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Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly

Journal of Jungian Thought
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Wounded women
Meredith Sobini
Published online: 17 Jan 2008.

To cite this article: Meredith Sobini (1979) Wounded women, Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly
Journal of Jungian Thought, 10:2, 149-160

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332927908409487

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 Meredith Sabini

WOUNDED WOMEN

It seems as if the women’s movement has come to life in cinema, for

during the past year, there has been a flood of films by women, about
women, and about aspects of personal life rarely seen in American films.
I thought it would be interesting to look at these films, and find out what
kind of female figures and themes appear in them. I saw perhaps ten films
related to this topic, and what I found was partly predictable, partly very
surprising.
Surprising was the number of films portraying images of “wounded
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women”-women whose sense of self was injured, whose connection with

life was weak; women who were lost, suffering, or desperately searching
for themselves. I want to discuss this theme of the wounded feminine as
it appears in six films: Wifemistress, Autumn Sonata, Interiors, Lace-
maker, Old Boy Friends, and No Time for Breakfast.
Two of the main psychological themes in the women’s movement are
the trend away from stereotyped roles (such as the housewife whose life
belongs to everyone but herself), and the search for modes of self-expres-
sion and creative careers. I t would be reasonable to expect this new wave
of films to reflect these two trends, and to some extent, they do. Unmar-
ried Woman and Wifemistress raise the question of women becoming
more independent both from a man and from traditional roles. Norma
Rae is a very good film about a southern woman’s development through
a relationship with a union organizer who introduces her to literature and
her own leadership ability. Likewise, in Julia and China Syndrome, we
see women becoming heroic figures, achieving a new identity for them-
selves and making that felt in important social contexts. The modern con-
flict between having a family life and a career is the theme of Girl
Friends and Turning Point.
The topics of friendship between women, and relationships in general,
are getting more attention in these new films. The conscious working out
of relationship takes place in Autumn Sonata and Turning Point. Family
dynamics and inter-generational transition are dealt with in Interiors,
Autumn Sonafa, and Turning Point.
All of these themes are quite different from the heroic mode previously
 150 Meredith Sabini

dominant in American cinema, with its themes of conquest, intrigue, war,

success and failure. These women’s films focus on the personal side of
life, and center around one individual or family, and the development or
interaction of the main characters.
What is surprising about the new films is that there aren’t more figures
in them struggling with contemporary issues, or personifying where the
women’s movement could lead in terms of personal change. When a new
development begins in the individual psyche, there often appear images of
the goal toward which it is leading, thus giving a sense of direction and
inspiration t o the task ahead. I expected to see characters in films who
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embodied that image of the “ideal.” But rather than containing such
images, a full half of those films I saw showed women who were quite
wounded in their basic sense of feminine identity. This served to remind
me that a strong identification with collective values may be compensa-
tory for an undeveloped sense of personal identity. Such an identification
with institutions, sects, ideologies, or traditional roles can act to fill up
the emptiness in individuality; when those collective images break up, as
traditional female roles are now doing, they no longer offer containment
or protection. The wounded or undeveloped sense of self which has been
hidden is then visible, and this seems to be what we’re seeing in films now.
American films have generally had little t o offer in the way of models for
women, and the new films bring about only a very preliminary change in
this respect.
In “Complications of American Psychology,” Jung observed public and
collective life in the U.S. “You are simply reduced to a particle in the mass,
with no other hope or expectation than the illusory goal of an eager and
excited collectivity. You just swim for life, that’s all. You feel free-that’s
the queerest thing-yet the collective movement grips you faster than any
old gnarled root in European soil would have done.” The western fron-
tier, modern business and academic life have held up images of individu-
ality, but more for men than for women. And whereas a young man
might have been able to find in cinema models of masculinity to emulate,
a young woman would have seen mostly glamour girls, and occasionally
Katherine Hepburn! And now, before any new images of modern femi-
nine patterns can emerge, apparently the woundedness of the feminine
must come out into the light.
The films which focus most directly on this theme are Bergman’s Au-
 Psychological Perspectives 151

tumn Sonata and Woody Allen’s Interiors. In each film, the woundedness
is in the mother-daughter relationship affects the overall identity of the
figures. The films are very similar, but also illustrate the difference in
treatment of relationships in European and American cinema. The Ameri-
can films go in for breadth and have to include some action, a change or
venue or marital partner; by contrast, the European films often involve
little action and focus in on a relationship with a magnifying glass.
Ingrid Bergman plays the mother in Autumn Sonata, a successful con-
cert pianist, recently widowed; she is a nervous, driven woman suffering
from insomnia and a mysterious sense of guilt. After a hiatus of seven
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years, she visits her elder daughter, played by Liv Ulman, a sad, self-
effacing girl-woman overly eager to please her mother. When the mother
arrives, Liv surprises her with the news that the younger sister, who has
an advanced case of multiple sclerosis. is living at the house rather than in
the institution where she had been placed. This younger daughter seems
symbolic of the woundedness of both daughters which the mother has
tried to keep at a distance, but now must face.
During the night, the mother is awakened by a nightmare of being
strangled by a woman’s hand. The daughter comes to comfort her, and,
after a few nightcaps, admits that in fact she has felt like killing her, that
she has a deep hatred for her, the hatred of having been ignored and
neglected all her life. The story pours out that the mother preferred the
piano to her daughters and had been away constantly except for one
year when she gave it up, stayed home and tried to make up for all the
previous years of neglect. Like many other instances Liv recalls to her, it
was a time of doing things to and for the daughters that looked right but
in reality were completely unrelated to their needs.
The mother is astonished to hear the story, for she had until now
denied her neglectfulness. The emotional impact of their talk touches her,
and she explores for the first time her own lack of mothering and the
expectation that her daughters’ devotional love for her would make up
for it. Whereas Liv has obviously been aware of her feelings before to-
night and was the one to initiate the conversation, it is all too much for
the mother, and she leaves abruptly.
Autumn Sonata is a painful and tense film to watch, told mostly from
the daughter’s standpoint. We see more of her woundedness than the
mother’s: her immaturity, an overattachment to a dead child, the envy of
 152 Meredith Sabini

her mother’s competence as a pianist which prevents her from becoming

an artist in her own right; all wounds of injection internalized. But the
film is sympathetic t o both figures and shows how they both have suf-
fered. They listen to each other and are touched by each other. The
daughter’s exploration and expression of built-up feeling and the mother’s
responsiveness seem to free the daughter to grow more into herself; in
the end, she reaches out by sending an apology that doesn’t rescind any-
thing but asks that their relationship continue anew.
Interiors is Woody Allen’s tribute to Ingmar Bergman, and the story is
very similar t o Autumn Sonata. It is also told from the standpoint of the
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eldest daughter, who likewise carries the burden of becoming conscious

of her woundedness (by being in therapy), but there is no working out of
the relationship between mother and daughter in actuality.
The film’s title is a double entendre. It refers t o the interior of the fami-
ly which we see; and it refers to the mother’s being an interior decorator
and having made their house a frozen artistic statement. Geraldine Page
plays the mother, the epitome of an “ice queen”- haughty, unreachable,
totally self-absorbed, and manipulative of others via threats of having a
breakdown. We come in on the family as the husbandlfather announces
that he is leaving Page; it is a public announcement, made over the dining
table during the three daughters’ visit, as if he and the wife no longer had
a private relationship and needed the daughters as a buffer.
The first third of the film felt very contrived, like a made-up version of
a family’s psychology. I was just putting on my coat to leave when Pearl,
the father’s new wife-to-be made her entrance, dressed in bright red. I
realized then that the contriveness was exactly the mood Allen had in-
tended; that was the family’s interior-“decorated,” false, effete. Allen
conveyed this image through the use of muted, almost colorless clothing
and sets, giving the film a dream-like quality.
The three daughters show various kinds of feminine identity that can
emerge in relation to the “ice queen” mother. The eldest daughter is iden-
tified with the mother and her artistic competence. The mother had
pressured all the daughters to be creative, but only the eldest was able to
fulfill that ideal. She is a successful poet, but over-identified with that
competent side. This limitation comes out in the relationship with her
husband, who is also a poet but less successful. He is a shadow figure for
her, and his ordinary self-doubts and struggling make her impatient and
 Psychological Perspectives 153

annoyed. She tries to cure him with facile words (“you are good”); at
other times, she demeans him unmercifully.
He takes understandable refuge in the youngest daughter, an actress
who flies in from exotic locations for family visits. She appears to have
fled from her mother’s heavy sterility into an artificially sweet, excessive
femininity; she covers up her woundedness with the make-up of her roles
and with flights from mother earth both literally in airplanes and psy-
chologically with drugs.
It is the middle daughter who seems to suffer consciously and to be
the most lost. She has not been able to develop her creativity as a pho-
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tographer, nor able to settle into an adult life as a woman; we see her
unable to decide about having children with her husband and unable to
stay with a job. She too had fled from the mother by identifying with
the father and being his little girl.
The healing element is introduced in the figure of Pearl, excellently
played by Maureen Stapleton. While everyone else wears beiges and greys,
she wears bright colors, and her behavior is equally lively. There is a won-
derful scene in which all the daughters and their mates are having an
abstract intellectual discussion about a play, trying to evaluate the merits
of a certain scene. Pearl doesn’t quite follow the arguments, and they try
to draw her in. She admits that she doesn’t know much, but does know
what’s right and wrong, and “you just don’t squeal on someone.” Her
values sound simplistic and low class to the daughters, but it is clear that
they come out of her earthiness and experience in the world. Later, when
she and the father celebrate their marriage with wine, music, and dancing,
none of which the daughters can abide, she knocks over a precious vase
of flowers put just so for effect. This is a well-chosen image for the break-
ing of the glass container the daughters have lived in. Their mother cannot
tolerate the change, the new marriage, and takes her own life. At the end,
the three daughters are left looking at the ocean where she died and the
eldest comments, “It’s so calm now.”
The maternal figures in these two films were one-sided in their identi-
fication with work, but in Autrrrnn Sonata, the mother was still alive as
a person and her suffering made her approachable. The daughter was
wounded in her “sense of self,” but able to bring this woundedness and
its roots out into the open; some healing then took place in the context of
their relationship. In Interiors, the mother was not approachable and of-
 154 Meredith Sabini

fered nothing of the feminine for the daughters to identify with; they were
forced to either imitate her or flee from her altogether. Pearl provided a
new image for them, of a woman who embodies a natural connection
with eros, and whose sense of self is wholesome and strong.
In these two films, the woundedness of the female figures has a context,
a family background, which makes it understandable. In the following
films, there is no context or explanation, and consequently they are less
satisfying films. Old Boy Friends is the worst in this respect; not only is
there no context, the main character herself is not cohesive or believable.
She is Diane Cruse, a 30ish woman who tries to find herself by making
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a pilgrimage to see old boy friends, as if through knowing how they saw
her in the past, she can know herself in the present. (She explains this at
the end of the film.) All we are told about her is that she is divorced and
recently tried to commit suicide by driving her car into a wall.
She abruptly leaves her job in L.A. and takes off on this journey in a
very “macho” automobile (as her first boy friend notes). She doesn’t do
anything sensible like writing ahead; she just appears and lies about how
she happens to be there. She tells each one a different story and also lies
about her marital status and her job.
The first boy friend was from college days, and apparently they had
considered marrying but she couldn’t “get married and still be me.” She
seduces him the first night and then moves into his home. When he is
sensible and says they can’t just take up again after ten years, she leaves
without notice.
The second boy friend was a high school fellow: their relationship had
ended when he ridiculed her publicly about sleeping with him when she
in fact hadn’t. She entices him out to their old necking place, but has in-
tentions only of revenge; this she accomplishes by dumping him there,
clad only in shirt and socks.
By this time it is evident that her “search for self’ is far from an intro-
spective journey; it is acting out in the worst way; she is desperately trying,
through these encounters, to reconnect with lost aspects of herself. The
last stop reveals what a pathetic character she is. The grade school boy
friend she hoped to find has been killed in the Navy, but this doesn’t stop
her. She goes for his schizophrenic-seeming brother, making him dress in
the dead brother’s clothes and taking him to an old hideout where she
seduces him. Needless to say, this episode has quite an impact on the young
 Psychological Perspectives 155

man; he promptly decompensates and has to be hospitalized. When she

goes to visit his psychiatrist, we learn that she herself is a clinical psycholo-
gist. In this film, as in Interiors where the eldest daughter’s therapist evokes
guffaws from the theater audience, psychology doesn’t fare too well.
Only with this last visit does the depth of this woman’s woundedness
become evident. She herself is like the schizophrenic boy, lost from life
on account of some intolerable losses and events that only she knows
about. Her sense of self is not only wounded, because of the poor direc-
tion (by a woman) of the film it is practically absent. Unfortunately,
the three fellows have nothing particular in common, either among them-
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selves, or in terms of meaning to her, so we cannot conclude that it is

something of the masculine she was searching for in this peculiar saga.
The Lacemaker is not quite as frustrating a film, because the character
is well drawn; but again, we are given no insight into why she is so unde-
veloped. This is a French film about an eighteen year old beautician; she
goes on a holiday with an older woman client and is soon abandoned when
the woman finds a lover. We see her moping around the beach town, sadly
eating ice creams alone. A university student tries to take up with her,
but she is extremely shy and can hardly speak to him. Her woundedness is
apparent right away in this almost schizoid withdrawal and extreme lack
of confidence. The young man leads the way coaxing her along. At one
point they play a game of trust in which she, with her eyes closed, follows
his verbal directions to walk this way or that; he cautiously directs her to
the edge of the cliff. It is a tense scene; the viewer feels that she will not be
betrayed by him, and yet there is something awry in the very act of playing
such a game. I suppose it is an image of her relationship to life, being
curious, and willing to be led into it, but essentially being in the dark,
keeping her eyes closed about where she stands and where she is going.
Their relationship continues after the holiday, and they soon take an
apartment together. It is her first experience with a man, not only sexually,
but even in getting acquainted. A polarity between them soon emerges:
she lives close to the interior world of feeling, and he is devoted to his
studies, talks with friends, political activity. He tries to draw her out into
the world, encouraging her to “make something of herself,’’ although she
feels he is right in his suggestion, she is hurt by the lack of acceptance.
The gulf between them increases, and he calls off the relationship.
She apparently took the brcak-up very badly, for when he visits her
 156 Meredith Sabini

some months later, she is in a mental hospital. She shuffles out in dark
clothes, walking with that slightly askew gait of someone who has been
knocked off balance and never recovered. He asks if she had any other
lovers since they parted; she says she has, and also that she made a trip to
Greece. In the last scene, when she returns to the day room and takes up
her knitting, we see a poster of Greece on the wall indicating that the trip
was taken only in her imagination.
Lacemaker is a sad film. This young girl just emerging into life attaches
herself to her opposite, a man who might be able to help her, and she
him; but they are too far apart, and she is unable to bridge the gap be-
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tween herself and what he represents. Losing him has such impact because
it seems to mean losing the possibility of coming out of her cocoon; and
thus defeated in her attempt at self-development she falls back into the
unconscious.
These films about wounded women are terribly sad. WiJernistress is
one of the few that portrays an undeveloped figure finding her way into a
new kind of life. From the advertising posters one might think that this
was just another Italian sex-comedy with Marcello Masttoiani, but it
turned out to be a delightful and sensitively done film that deals both
with the path of self-discovery a woman might take and the difficulty of
having a genuine marriage relationship.
It begins as a doctor pays a visit to the woman, played sumptuously
by Laura Antonelli, and makes it clear that the paralysis in her legs which
keeps her bedridden is psychogenic. When her husband comes home from
one of his regular trips as a wine merchant, she.pleads with him to stay
with her awhile. He declines saying that he must travel; if she were better,
she could come along, but for now he leaves a recording of train sounds
for her to play.
During his trip he happens across a murder and is falsely accused of
committing it. He flees to the house of a friend and is secreted away in
the attic; this room just happens to be across the street from his own
house and affords a view of his wife’s bedroom. After being missing for
several weeks he is presumed dead. This seems to free the wife from hei
illness and dependency, the way people are freed of their neuroses during
wartime. She gets out of bed and determines that she is the one who
should carry on the business. So she goes off along in his carriage driving
wildly through the square. That scene is an image of her libido, free for
 Psychological Perspectives 157

the first time in years and consequently unruly and disruptive. But the
horse knows the route and in fact won’t proceed until she makes the
correct stops.
The following weeks are full of experiences she has never had: meeting
with strangers, riding through new countryside, making business deci-
sions. By taking charge of her husband’s work and following his exact
route, she discovers that he had a life she knew nothing about. This is
portrayed in a very tender way, not like a wife going through the hus-
band’s wallet behind his back, but like the appreciative discovery, that
can be made more easily after death, of what life was like for someone
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else. She learns that he belonged to a hunting club, had special hotel
rooms reserved for him and had friendships and love affairs with vari-
ous women. In his hotel rooms she finds political tracts he wrote under a
pseudonym.
She takes up his life as if it were her own, partly t o learn about him,
and partly to learn about life for herself. This pattern of imitating a man
is not unusual for women seeking independence; but in Wifemistress the
woman imitates only the actions of the man’s life and thus doesn’t lose
her essential femininity in doing so. She doesn’t identify with being a
businesswoman, but knows that all of this is a temporary means and not
an end in itself. She also develops in areas that never belonged to her
husband. Whereas he had visions of political and social reform, but only
wrote about them secretly, she brings about some changes by taking
charge of the family estate she had inherited (and previously left to her
husband t o manage). With the help of a country doctor, an ideal mascu-
line figure for her, she transforms the estate from a feudal plantation into
a modern community with good housing and medical facilities. But in
the end she uses the doctor to prove to her husband, whom she now
knows is watching her from his hiding place, that her frigidity is gone and
she has lovers just as he had. In the sexual area as in others, although she
imitates the masculine pattern, her fears about her new experiences and a
subtle awareness that the changes are for herself, redeem the situation.
The whole matter of her development is handled very subtly, and there is
an edge of consciousness in both main characters that gives Wifemistress
a rich quality.
I have focused on the development of the wife, but the film gives as
much attention to the husband. Cooped up and forced to watch his wife
 158 Meredith Sobini

change, he goes into a deep depression and begins to look at what kind of
life he has led. He confesses to his host that, underneath it all, he has
been afraid of life, that the galavanting and writing were false, airy at-
tempts t o live. What he describes is the death of the Puer Aeternus (the
eternal youth), the kind of figure Mastroiani has played for years in
Italian films. He emerges a man who has owned u p to what he has been
and suffered with that knowledge.
It is an altogether lovely film showing the kind of shift in the balance
between man and woman that can take place successfully. The wounded,
dependent, frigid woman gets out of her bed, her retreat, and enters life;
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she gathers about her experiences of what she is and what she can do. The
man withdraws from life and undertakes the painful task of introspection.
They both recognize that they have avoided a real relationship with each
other out of fear. In the end, she sends her lover away and invites her
husband to come across the street to their home. It isn’t a “happy ever
after” ending, because they are both full of fear and trembling as they
face each other anew.
So far the films have been about women at the beginning of their lives
whose woundedness was in their basic identity formation. No Time for
Breakfasf is about a woman in later life who has made a place for her-
self as a doctor; her sense of self is overly strong. Her woundedness is
in having lost touch with her essential femininity and being unable to
relate to her husband and children. Having no time for breakfast captures
that image of being so caught up in doing that there is no time for being,
for the leisurely, undirected aspect of life that is so nourishing.
Annie Girardot gives an excellent performance as Dr. Gaillant, the wife
of a French cabinet minister; their marriage has become an agreement to
stay together while going their separate ways. She is so busy with her lover
at night and medical practice during the day, that these and her family all
get short changed. Her son suffers the most from this and accuses her of
giving more time to her patients than to him; she appeases him by making
a date with him several days hence. Both her teenage children act out their
anger and despair at being uncontained in the family, the son by stealing,
the daughter by becoming pregnant. Dr. Gaillant deceives herself about
her importance to the family and tries to ameliorate the situation with
palliatives rather than the more needed medicine of her relatedness. She
quietly permits her children to get angry with her, telling her husband, “It’s
 Psychological Perspectives 159

alright, let them get it out.” Feelings are thus something one gets out and
has done with it; they have no life of their own nor are they woven into a
fabric that binds people. In many situations, we see her lie to people or
make that subtle deception of false feeling; she covers it over with a big,
intentional smile, as if t o say, “see, everything is just fine.”
This false facade begins to break down when she learns that she has
cancer. It is predictably in the lungs, for throughout the film she has a
cigarette hanging out of her mouth in that cold, mannish way. At first she
tries to run away from the illness by taking a trip with her lover and not
telling him or anyone. But she comes home early and, with the first show
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of real feeling, turns to her husband for help and comfort. The connection
that has always been between them comes to life, and he confesses t o her,
“I feel we had a narrow escape.”
She faces the exploratory tests and then surgery with great anguish. Her
suffering touched a universal nerve; it was that begrudging surrender to
what fate has brought, that anguish at feeling ‘no exit.’ At the end, a
printed message on the screen informed viewers that No Time f o r Break-
fast was based on a true story, and that the real Dr. Gaillant recovered
from surgery and returned to practice medicine. It doesn’t say, though,
whether she returned to herself. Did she take time for breakfast, sym-
bolically speaking? We can’t be sure that she did, but the message that one
must is certainly clear enough in this very poignant film.
* * *
These films illustrate different types of woundedness and different ways
change may take place. In Lacemaker and Wifemistress the women
have a natural connection with the feminine, but lack ego strength, a
cohesive sense of themselves in relation to the world and an ability to
“do” anything. One succeeds in achieving this, one doesn’t. The daughters
in Autumn Sonata and Interiors suffer from a more basic disturbance in
their “sense of self” which affects both their feminine identity and their
creative work. The mothers in both films were selfish women who im-
peded the daughters’ natural development. The woman in No Time for
Breakfast is well on her way toward being like those maternal figures,
overly devoted to work and lacking in real relatedness.
Movement out of that woundedness may come about through the action
of fate or illness, as in Wifemistress and No Time f o r Breakfast; con-
 160 Meredith Sabini

scious suffering may lead to psychological exploration as in Inferiors and

Autumn Sonata; or the attempt at change may be misdirected and abortive
as in Lacemaker and Boy Friends. For me, the most interesting and cer-
tainly most healing image is that of Pearl, the earth woman in Inferiors, a
woman perhaps not quite modern, but nevertheless timeless in her caring,
her relatedness to herself and others, her liveliness. In the film she has
had several husbands, several children, and lived many places. She is one
of those sturdy, unself-conscious women that a daughter or friend or mate
would discuss anything with, ask anything of, not that she would be all-
giving, but that her reply would be based on experience and be given from
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the heart.
Her name was well chosen, for the pearl is an ancient image associated
with the feminine. A pearl is formed inside the oyster; the impetus for its
development is that a grain of sand or other irritant enters the oyster,
which then transforms it by enclosing it in rings of nacreous material,
forming the pearl. It is a feminine self-symbol, because of its association
with the moon and its almost eternal value. And since it begins with a
grain of sand, that tiny speck of nigredo, it carries the image of wounded-
ness as the initiator of self-development.