The Psychic Warrior: Ivory tower

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In the next series of slides we see a figure wearing a dress, high up on a building called Ivory Tower. The Ivory Tower is a play on the idea within psychiatry that psychotherapists live in something of an Ivory Tower, removed from the acute disturbed situations often encountered with patients in in-patient settings or Community Mental Health Teams. 

The idea in this cartoon is that there is somebody who is clearly contemplating suicide and is in a state of being paralysed, not sure what to do, perhaps waiting to jump. Gradually we see the therapist’s face emerging from one side of the cartoon, rising up near to where the figure is standing on a ledge high above on a tower. We then see that the therapist, The Psychic Warrior, is in a cherry picker and has risen up to the level of the person who seems to be about to jump but rather than persuading the person not to jump the therapist hands a mobile ‘phone to the person and we discover that it’s Mr Jones.
 
The therapist says ‘It’s your mother, Mr Jones, she wants her dress back’. We then see that Mr Jones is wearing the same flowery dress that his mother had worn when she first appeared from underneath his overcoat. It’s perhaps only Mr Jones’s hairy legs that give us a clue that this may be Mr Jones. This whimsical spin on suicide and self harm has a serious point to make. In self harm and suicide anger that was perhaps directed towards another is directed towards the self. Quite often in self harm and suicide it is not just the self that is subject to attack but a relationship that has been internalised with somebody else that also evokes the attack. The mother’s body is in phantasy subject to an attack as well as the body of the person committing suicide or self harm.

The idea of Mr Jones who feels he may have been painfully separated from his mother wearing her dress is a joke which plays on the idea of identification as a defence against loss. By ‘appropriating’ his mother’s identity he need not face the fact that he has lost her. This idea was embodied in the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) in which Norman Bates’ character, whose mother is dead, wears her clothes and adopts the persona of his dead mother.