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The Thought Broadcast
Analysing Joker
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In this Episode of The Thought Broadcast, Dr Ed Miller and Dr Andrew Amos discuss psychoanalytic theory using the Joker character from the 2019 film Joker.
Music: https://freesound.org/people/ShadyDave/sounds/277375/
Logo: Sidonie Prentice
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This podcast is provided to you for information purposes only and to provide a broad public understanding of various mental health topics. The podcast may represent the views of the author and not necessarily the views of The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists ('RANZCP'). The podcast is not to be relied upon as medical advice, or as a substitute for medical advice, does not establish a doctor-patient relationship and should not be a substitute for individual clinical judgement. By accessing The RANZCP's podcasts you also agree to the full terms and conditions of the RANZCP's Website. Expert mental health information and finding a psychiatrist in Australian or New Zealand is available on the RANZCP’s Your Health In Mind Website.
Hello and welcome back to the Thought Broadcast, the trainee focus podcast from Australasian Psychiatry, joining you from Congress in the Gold Coast 2025. My name is Ed Miller and I'm the trainee editor of Australasian Psychiatry. Joining me today is a regular voice on our podcasts, Andrew Amos, who is the Deputy Editor of Australasian Psychiatry. Welcome, Andrew. Today, Andrew and I will be discussing a paper that we wrote together that was published in the Australasian Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy earlier this year. It's called Using Joker to Understand Psychoanalytic Principles. And it uses the 2019 Joker movie to explore some key psychoanalytic teachings. And the aim is that this will be helpful for registrars and medical students to understand a little bit more about psychoanalysis. So if you have an interest in psychoanalysis and its application in psychiatry, this is a podcast for you. So psychoanalytic theory is rich, complex, and densely written, but it often lacks representation in standard medical or psychiatric training. The relevance of psychoanalytic theory can therefore be undervalued and underappreciated by junior doctors and psychiatric trainees. Analysing film and literature using psychoanalytic principles can be one useful and engaging way of teaching and learning these concepts. This podcast will first highlight some of the key psychoanalytic principles, going over the theory, and then demonstrate them through a brief analysis of the character Arthur Fleck, who is the Joker, as he is portrayed in the 2019 film Joker. It will then explore the principles of transference and counter-transference in relation to Arthur, in an attempt to better understand his character, and we'll also consider how psychoanalytic principles may fit alongside other psychiatric or biomedical concepts.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Ed. Look, psychoanalysis was the dominant mode of treatment in psychiatry until the 1960s, largely because there were medications invented in the 1950s. But since then there has been a steady decline in psychiatrists choosing to subspecialize in traditional psychoanalytic psychoanalysis, and of course, particularly in the public healthcare sector. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic principles can add valuable depth and rigor to understanding the complex vicissitudes of human behavior, even amongst contemporary psychiatry and biological or diagnosis forward formulations. Evidence has shown that long-form psychotherapy improves mental well-being and can be cost effective. This has in fact been a point of contention in the college for the last couple of years, but we've got some reasonable evidence that it does help and is cost effective. Psychoanalytic concepts can also help understand the complex dynamics and strong emotions which can be present in day-to-day clinical practices that are not primarily psychotherapy-based, such as clinical liaison work in a medical hospital or inpatient child and adolescent psychiatry. Even though, in many countries, traditional long-form psychoanalysis is mainly found in the private sector, distilling these complex theories into understandable and applicable formulations can be a valuable way to preserve this knowledge and disseminate it amongst new generations of medical and psychiatric graduates. Following Freud's application of psychoanalytic principles to art and biography, clinical psychoanalytic theory can also illuminate the text, characters, and subtext of a film, as well as the way in which an audience experiences it. And this can be helpful for demonstrating psychoanalytic concepts for teaching or educational purposes.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Andrew. So now we're just going to talk a little bit about some of the core psychoanalytic concepts. And this is just going to be a relatively brief run-through. To talk about psychoanalysis in general, it's really a method of exploring the human mind and treating mental illness and psychopathology, which was developed by Freud and Brewer around the turn of the 20th century. And as some people may know, the traditional psychoanalytic method involved a patient who's traditionally called the analysant, who's sort of positioned on a couch lying supine and facing away from the therapist or the psychoanalyst, so that no eye contact could be made. And then the analyst who sits at the head of the couch facilitates free association, where the analysant is encouraged or allowed to say anything that comes into their mind without intentionally applying any sensor or limitation. And so one reason the analyst sits out of eyesight is to potentially avoid interpersonal processes such as embarrassment, for example, on the part of the analyscent.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell I think it's worth pointing out here, Ed, that many people find this extremely difficult. You're essentially letting go of all of your inhibitions in order to free associate. So it can require a bit of encouragement.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's not a natural way of interacting with someone, that's for sure. So by facilitating access to unconscious thoughts, the analyst can help to bring to conscious awareness the various underlying dilemmas, conflicts, and emotions which were thought to contribute to psychopathology. Over time, Freud introduced several theoretical and technical principles, which informed the way that the analyst addressed the material encountered in a psychoanalytic session. Among these principles were transference and counter-transference reactions, which acknowledged that some feelings experienced by the analysand towards the analyst come from the analysand's own past, so that's called transference, and some feelings experienced by the analyst come from the analyst's own past, and this is called counter-transference. Freud believed that many early infant emotional experiences, such as anger, anxiety, and even sexual desire or sexual feelings, have the capacity to replay in symbolic form through dreams, and can continue to influence one's day-to-day emotional experience in adulthood. He also placed emphasis on the development of adult sexuality by theorizing stages of psychosexual development in children, such as the oral, anal, genital phases, whereby these different erogenous areas were thought to take preference in the child's developing psychosexual mind. That probably still is, but particularly at the time, that was quite a revolutionary sort of idea that Freud introduced. Freud postulated that these earlier emotional and somato-affective experiences, so emotions and feelings relating to the body, had the capacity to be present in both symbolic and literal form during a course of psychoanalysis. So therefore the counter-transference experienced by the therapist was, and still is, a key modality through which the underlying meaning of these experiences could be unlocked and given accurate mental or verbal representation. Freud also elucidated the importance of navigating psychic defenses through this process, for example, the defense of repression, the function of which is to keep potentially painful or frightening emotional experiences out of one's conscious or verbal experience. He refined many of his theories over time, such as his original topographic model of the mind, based on the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious systems, then evolved into the structural model of the id, ego, and superego, before he later introduced the more abstract idea of an overarching battle between the death instinct and eros or libido.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Ed. Melanie Klein then was a later analyst who introduced key psychoanalytic concepts such as projective identification and the depressive and paranoid schizoid positions within an early theory of object relations. Klein's theory refines many of the concepts of Freudian psychodynamics with a greater focus on the development of the ego as a representative of the self. So in this theory, internal objects are representations of meaningful relationships, usually first and most importantly, the caregiving or withholding mother. This of course is a universal experience or a very near universal experience. The first relationship we all have is with our mother. So decline, projective identification, was an unconscious fantasy, a form of imaginative activity linked to psychological function and defense. And during this activity, patients split disquieting parts from their ego in order to experience them as contained within non-self objects. So for example, an overwhelming feeling like aggression or desire might be disturbing when experienced as part of the self and might then be split from the self for that reason, in order to experience it as part of an object representing the father or mother. So Klein proposed that projective identification might fulfil several unconscious functions or defenses, including the feeling of possession or control of the object, or the protection or harm of a loved or hated and split off part of the self. So these are all internal dynamics essentially set up to protect your emotional state by removing threats to loved objects or excluding hated parts of the self. Now, while in Klein's theory, projective identification describes a dynamic process of ego development in the early years of life, it has been used in different but related ways to understand psychoanalytic psychotherapy and adults. Projective identification has been theorized to perform many functions within the therapeutic relationship, albeit it's difficult to differentiate from countertransference, empathy, and other psychodynamic processes within both patient and therapist. Now these terms are all coming very thick and fast during this talk, but of course, one of the reasons for using something like a movie is to refine your understanding of these concepts and develop the capacity to differentiate which one applies in which situation. So as an example, the analyst might initially act as a substitute for the projected internalized positive and negative parental objects of the patient with multiple reality-based interactions between patient and analyst, internalizing healthier modes of thinking, feeling, and behavior.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the and the way that I think about this is it's easier for someone to put feelings into someone else than it is for them to experience themselves. That's one of that's one of the key kind of mechanisms of this dynamic, and particularly children. So the job of the analyst is to think about those feelings, contain them, give them representation, and facilitate the patient to take ownership of those feelings.
SPEAKER_00One of my favorite theories of consciousness is uh Daniel Dennett, who in a book called Consciousness Explained, essentially said the way that consciousness developed was that we started as monkeys, essentially, vocalizing things while we were acting. And people or other monkeys around us started hearing those vocalizations and started realizing they meant something. So if we were, you know, an ape screaming, they would know that we were angry. And eventually what happened was we ourselves started listening to those vocalizations because we realized that there was important information that could tell us how other people were going to react to us. And eventually then the external loop was internalized, and you started being able to anticipate what this vocalization was going to do to the external world. And I think that that fits in reasonably well here. So essentially what you're doing here is using an internal representation of the external world in order to predict your own responses and to anticipate the responses of the external world. Freud, of course, added the conscious-unconscious distinction, and Klein and others like Fairbank then uh looked at more complex dynamics. How do we represent other people in our internal state? And the technical term is we represent them as objects uh with whom we have relationships. Okay, so Fairbank and others have noted that the patient's unconscious drive to project primitive object relations into the analyst reciprocally, the analyst's conscious or unconscious interjection of the same may be both highly distressing, but also the only way to access and address certain forms of pathology. This is a little bit like subjective versus objective reasoning. So if you can externalize something, see it in the external world, something that was internal to you, you can analyse it in a much more objective way. Um, even though you may be projecting onto an external object such as the therapist, something that doesn't actually uh exist within them.
SPEAKER_01Well it's almost it's almost a form of peer review. It's something that that you've you've you've carried yourself as as an N equals one. And even by sharing it with one other person, you've at least got one other source of input peer review to that process.
SPEAKER_00Well, this is probably again a little bit far afield for this, but um there are theories that you can project internal states onto large groups of people, so crowds and so on. Great book by Elias Kennedy called Crowds and Power, uh, which talked about this exact process. One of the reasons we find large crowds threatening is the idea that they are the primeval horde that is going to destroy us uh and uh take all of our treasured relationships. Okay. The depressive and paranoid schizoid positions generally refer to the various emotional states and defenses that an infant can adopt towards the fear, frustration, and anger at losing a constant attachment to its mother. So in Klein's theory, all infants adopt a initially adopt a paranoid schizoid position, which tends to cope with painful frightening and conflicting emotions by denying and splitting them, which in turn contributes to the potential for a grandiose and omnipotent frame of mind. So this is a very primitive approach to reducing distress. However, in the normal course of development, infants then learn to simultaneously experience conflicting emotions and integrate previously split objects. So the reason the split in the paranoid schizoid position is comforting is because you split off the negative aspects of your mother from the positive aspects, you repress the negative aspects, and you are free then just to enjoy the positive aspects of your mother. Now, how strongly you believe this theory of course is up to you, but literally this allows you to idealize your mother and not be consciously aware of the negative aspects of your mother. So the times that she delays before feeding you or whatever whatever other discipline has been imposed.
SPEAKER_01I I once tried to search for a psychometric tool for measuring projective identification and I couldn't find one. So you're right, it is a theory in the sense that yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, look, I guess the things like the Rorschach uh blot uh is intended to have a similar sort of capacity to it. People are projecting, in a sense, their internal state onto those images, and potentially if they're talking about things like positive and negative aspects of their mother or the uh therapist, of course, you might then make some assumptions about what's going on internally. Now, in the normal course of development, infants then learn to simultaneously experience conflicting emotions and integrate previously split objects. So effectively it's more mature to learn to tolerate the positive and negative aspects of your mother rather than only experience the ideal and repress the hated aspects of the mother. So the greatest conscious awareness of the limitations of previously idealized objects contributes to more realistic and functional experiences of the internal and external world, but it also decreases gratification and was therefore described as moving from the paranoid schizoid to the depressive position. Now, of course, it's much more functional being paranoid schizoid as a helpless infant because what you do really doesn't uh have any bearing on the external world. So if you are completely living in a fantasy world, your mother is still going to take care of all your needs. As you gradually go out into the world and there are all these constraints, you then need to develop this more realistic picture of yourself and others.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. To me, the depressive position is just feeling the emotions that actually underlie this paranoid schizoid position. To me, that's what it is.
SPEAKER_00Well, well, in a sense, it's bringing into conscious awareness the negative emotions that previously were repressed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Like the infant has lost this perfect in utero environment in which all its needs were met all the time.
SPEAKER_00Well, I think if you think if you if you look at it from uh an object relations sort of school, you're literally changing the object which is this the um the the source of the positive and negative emotion. So you're rather than uh having all of your positive emotion go to your idealized version of the mother and then repressing or putting into a different object the negative features of the mother, you're realizing they have the same source, and that's the nature of the integration.
SPEAKER_01By this stage, some I think some other analysts were starting to think this is getting a little bit individual and it's starting to feel like the problems are relating to the analysand. So, and this was sort of uh around the 50s.
SPEAKER_00Well, Ed, I'm I'm gonna stop you here because I find Melanie Klein absolutely bonkers. Yeah. And I mean, you have to realise, of course, the reason it looks like that is she was an originator. She was thinking things that no one had ever thought before. Um, and the way she expressed them was highly individual to her, and later uh theorists have refined them so that they're more generally accessible to other people.
SPEAKER_01So by the 50s, you start to have other analysts like Donald Winnicott and beyond start to emphasize that these problems are relational, they're not sort of individual necessarily, and so really bringing the early family and social environment and a relational approach, I guess, into therapy. So now let's start to think about the the Joker movie. In this movie, Arthur Fleck is the name of the character or person who is commonly referred to as the Joker across the Batman media franchise. In the 2019 film Joker, Arthur is portrayed as a middle-aged man who works as a professional clown and lives with his mother, Penny, in a rundown apartment in the fictional Gotham City. The audience is told that he has previously been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, but is not told the reason why. Over the course of the film, it's revealed that Penny was also previously admitted to a psychiatric hospital with a quote unquote delusional psychosis, in which she believed that local billionaire businessman Thomas Wayne, whom she worked for as a cleaner at the time, was the father of baby Arthur. However, Arthur was in fact adopted by Penny as a young child and was severely emotionally and physically abused by Penny's boyfriend at the time, with Penny's implied consent, i.e., she knew it was happening and she did nothing to stop it. At the start of the film, Arthur is not aware of his mother's illness, and the two operate as a couple, essentially, with Arthur feeding and bathing Penny, and this is shown on the film. Arthur becomes infatuated with a female neighbour and hallucinates multiple dates with her before he realizes that she is actually revolted by and afraid of him. Over the course of the film, the audience is shown that Arthur has a dark sense of humour and a morbid fascination with death, which is juxtaposed against his desire to be a professional comedian rather than a clown, and his touching and genuine desire to make people, especially children, laugh. He also has these spontaneous and uncontrollable bouts of prolonged laughter, which is explained in the film as being a neurological condition, and it's shown to usually happen at times when Arthur is either emotionally stressed or socially embarrassed. Unfortunately for Arthur, he is rather socially out of tune. He's frequently the butt of jokes and harassment, and this perpetuates his deep self-loathing and a hatred of society in general. As the film progresses, he begins to murder people without remorse, and in finding that this also gives him an outlet for his anger and an increased sense of self-worth and agency, he eventually evolves into this popular anarchist symbol as viewed by the downtrodden lower class denizens of Gotham, and then they all begin to revolt against the established authority.
SPEAKER_00Alright, well look, to discuss Arthur from a psychoanalytics perspective, one needs to first consider his early emotional experience. As the adopted baby of a mother with severe mental health problems, who was later removed from her care after prolonged abuse, Arthur is likely to have experienced severe emotional neglect and disrupted attachment. His basic needs, such as feeding and toileting, would likely not have been met on a predictable and consistent basis, and his mother may also not have been able to attend to his emotional experience with adequate levels of tolerance, affection, and emotional warmth, nor with clear, fair or well-mantained boundaries. This obviously fits well into the idea that we were talking about before in terms of object relations of the withholding mother. Now the unpredictability of Arthur's home environment may have contributed to his development of anxiety, fear, and later emotional ambivalence. And indeed, Arthur's extreme trauma at such an early stage, compounded by maternal denial, lends itself to being characterized by an autistic contiguous position, which may even fail to develop into a paranoid schizoid state. So these early traumas also fit with Fairbairn's formulation regarding the development of schizoid factors in the personality. So literally, what this means is the paranoid schizoid state that we were talking about, rather than developing into the depressive position where you're able to integrate positive and negative features of the same object, rather than developing the capacity to tolerate positive and negative, you carry the paranoid schizoid split into the adult term. Now, in terms of projective identification, the unpredictability and absence of his mother. May have meant that many of his emotional projections may have not been adequately attended to. So normally an attentive and emotionally in tune mother can sense the emotional state of their infant through the unconscious communication of emotions and transform these into adequate verbal and behavioral responses that help the infant to make sense of their experience. Since many of Arthur's early affective and emotional experiences may not have been met with adequate maternal responses, infant Arthur may not have been able to adequately psychically introject and assimilate these early experiences and may not have formed these into adequate or accurate symbolic or mental representations. So essentially what this means, this very chaotic, very punishing early environment means that Arthur's internal object relations have not been developed in a mature way. They're very chaotic and they don't represent reality. Additionally, Arthur's experience of seemingly not being able to exert any sort of emotional physical control over his environment may have contributed to a sense of powerlessness, leading to the retention of the omnipotence of the paranoid schizoid position as a means of defense. Now I don't think we discussed this in the intro bit, but one of the characteristics of the paranoid schizoid position and only experiencing the idealised form of your primary object is that very omnipotent sense. And this is the idea that the child or the infant always wants access to the breast, for example, that always in control of when milk is delivered by the mother. I almost associate the idea of the depressive position as the realization that you don't have control over your mother in this way.
SPEAKER_01Building on that, and one of the reasons we chose this subject, Arthur, is because it is so complicated. So then you've also got physical and emotional abuse that Arthur endured through Penny's partner and also through Penny. And this could have contributed to his rage. And then this rage, Arthur, can could also split off and project into the partner. And so you can see how things get sort of so much more complicated.
SPEAKER_00One of the most common ways of explaining this sort of split and projection is if you are a helpless infant or child and you are angry at usually the father, but in this case a partner, that is terrifying because the reality is that person can destroy you physically. So a protective mechanism is to realize that you've got this rage, but to repress the rage projected into the punishing father or punishing partner, and that makes you feel safe because this is an interpretation, of course, and it may differ in different circumstances. You often develop the idea that you deserve this rage, and the father, in fact, is punishing you for something that you have done. You therefore deserve it. Therefore, this almost rights the universe. The parent is not acting because they are evil, they are acting because they are just.
SPEAKER_01So Arthur's laughing fits throughout the film could be conceptualized as a tick. And if you look at that psychoanalytically, it could also be thought as a defense, either against anger or self-loathing or embarrassment, which kind of fit with the situations in which he does have the laughing fits. We'll talk about this a little bit later on, but particularly for medical students and psychiatry trainees who are obviously doctors, thinking about other causes or explanations of those ticks. So one particular symptom could be pseudobulba affect, which sometimes results from a traumatic brain injury in childhood, which Arthur actually may have endured if he's been physically in injured from violence from his parents. Or if he is it could be a result of a globally impaired neurological or cognitive functioning, which might also be secondary to early childhood deprivation. For example, lack of nutrition, lack of emotional response, isolation as well, might have contributed to an abnormal brain development. And then so on top of that, if Arthur then goes to primary school, he's a little bit, let's say, different to the other children because of his quite atypical, I would say, experiences of life thus far. He then experiences bullying, emotional unpredictability throughout childhood, which contributes to his, let's say, poor achievements at school, which then compound many of his problems. And then thinking psychoanalytically again, once he's an adult and as shown in the movie, he then becomes medicated and sort of controlled and treated by the state. To him, this this is then just another representation of a faceless and absent agent, just like his own biological father. And in particular, the social worker in the film really does prioritize her own needs and her own a job, I suppose, rather than actually thinking about Arthur's emotional state. And then this reinforces his own sense of worthlessness, lack of agency, and it doesn't address any of the deeper underlying emotional problems that he's struggling with. You've also got the classic eedup sort of relationship with his mother, Penny. And so his murderous rage, as Andrew kind of touched on, you know, this could be thought as an eedable response. So the classic Oedipul situation is that the infant wants to murder their father and take possession of their mother. And so if the the state represents Arthur's sort of emotionally absent father, it makes sense then that Arthur would actually want to murder the state to retain possession of his mother. And that and this is actually what happens. Although Arthur does actually murder her his mother in the film as well. So he's a he's even more complex than that.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I don't think the filmmakers were strict Freudians.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So as a deeply traumatized individual existing within the paranoid schizoid position and relying upon autistic retreat as his principal defense. Um you can think of this as a sort of uh extreme dissociation from himself and others, with the retreat into the internal world, and then the hallucinations in the film are fantasies essentially that are experienced internally that have nothing to do with the external world. So as a deeply traumatized individual, Arthur is unlikely to be able to tolerate the demands of prolonged psychoanalytic psychotherapy, or probably even short psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The theory described by Fairbairn and others, asserting that the healing effect of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is in large part the result of a struggle between the patient's attempts at projective identification with their most primitive and distressing object relations in the psych of the therapist, and the therapist's assertion of non-transferential reality-based relations suggests that this is a difficult process for both the patient and the therapist. Treating Arthur in a psychotherapeutic context may not be realistic or appropriate in a real life sense, given the substantial risks of aggression and acting out, including murder, towards any therapist involved in Arthur's care. And of course, almost no one would take on a case like this for psychoanalytic psychotherapy. But as we discussed in the beginning, it's useful to understand the dynamics even in patients like this when you're treating them in other contexts. So the dynamics of any potential sessions would also be affected by whether Arthur is a voluntary participant or likely in our system mandated in a forensic context, as he appears to be at the end of the film. So for a character like Arthur, engaging with free association at any stage of his life may well bring constant themes of death, suicide, murder, and an intense loathing towards himself and others, which may be particularly directed towards and projected into the therapist. One of the things that's not often talked about in terms of an integrated personality is the constraining effects of the positive features of a loved object on the negative features. So if you split off the positive and negative features of an object and only try and experience the positive, when you are overwhelmed by the negative features, the mother refusing the breast, for example, you don't have any way of controlling that. It's overwhelming and you can act with incredible anger as Arthur does in the film. So through the process of projective identification, any therapist interacting with Arthur may therefore experience a strong counter-transference reaction, where they may find themselves being primarily afraid of Arthur's intense affect and capacity for murder. Of course, if you're consciously aware of this, it would probably be better described purely as rational fear.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And and and like you said, this is this is purely fictional. So we're not suggesting that Arthur would actually be suitable for this type of thing. No, no, no. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh well, to be honest with you, I have experienced fear in uh psychotherapy uh sessions with actual patients.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I think one important sort of thing to mention there as well is there are many patients that we deal with that aren't as risky as Arthur, but the complexity of the feelings draws out from us this sense that, oh, they're too hard to help, you know, or or blaming them, or they've done this themselves, they're too hard to help. And it's that sort of counter-transfer action which is really important to be aware of, actually, um, because then that's actually a manifestation of our own feelings of being overwhelmed and inadequate, which which is driving that, not actually the reality of the situation, which is there are often many ways, sometimes small, that we can help people and break down that complexity.
SPEAKER_00One of the most useful ideas of projection, projective identification is that the way that we know what's going on in the patient is how we experience uh our response to them, and we interpret that then as partially their intention. This is commonly an explanation for borderline patients, for example, who we believe may be trying to create the same sort of turmoil in another person so that they have externalized what is turmoil in themselves. As a therapist, you want to experience these emotions, understand and interpret them, and then use them to be more effective in therapy. And not and not be controlled by them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, like I uh signposted before, I think it's helpful again for medical students and psychiatric registrars to think how do these theories interrelate to a biomedical understanding of of Arthur as well, because that's what our training primarily is in. And so we'll just think a little bit about what are some of the other biomedical issues that Arthur might be having. So we'd be thinking about things like PTSD, for example, or complex PTSD, because he's experienced prolonged childhood trauma. He might be depressed, he might have some bipolar aspect to his mood, he might be socially anxious, he's certainly got homicidal thoughts and he's and he's possibly got suicidal thoughts as well. He might have a personality disorder and you'd think about cluster A or possibly B. And towards the end of the film, you'd actually be thinking, does he have a sadistic or psychopathic personality? You'd be thinking about neurodevelopmental disorders as well, like ASD or autism, ADHD. I'd be thinking about learning difficulties as well, and as we've discussed, does he have a tick disorder? Has he experienced a traumatic brain injury? Or yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yep. So to conclude, psychoanalytic principles add valuable depth and rigor to understanding the complex vicissitudes of human behavior. Even though traditional long-form psychoanalysis is at present mainly found in the private sector, distilling these complex theories into understandable and applicable formulations through analyzing media can be a valuable way to preserve and disseminate these hard-earned ideas amongst new generations of medical and psychiatric graduates. So, this podcast has considered the character of Arthur Fleck from the 2019 film Joker using psychoanalytic paradigms and elucidated some of the mechanisms of transference and counter-transference that may reveal a deeper understanding of Arthur's character, as well as considering other aspects of Arthur's formulation and treatment and the resulting difficulties in any psychotherapeutic treatment. Now, just before we finish, Ed, I'd like to just briefly list some other media that I think are great for this sort of analysis. I did a whole series on Game of Thrones from a psychoanalytic uh perspective. Um, I've particularly found the relationship of Tyrion to his father as psychoanalytically rich, embodied in the response that he gave to all dwarves are bastards in their father's eyes. And more recently, White Lotus, the uh both season one, season three, season two less so, were very conducive to this sort of analysis. And what I would say to students and registrars in particular is don't be too doctrinaire in your analyses of these concepts. It's really useful to consider many different paradigms of psychoanalysis when you're doing these sorts of analysis, because each of them can give you a different type of understanding, and often they will be more relevant to particular characters. Playing with these sorts of ideas, discussing them with other people is the way that you develop facility and your own awareness and understanding.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. That that's how I think about it. It's like and you're playing with it. It's like you're holding these concepts and you're sort of playing with them, you're not applying them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And and and the final point that I would make, none of these theories are right. Freud was not right. Melanie Klein, as I said, I find completely bonkers, but she uh she had some insights that were useful. You can play with the ideas and develop your own understanding. The formulation then is in fact the way that you determine the utility of these theories. So you don't want to go out on a limb and say, I think this is projective identification. What you want to do is to explain the behavior of a patient in realistic and concrete terms and then make predictions or or prognosis uh on in terms of the treatment.
SPEAKER_01Yep. So that's all the time we have here for today. I'd like to thank you, Andrew, for coming on and having this really interesting discussion. Oh, great pleasure, Ed. We'd also like to acknowledge David Bill and Nishta Kuma from the college who give us so much support in producing and editing the show. We are also thankful to Australasian Psychiatry for the opportunity to make these podcasts, as well as Sidoni Prentice for our artwork and Shady Day for our music. We encourage our listeners to rate the podcast on whichever app you have accessed it, as well as promoting it to other registrars or supervisors. We always love getting feedback or suggestions for further episodes, including volunteers interested in being a guest. Please get in touch by email at thethoughtbroadcast.podcast at ranscp.
SPEAKER_00Can I interrupt you here, Ed? I think people should send us in their interpretations of Joker movies and uh mistakes that we've made and so on and point out how it might be useful to think about these with different paradigms. Yeah, that would be great.
SPEAKER_01That's all for now. My name is Ed Miller. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time.