Edvard Munch

[Beware of Junk Psychology...]

I had a very insightful experience this evening.

Since starting a new job, I have been very motivated again to tie up loose ends and start moving forward in life again after the grief/depression of this latest (and final?) break with my BPD ex. As I've said to my friends, I "got my groove back."

One of the things that I have been procrastinating on is watching this movie. I ordered it from Netflix back in July(!) but it has just been sitting there and I've avoided either watching it or sending it back.

Part of the reason I was avoiding was because this was one of the movies that was recommended by my guy's ex (whom I think he is now, again, involved with), and so I had an emotional aversion for a while.

One of the perhaps perverse little things about our love triangle is that we all shared the same movies. The ex would recommend them to my guy (or post them on his letterboxd account) and then my guy would watch them (with the ex or on his own), and then so would I at his recommendation, or because I was sort of stalking the ex's letterboxd account so that I could imitate his taste in cinema (he was a film buff, admittedly, so I learned a lot about good film in spite of our rivalry, and I knew that was one of the few things that the ex had "over" me, that he was superior in... .so I tried to watch "their" films too so that I could co-opt that intimacy and prevent it from becoming just "their" thing, but rather it became something shared by all three of us. Sort of sick, I know... .)

Anyway, it was a movie about Edvard Munch, the Peter Watkins 4-hour one from the 70's.

Edvard Munch is a Norwegian artist perhaps most famous for painting "The Scream" which is often used as an image of mental illness.

Not surprisingly, the movie revealed, Munch struggled with mental illness himself. However, the movie also depicted Munch's bohemian circle romanticizing thoughts or traits or tendencies that I recognized as mentally ill, and indeed the movie itself seemed to romanticize them, as somehow fueling greater wisdom or art or revelation of discovering new experiences on the cutting-edge frontier of human subjectivity.

Interestingly, it made perfect sense to me that the ex liked this movie, gave it five-stars on Letterboxd. He too seemed to romanticize this sort of broken-but-'artistic' personality, and indeed that seemed to be what he saw in "our" guy. Our guy also sometimes spoke as if that was one possible narrative by which he could interpret his life, but he also in moments of clarity knew the dangers (Edvard Munch and company were not a happy or functional group!) In some ways, philosophically, my guy was constantly swinging between the sort of romanticized "artistic angst" that the ex was sort of a cheerleader for, and the stability and functionality that I represented and advocated for.

In the end, at least for now, it seems he collapsed into the dysfunctional vision. But, the point is, I could just imagine the ex, the other guy, sitting and watching this movie and thinking of our guy, romanticizing these "artistic" angsts, imagining that in finding our guy he had found a similar diamond-in-the-rough, the next Edvard Munch. I too thought there was a spark of genius in our guy, but I thought that if that genius came at the price of functionalism or madness, it just wasn't worth it, and indeed I thought that probably his genius would be even MORE powerful if he could find mental health TOO; that it was a myth that the one required the other (even if they were correlated somehow).

Anyway, it did not surprise me at all then when a quick Google search for Edvard Munch and Borderline Personality Disorder revealed that many psychological historians, looking back, have thought Edvard Munch and his crowd specifically suffered from BPD!

What an interesting set of insights to come full-circle for me tonight.

[UmbrellaBoy]

I had a very insightful experience this evening.

Since starting a new job, I have been very motivated again to tie up loose ends and start moving forward in life again after the grief/depression of this latest (and final?) break with my BPD ex. As I've said to my friends, I "got my groove back."

One of the things that I have been procrastinating on is watching this movie. I ordered it from Netflix back in July(!) but it has just been sitting there and I've avoided either watching it or sending it back.

Part of the reason I was avoiding was because this was one of the movies that was recommended by my guy's ex (whom I think he is now, again, involved with), and so I had an emotional aversion for a while.

One of the perhaps perverse little things about our love triangle is that we all shared the same movies. The ex would recommend them to my guy (or post them on his letterboxd account) and then my guy would watch them (with the ex or on his own), and then so would I at his recommendation, or because I was sort of stalking the ex's letterboxd account so that I could imitate his taste in cinema (he was a film buff, admittedly, so I learned a lot about good film in spite of our rivalry, and I knew that was one of the few things that the ex had "over" me, that he was superior in... .so I tried to watch "their" films too so that I could co-opt that intimacy and prevent it from becoming just "their" thing, but rather it became something shared by all three of us. Sort of sick, I know... .)

Anyway, it was a movie about Edvard Munch, the Peter Watkins 4-hour one from the 70's.

Edvard Munch is a Norwegian artist perhaps most famous for painting "The Scream" which is often used as an image of mental illness.

Not surprisingly, the movie revealed, Munch struggled with mental illness himself. However, the movie also depicted Munch's bohemian circle romanticizing thoughts or traits or tendencies that I recognized as mentally ill, and indeed the movie itself seemed to romanticize them, as somehow fueling greater wisdom or art or revelation of discovering new experiences on the cutting-edge frontier of human subjectivity.

Interestingly, it made perfect sense to me that the ex liked this movie, gave it five-stars on Letterboxd. He too seemed to romanticize this sort of broken-but-'artistic' personality, and indeed that seemed to be what he saw in "our" guy. Our guy also sometimes spoke as if that was one possible narrative by which he could interpret his life, but he also in moments of clarity knew the dangers (Edvard Munch and company were not a happy or functional group!) In some ways, philosophically, my guy was constantly swinging between the sort of romanticized "artistic angst" that the ex was sort of a cheerleader for, and the stability and functionality that I represented and advocated for.

In the end, at least for now, it seems he collapsed into the dysfunctional vision. But, the point is, I could just imagine the ex, the other guy, sitting and watching this movie and thinking of our guy, romanticizing these "artistic" angsts, imagining that in finding our guy he had found a similar diamond-in-the-rough, the next Edvard Munch. I too thought there was a spark of genius in our guy, but I thought that if that genius came at the price of functionalism or madness, it just wasn't worth it, and indeed I thought that probably his genius would be even MORE powerful if he could find mental health TOO; that it was a myth that the one required the other (even if they were correlated somehow).

Anyway, it did not surprise me at all then when a quick Google search for Edvard Munch and Borderline Personality Disorder revealed that many psychological historians, looking back, have thought Edvard Munch and his crowd specifically suffered from BPD!

What an interesting set of insights to come full-circle for me tonight.