December 8, 2007

• THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCROOGE
  (I originally wrote this in 2005 but it looked good enough to reprint.)

  Okay, I am after all a psychologist and so, as I
  discover this role, I also think of what makes Scrooge, Scrooge? Indeed
  it goes to the deeper issue of why victims sometimes become victimizers.

  We know that Scrooge was a victim of the emerging mercantile nation
  that was England in the 18th and 19th century. A period of rapid
  economic growth that was not matched by an equally rapid ethical
  growth. And so, although debt among the emerging capitalists like
  Scrooge’s father was unavoidable, failure to thrive meant long prison
  terms, the splitting up of families and the work house or forced
  apprenticeship for children. (Perhaps I’ll go into the economics of the
  period at another time but, suffice to say, the period of Scrooge was a
  time in Europe where commoners had, for the first time in history, the
  opportunity to gain the status of Gentlemen and Ladies by becoming
  wealthy businessmen. The Scrooge family was not titled or hereditary
  gentility. They gained a temporary station via Father’s wealth and
  lost that station with his bankruptcy. We see Scrooge as a Gentleman
  only because he has become wealthy and re-earned the right to the
  prerogatives of a gentleman.)

  Okay so Scrooge is torn from his family at a tender age losing his
  father to debt; and then he becomes a miser who gleefully sends others
  to the same fate (“are there no workhouses, are there no prisons?”) He
  loses his mother and Fan and then gives up  the only other woman he ever loves. He is abused as a young worker and then he abuses Cratchit in turn.

  What is going on for Scrooge? Why did he not learn the lessons he
  ultimately learns when he underwent all the loss and abuse? Why did he
  become a victimizer?

  Freud spoke of something called a “repetition compulsion.” To make it
  very simple, this is when an individual who experiences trauma and is
  forced to confront his powerlessness, is compelled throughout his life
  to repeat the trauma in a symbolic way that makes him the powerful
  person. It is a way of reliving the past but having it turn out that you are the powerful one; you are the victimizer; not the victim.

  This is quite evident in Scrooge’s attempt to vilify the poor. He
  is not
  one of them. They are sub-human. He treats them the way his father (and
  family) were treated. He is powerful! He falls in love but he cannot
  overcome the knowledge that the women whom he has loved in the past
  have left him, abandoned him (it doesn’t matter that they died, it’s
  still abandonment). So what does Scrooge do? He sabotages his
  relationship
  with Emily. Although she gives back his ring, he says nothing. He does
  not lift a finger to atone, to beg, to ask forgiveness. He MADE it
  happen. He caused it. He has the power; not Emily. Indeed, we can
  believe that Emily, even at the last, might have taken him back. But we
  can almost hear a parody of Shylock’s lament when she gives the ring
  back; “Oh my finance! Oh my fiance’! Oh my finance! Oh my
  fiance’!”  In
  this giving up of Emily, he gains control over the loss of his sister
  and mother.

  He then becomes his evil bosses, mistreating Cratchit. He gains power
  over his tormentors. He redeems his father, not by having the family
  and future that was denied his father,  but by getting into a position where he can
  take other families apart.

  Scrooge is no longer a victim; he has become the abuser. The cost
  however is one he did not reckon with; because he was so in awe of the
  power of the people and events that harmed him that he believed that he
  could never be happy until he had that power.

  We can diagnose Scrooge as having a Major Depressive Disorder
  complicated by Post Traumatic Stress. Dickens, way ahead of his time,
  “cures” Scrooge by first stripping him of his defensive position in
  regard to his love affair with Emily and the loss of his mother and sister. All the pain that Scrooge buried
  with anger and indignation floods back to him and he must face his
  pain. Next he is treated to an extended empathy training where he
  begins to understand that these creatures whom he has ignored and
  mistreated are human beings like him. This reaches it’s pinnacle when
  he is forced to finally see Tiny Tim and feel the love and pain of the
  Crachits.

  So Scrooge becomes the loving, giving person that he might have
  naturally become if he never had the early trauma and he lives happily
  ever after? Not quite. Here’s the cautionary tale that Dickens leaves
  unsaid. Yes, Scrooge atones and is redeemed. But in the end, his life
  is but a shadow of what might have been. He never falls in love or
  marries. He never has the joy of his own family. Oh, he joins both his
  nephew and the Cratchits but these are substitutes for the future he
  gave up when he turned toward the dark side.

  So this story has more than one moral. It certainly illustrates the
  redemptive power that we each have when we turn toward the light. We
  can always choose to redeem our lives; up until we have no life to live.
  But there is also a sadder message and that is; redemption does not
  erase the past, it only ameliorates the damage. Some doors, once shut,
  can never be opened again. Sometimes it is a case of “If ye will not
  when ye may; ye shall not when ye will.”
  So…”Let us love till we die and God bless us everyone!”

  • 10:36 am
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