end of a rianbow which in western culture is where people often assimilate riches to be found. Yet here we see a young boy heading to, as his mother put it, unavoidable death. The guilt from his awakened state for performing some specific act which he was instructed not to is mirrored in the dream, as well as the strained relationship with his mother that breaks nearly all motherly archetypal norms at the end, yet begins as the definition of the archetypal mother, who guides and directs her child. Upon the conviction of his deeds, she ceases to provide him emotional support and nurtering, and becomes hardened, thus putting on display their strained relationship, which appears to really bother Kurosawa as it's one of the main themes of the recurrent dream. His guilt and their relationship does not seem to be in a favorable place when the curtain is drawn on this dream.

Psychoanalytic Analysis of This American Life (Pt. 2) Podcast

The Text:

Act One. Guilty As Not Charged.

Ira Glass

Act One, Guilty As Not Charged. Darin Strauss tells this story. It's a true story, though we've changed everybody's name but Darin's, out of consideration for the family of the girl in this story, who Darin calls Celine Zilke. Here's Darin Strauss.

Darin Strauss

Half my life ago I killed a girl. It happened in 1988. I had just turned 18. And my friends and I were headed to shoot a few rounds of putt-putt golf. We had a week of high school left before graduation. I was driving. Far ahead, on the right shoulder, a pair of tiny bicyclists bent over their handlebars. It was a four lane highway. And my Oldsmobile was in the left lane, going south. I think I futzed with the radio. A song I liked had come on.

Then one of the riders did something. I remember just that, a glitch up ahead. After a wobble or two, the bicyclist hopped into the road, maybe 30 feet ahead of me. My tires lapped up the distance that separated us. Then suddenly the bicyclist made a crisp turn into the left lane, just 10 feet ahead of my hurrying car.

For a second, her dark blond hair appeared very clearly in my windshield. I remember a kind of mechanical curiosity about why this was happening and what it might mean. The next moment has been, for all my life, a kind of shadowy giant. I'm able-- tick by tick-- to lay out each second. Radio, friends, thoughts of bailing on mini-golf and heading to the beach, distance between car and bicycles closing. Anything could still happen.

And then it's too late. My forearm hooks to protect my eyes. My friends shout. And I picture a cartoon of my foot disappearing under the dash, kicking down for the break, reaching farther than any leg can go. Yet the hood of my car met Celine Zilke at 40 miles an hour. Her head cracked the windshield. I remember the yellow reflector from her spokes flipping past us and over the roof.

The car made it onto the grassy median. I must have done all the normal driverish things, put on the hazards, killed the engine. I must have stepped onto the grass. I just have no memory of how I got there.

Celine Zilke, the girl I killed, was 16. And I knew her. She went to my school. She was an 11th grader. I can see her playing field hockey in blue gym shorts, settled in beside friends on the concrete benches of the court yard, scribbling notes in the public speaking class we took together. Celine had sat by the window.

Now I walked to where Celine lay in the road. I didn't know who I'd hit, or even that we'd had a serious collision. I thought in terms of broken arms and getting in trouble with my parents. Then I reached her and noticed the peculiar stillness of her face, which transformed her. I didn't recognize her. Celine's eyes were open. But her gaze seemed to extend only an inch or so. A small imprinted purple horseshoe of blood was pressed in the space between her eyebrows.

I think maybe she's hurt, my friend Dave said. This might seem an obvious or even a dense statement when you hear it now, but not if you were there. I could feel my breathing rev up, and that's all.

A tragedy's first act is crowded with supporting players, policeman scribbling in pads and making radio calls, witnesses crimping their faces, EMS guys folding equipment. I must have managed to ask about Celine's condition, because at some point the cops told me that she was unconscious but still alive. I remember talk of cardiac arrest, of a medevac helicopter on its way.

I had the strangest feeling that everyone was responding appropriately to what must have been an emergency. But I still didn't have the feeling there was anything to freak out about. This was something that was being fixed.

Police had suspended traffic on both sides of the highway. My friends made cameo appearances as standers, mullers, back rubbers. I thought, how strange that in normal life we touched each other so rarely.

The most embarrassing memory of that day was when two teenage girls materialized from one of the stopped cars nearby. They were pretty and not from my school. I remember they were both in shorts and white sleeveless undershirts. One of them smelled strongly of suntan oil.

Hey, she said, were you in that crash? Her voice was a mix of shyness, concern, and pure nosiness. Yeah, I said, I was. Having acknowledged my own sensuality and drama, and knowing the girls were still watching, I dropped to my knees and covered my head with my hands, fingers between the ears and temples, like a man winning the US Open.

This movieishly emotional reaction acted out for girls I'd never see again is one more stomach-turning fact of that afternoon. Aw, the first girl said, coming over to me. I know it wasn't your fault.

My father arrived. Someone must have called him. This was before cellphones. It was the sight of my dad that day, the sadness on his face, that made it finally real somehow. And when he hugged me I totally lost it, collapsed all at once into tears, as I never had before and haven't since.

I got a call the next day, saying that Celine died in the hospital before her parents-- who had been on vacation-- got the chance to see her.

The police, Celine's biking companion that day, and several cars of eye witnesses all said there was nothing I could have done. No charges were filed.

A police detective, Paul Vitucci, later told the newspaper, quote, "for an unknown reason, her bicycle swerved into the traffic portion of the street. And she was immediately struck by the car. There was no way he"-- meaning me "--could have avoided the accident, no way whatsoever."

I thought, how could that be possible? I saw it all happen. It was hard to believe there was only one way this could have gone. It was hard to believe she had to die. Maybe I'd been distracted. Maybe I could have swerved away somehow. Maybe I hadn't felt the right amount of alarm just before the girl jumped into my lane.

After the story appeared in the local paper, everyone knew. I remember coming down to breakfast and my parents showing me the article. And I remember thinking, that was it. There was no hiding from this. My parents, after offering quiet voiced assurances, encouraged me not to beat myself up about it. You should go to a movie, they said. And so a friend and I drove toStand and Deliver.

At the multiplex, the weirdness of my having gone out, of not being under house arrest, slowly sunk in. We traveled to another town. I didn't want to be seen trying to enjoy myself. I didn't want people to know that I was capable of having any emotion, but constant remorse. We left before the end of the movie.

I spent the next few days behind a closed door, talking to no one in particular, a parrot in underpants and socks who kept asking, will I get over this? That Monday or Tuesday, I heard there was a school-wide memorial assembly. Celine's teachers, friends, and coaches giving tribute to her, the quote, "girl who's been so cruelly taken from us." I hadn't had the guts to be there that day, or back to school at all.

My friend Eric told me that near the end of that assembly, a teacher I barely knew and didn't very much like stood from the crowd and walked straight to the microphone. This was a surprise. He hadn't been designated to speak. Along with the sadness, he said-- taking the mic from the principal-- I know there's a lot of anger here. This teacher wasn't a hippie. He was given to wearing pullover Baja shirts to social studies class. I had laughed behind his back many times.

Great emotion is justified in tragic events like these, he said. But we should take a second to remember that Darin is a student in the North Shore community too. The reports tell us he wasn't at fault. And I'm sure we can agree, he's a good person.

It was years before I wrote to thank him, this guy I didn't really know, who was decent enough to perform this simple act of kindness for a student he barely knew.

I returned to class about a week after the accident and a few days before the funeral. I hadn't heard what kids were saying about me. But I was met at the school's front door with a dirty look from one Steffi [? Gayheart ?], a friend of Celine's. What high schooler wouldn't glare hard at the driver who had killed her friend?

I expected my day would be filled with these black looks. But in the classrooms and corridors there quickly grew around me a zone of silence and inviability, except when my friends would suddenly mount brief, haphazard campaigns of everything's normal, quoting lines from Fletch and slapping my book bag, and calling me a dick.

My friend Frank assured me that they also-- without my knowing it-- had started in on the high school equivalent of caucusing, push polling, of lobbying for votes. Come on, they'd say to anyone still on the fence, the undecideds. Wasn't it kind of suspicious how she just turned into his car? Did you ever think of that? True friends, they'd say quietly, we have to be there for Darin too. We have to support him too.

Steffi [? Gayheart, ?] at the end of that first day, approached my locker. I'm sorry I, she barely managed to say, I support you. She told it straight to my Keds. At the time, I was sure it was insincere. She'd been peer pressured into saying that. She definitely wasn't sorry. But now, I don't know. Maybe she meant it. It couldn't have been easy for her to talk with me, the kid who killed her friend.

A few days after I'd gone back to school, Celine had her funeral. It was just my dad accompanying me. At the church entrance, I remember taking a breath, grabbing the door handle, then plunging into the crowd. This was and remains the hardest thing I've ever had to do. I couldn't help but be scared.

But I was also kind of relieved to feel tears on my face, tears some part of me knew would look good. And they were real, these tears.

I was afraid someone might stand up and yell at me, here in front of everyone. One old man looked at me like he wanted to kill me with his bare hands. And then I had to face Celine's parents.

Some morticianal functionary shunted me into a back chamber where they were. Her father, a big man, moved toward me with a surprisingly light step. He didn't know what to do with his face. It was soft and jowly. And he wore glasses that gave him a Tom Bosley, Happy Days vibe. In the long moment before he found words, and as he took my hand, he settled on an expression of, I will be friendlier than you have any right to expect me to be.

"You're Darin," he said. My voice and face behaved-- or prevailed upon to behave-- as if this were a regular meeting between cordial strangers. Celine's mother joined us. She attempted a smile, but without much success. Her body clenched as she steeled herself for an odious act. Then she hugged me quickly. And just as quickly, she pulled away.

"I know it was not your fault. They all tell me it was not your fault." She was speaking as kindly as she could. And so her voice was dim. "But I want you to remember something. Whatever you do in your life, you have to do it twice as well." She looked at me with exhausted eyes, "because you are living it for two people now. Can you promise me?"

It didn't feel right. I was going to commit to something I had no control over, or even really understood. I nodded. I'd accepted her request without saying a word, as you would a benediction.

Then I was standing before Celine's open coffin. I don't remember how I got there, who had taken me. I only remember the whispers at my back, the weight of 400 eyes on me. Celine's eyes were now closed. And she looked almost like herself again.

Next I was hurrying from the coffin, past all the people who stared. As I approached the exit, my dad kept buzzing in my ear, keep your head up, just keep your head up.

I hadn't realized I'd been slouching my head. I felt buoyed by a great respect for my father at that moment. And I wondered if I would ever know the things grownups know. And I lifted my head.

About two weeks later, I graduated and left town. I didn't stay for summer break. College offered a sort of witness protection program. Everyone in my high school knew. No one at Tufts did. And while I was there, they never would.

But I did make one important stop in town before I'd left, to Celine Zilke's parents' house. They had invited me to come by whenever at the funeral. So I thought they expected this visit. I went alone. I even imagined a cozy welcome. They would smile, maybe touch my cheek, we'd cry together.

I knocked. My stomach shuttered up into my throat. No one seemed to be home. Leaning an ear to the door, I made out the clumps and risings of voices. After an extra swallow for courage, I knocked again. One man's voice became louder and more distinct, getting closer. The door opened. It was Celine Zilke's father. After seeing me, Mr. Zilke turned back toward the room.

"Look who it is." He still wasn't facing me. "It's Darin." He said this as if he was proud of me for having showed, as if he had that very instant been defending me to someone.

"He's here to say how sorry he is," he told the room, "to apologize." There were a few other people there in the Zilke's den, fellow grievers whom I didn't know, who didn't say a word.

And I wondered, was I there to apologize? The Zilkes said they knew it wasn't my fault, hadn't they? Mr. Zilke gestured me to the couch and offered me an iced tea.

"How are you?" I said stupidly.

"OK," he said. "Yes. OK, you know."

"Good," I said, "good," taking a long sip before I put the glass down. Then that was finished.

The room got quiet. I couldn't believe how quiet, how quickly. So I shouldn't have come. The visit was a check cashed too soon. They didn't want me there. I didn't want to be there.

Before long, Mr. Zilke shepherded me to the door with another, "no matter what, we would never blame you, Darin."

I left there covered in a feeling of globby naivete. There was little chance, I thought, that I'd ever see them again.

A month into my freshman year of college I got an official letter saying that Celine's parents were suing me for $1.5 million. It took five years of depositions and meetings before the case finally went away.

Right before the trial, the Zilke family lawyer advised them to take a small amount of money-- go away money, my insurance company's lawyer called it-- that payment corporations give to a family when they know their client isn't at fault. There was-- they were told-- no case.

At college, I dove into physics and psychology textbooks, where I discovered a weird solace in computation. If you're doing 45, and the girl with the bicycle cuts 10 feet in front of you, impact will take place in something like 700 milliseconds. Human perception time-- not only to see a hazard, but to designate one as such-- is generally accepted to consume some 220 milliseconds.

Next, the purely neural job of stamping your foot on the brake adds roughly another 500 milliseconds. I was exculpated by 20 milliseconds.

I'd be studying in the library, and tell myself I was going to take a bathroom break or something. And then I'd find myself in the stacks, making sure that my reassuring numbers were still there, still reassuring.

In the first semester of my freshman year, I took a class called On Death and Dying, which was a lot of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and When Bad ThingsHappen to Good People. I thought it would make me feel better.

After I wrote a paper about my accident, the grad students who taught this touchy feely seminar suggested that I do research into Celine's side of things. I thought this was a terrible idea. But I was an obedient student. So I made blundering, unwanted intrusions into the lives of Celine's friends, the other bicyclist that day, a girl she played field hockey with, a lab partner, anyone whose number I could get.

I learned that Celine had remade herself, becoming a born again in the months before her death, even though her family hadn't been particularly religious. And then I discovered something that changed how I felt about her death for years when I talked to her friend from the field hockey team.

"I'm sorry to call like this," I'd said, floundering. "I just am taking this class. I need to find out more about, you know, her, because of the class."

"Wasn't that diary thing weird?" the girl said.

I felt my heart thump. "What diary thing?"

"Oh," the girl said. She obviously felt that she'd overstepped. "I assumed you knew."

It turned out that Celine had written in her journal right before the crash, "today I realized I am going to die." Celine's mother had told this field hockey friend about it.

"Thank you," I'd said as I hung up. I may have even said it again after I put down the phone. "Thank you."

Celine, I decided, had taken her own life. That's why she turned right in front of my car. That was how I got through my twenties and even my early thirties, believing with full certainty that she'd committed suicide, that I was no more responsible for the accident than the bullet that comes out of the gun's chamber.

I wouldn't let myself think what now seems obvious, that when she wrote, "today I realized that I'm going to die," she may have just meant, today I realized I will die someday.

Before the accident, I wasn't so introspective. I'd had nothing to be introspective about. And I never had anything that I hid from the world. But now I did. For years, I told pretty much no one, which seemed the only way to treat a thing I was so uncomfortable with.

I didn't tell any friends. I thought it would taint how they saw me. I thought they wouldn't want to know. Who would want to know? Even I didn't want to.

When I went on dates, I'd be talking-- just getting to know you stuff-- and I'd wonder, when do I tell her? The few times I did tell women, it was only after I had known them a while. Even then, I hated the reaction it got. It made them feel tender. They hugged me. I felt gross for having told them, like I was using the accident to score points.

Though one time-- in my earlyish twenties-- I ended up on a first date at the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer. There is a pivotal scene, where a teenager hits somebody with his car. I just couldn't watch anymore. I told my date, "we have to get out of here." This was like 20 minutes in.

She didn't want to leave. And when we got outside, I told her everything. Her response surprised me. She got angry at me. "It's really selfish of you to feel bad for yourself," she said. "Don't you ever think of her?"

I didn't know what to say. Of course I thought of Celine.

"Yes," she said. "But do you think about her enough? How can you go on living with that?"

I excused myself. And I left for the subway without walking her home. A little later, she called me to apologize. She said she'd often thought of committing suicide in high school by swerving into oncoming cars. All right, I'd said.

Celine's father making up goofy songs just for her when she was a baby. Celine crying after she tripped stealing third base in little league. Celine on crunching roller skates, hurrying away from the neighbor's dog. I try to imagine her before the accident. And sometimes I try to imagine the life she would have gone on to live had it never happened. Maybe this was my way of pretending she hadn't died that day.

As I got into my twenties and thirties, Celine stayed with me. I thought of her, of course, any time I drove by a bicyclist, which happens a lot more often than you'd think. I know that's not something most people even register.

As I got older, she'd show up with me on job interviews. Would the prospective employer find out what I'd done? Was this an ambitious enough job for two lives? Because I'd absorbed Celine's mother's request, I had to live well enough and successfully enough for two. I thought of her at my wedding, and when my wife got pregnant.

Now I'm twice as old as I was when the accident happened. And I don't know when I changed. There was no single moment. But somehow I've grown into a different way of seeing it all. Because I was alive in a certain place, Celine Zilke isn't anymore.

That's all this was, a highway mathematical error. In the US there are over 40,000 traffic deaths a year. But it was me, and it was Celine. She was someone that I happened to, someone who happened to me.

The police told me if I'd swerved the car differently, I might have flipped it. If that had happened-- if I had died and Celine had lived-- I think I'd like her not to remember, not to have at 18, at 23, even at 35 years old to contend with a stranger there at all her intimate moments.

And I'd like her to be spared the feeling she'd traveled for two decades with a ghost. I'd be OK if she forgot me, though I can't forget her.

Ira Glass

Darin Strauss. He is the author most recently of the novel More Than ItHurts You.

A reporter for Washingtonian Magazine a few years ago interviewed lots of drivers who had been in accidents and killed people. It wasn't their fault. And this article quotes a psychologist named Ed Hickling, who wrote a book about overcoming the trauma of a car accident. And he says that drivers who have done nothing wrong in an accident are actually at greater risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder about the accident than people who were really at fault for an accident. Quote, "someone who falls asleep at the wheel knows what they can do to prevent future accidents. Innocent drivers," Hickling says, "realize they're at the mercy of the universe."

Featured here is the soundtrack on the podcast.

Listen To Darin Strausse's Story Here (Episode 359, Life After Death) 

OVERVIEW OF THE TEXT:

In this podcast, the man who hit and killed a 16 year old girl who swerved in front of him is retold in grisly detail "half of his life" later. Eerily, without seeing the speaker or the event, it is shown in shocking, bright colors as if you had been looking at the scene yourself. A young man, just waiting for his life to start at the end of college is hit with a burden he carries to the very day he speaks to the audience about it, the killing of another girl in his school as she rode her bike, and the effect the devastating act had on his psyche and therefore overall, his life. 

ANALYSIS MICRO:

So in the podcast, which more readily displays the guilt and emotion felt in Darin's voice as he relays the event, it becomes clear that Darin struggles with the events even though he is told on multiple accounts that the accident could not be prevented. He even dedicates part of his life to the physics behind the crash to enable himself to have continued belief that there's nothing he could have done. He even at one point becomes privy to a diary entry Celine Zilke, the girl, wrote on the day of her accident. It read "today I realized I am going to die." As strange as it may sound, this was a temporary saving grace for Darin. He construed that Celine had swerved her bike into his lane purposefully, that she had wanted to die and therefore had only used his car as a vessel to achieve this.

The idea that Celine had a premonition, that she had foretold her own fate, which is not unheard of historically, ebbed Darin's guilt in a way that even the mathematical calculations had not. He became set on the fact that Celine had done it to herself upon finding out that her time was nearing its end to help himself achieve peace. This was one of many psychoanalytic reprieves Darin gave himself in trying to overcome the disaster that to this day rocks his world, and shapes his day to day life as he "lives for two".

IMPLICATIONS MACRO:

Darin finds after hitting Celine, even initially, he is affected psychologically as anyone would be if the head of a young girl cracked their windshield. Throughout the story, Darin also appears to be hard on himself, giving himself no breaks in the light of the girl's death. Even right off the bat, when Celine is just hit and the accident becomes a crime scene, evidence of Darin's feelings can be read psychoanalytically. Such as when Darin sees two girls he doesn't know who appear attractive to him at the scene of the incident, he proceeds to play up his agony in order to gain their attention. Repressed desire for attention and belonging can be observed here as well as an ego boost. He utilizes the limelight in order to gain attention form those he may be sexually attracted to or interested in, thus he may luck such sexual attention in normal circumstance, so he exploits his agony to gain an ego push. He realizes later this is an ugly move and says so upon completing the story scene, "This movieishly emotional reaction acted out for girls I'd never see again is one more stomach-turning fact of that afternoon". His deep seeded desires are here put on display, however. 

Following this trend only a few lines down, Darin remarks on human to human contact in this surreal and almost dreamlike situation that is unfathomable to him in the moment. "In normal life, we touched each other so rarely." This seemingly displays his need and want to be touched by others, that in everyday life, contact was almost nonexistant. That which he gained in that instant, the contact and attention from those around him at the scene is cravable and distinct, He responds as if he finds this miscalculable or that he does not receive readily given attention on a regular basis. Thus he desires to be comforted by those there, the girls and his friends included. He desires the attention and touch they give him and he realizes, had it been a normal day, he would not have been touched so, would not have found comfort from the friends and strangers he got that he very much remembers. Human contact becomes one of the most memorable events from that day.

Moving forward, Darin seeks to rationalize Celine Zilke's death. As a first year college student he pours over his physics work, proving to himself over and over that he could have done nothing in the way of stopping the accident. He carries the guilt so far, that even watching the movie I Know What You Did Last Summer sends him into a tailspin years later and he has to leave the theater. His subconscious cannot let the act go for even an instant. His only reprieve is when he settles himself on the idea that Celine swerved her bike into his path because of her premonition she had wrote the morning of, that she knew her time had come and she wanted to kill herself. This cleanses him for a while, ebbs his guilt until he thinks about it again, and there are at least 10 different ways to view the one sentence. He thinks of her always, his guilt never failing, and always trying to live his fie good enough for two, as her mother had told him. Celine becomes a part of Darin, absolved into him because he cannot escape her. He thinks of her at his wedding, and at the notice of his wife's pregnancy, a romantic image if nonetheless psychoanalytic. She haunts him, his subconscious, his conscious and wracks him with deep seeded guilt.