A note on Mafia movies

Abstract

Near the end of The Public Enemy (Wellman: 1931), luck runs out on the mobster played by Jimmy Cagney as he falls in a rain of police bullets. There is a fleeting moment between his realization of what is happening to him and his death. It is a moment of confrontation between his grandiose sense of invulnerability and the reality of his mortality. With a look of disbelief on his face he mutters: ''I ain't so tough'', and falls into the gutter. Like most Mafia movies, The Public Enemy is a morality play. It tells the story, repeated in so many other Mafia films, of a protagonist whose lust for power and belief in his own invincibility fuel his rise from the street to the top of the mob world. Then, as in Greek myth, the anti-hero overreaches and commits the classical sin of hubris: believing in his own divinity. He perishes, the victim of his own manic denial.While there are countless dramas that recount the rise and fall of the overreaching hero, Mafia films have a special twist. They focus on destructive narcissism and depict the seductiveness of a fantasy in which a person is so powerful and untouchable that he is beyond the rules of law and retribution. In this fantasy, a person can indulge his desire to dominate and humiliate others, especially others who have insulted him. In real life, we are all forced to tolerate slights, disrespect, and continual reminders that we are not at the center of the universe. The celluloid mobster lives out the universal desire to retaliate for narcissistic injury, to retaliate totally and brutally, destroying the offender. He exists in a universe of libidinized hatred, where the pleasures of omnipotent destructiveness are so sweet that eventually the hero cannot resist them, even if it means that he is destroyed as he is destroying others.In the psychoanalytic literature, Rosenfeld (1964Rosenfeld ( , 1971) developed the concept of destructive narcissism and, in recent years, Steiner (1993) and Kernberg (2007) have refined and elaborated it. Steiner writes of a world of inner objects that is like a Mafia gang. Within this world:Reality is based on a retreat from the truth to omnipotence … The retreat is one in which reality is dismissed and the organization on which it is based peopled with omnipotent figures who claim respect from their divinity and power. The truth does not have to be argued or justified and shame and guilt are inappropriate. It is indeed the lack of shame which makes these alliances with omnipotent figures so dangerous since normal restraints on destructiveness and cruelty are rendered inoperative.

Psychoanalysis and The Arts: the Slippery Ground of Applied Analysis

“…Some of the shared preoccupations these papers deal with are: memory, history, and reconstruction; experiences of loss, mental growth, and creativity; facts linked with the passage of time-childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, as well as the inevitability of death; perception, desire, pleasure, and love; intimacy, identity, individuality, and difference; dialectics between inside/outside, language/action, individual/society, and reality/ illusion; the experience of listening, reading, or beholding; the value of thinking, relating, and helping; the consequences of new technologies for our ways of thinking and relating; and the complexities of violence, destructiveness, fundamentalism, and trauma. (See Abella 2008Abella , 2010Anderson 2009;Ashur 2009;Baudry 2001;Blum 2001;Civitarese 2010;Diena 2009;Frosch 2009;Goldstein 1975;Golinelli 2003;Jones 1999;Mandelbaum 2011;Minerbo 2008;Paul 2011;Petrella 2008;Poland 2003;Sabbadini 2009Sabbadini , 2011Schaub 2008;Schiller 2008;Schwartz 2009;Szajnberg 2010;Tylim 2010;and West-Leuer 2009. ) The style adopted by these papers comes nearer to what we usually call a dialogue: listening to the way others tackle the same questions with which we ourselves are dealing; confronting models and exploring different answers; receiving/learning instead of only giving/teaching; trying not to demonstrate but to listen to the way that others use our suggestions and their echoes on our own thinking; putting to work our constructs and questioning our ideas; accepting that we may be destabilized in our certainties and being willing to deconstruct our truths in order to allow them to grow and be enriched.…”

Unveiling the influence of the Italian mafia as a Dark Triad threat on individuals’ affective states and the power of defense mechanisms

“…The DT is further related to abusive supervision, counterproductive work behavior, and bullying in the organizational context 24 – 28 , showing detrimental effects on subordinates and the organization 29 – 41 . Previous research shows that the mafia is connected to the DT: Imprisoned mafia members scored higher in psychopathy than non-mafioso imprisoners arrested for a similar crime 42 and previous research has connected the mafia to narcissism 43 – 46 .…”

Diagnostic utility of the Hurvich Experience Inventory/50.

“…In addition to the basic dangers described by Freud (1959) as fears of abandonment, rejection, bodily harm, and pangs of conscience (Brenner, 1982), annihilation anxieties may be triggered along with any of these or separately from them. While previous work on annihilation anxieties (e.g., Frosch, 1967;Little, 1960) has focused on psychotic conditions, because of its manifestation at all levels of coping, the construct also has application for nonpsychotic conditions and the study of normal personality variation in response to catastrophic conditions (Hurvich, 2004).…”