Psychoanalytic Review of the Charmed Episode “When Sparks Fly”

Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are in abnormal, social, and personality psychology, with a particular interest in the psychology of religious and ideological belief and the assessment and improvement of personality and performance (1) explains why it is dangerous to categories people into groups when it forces businesses to hire people based on various categorized differences (ie: women, black, homosexual, etc.) because it obliterates individual identity like individual intelligence, individual temperament, individual interests etc. by corralling people into groups that represent the various “differences” that make up the larger society. Groups that tend to be discriminated against. He explains that this is largely a political process of Postmodernism which is nothing more than a euphemism for Marxist philosophy that sparked the downfall of the Russian Monarch during World War I. Oppressor versus the Oppressed.

In the book “Origins of Satan,” in fact states that at the heart of the very concept of “Satan” are the basic differences that tend to alienate one group from the other. What is interesting are the specific social implications of the figure of Satan: how he is invoked to express human conflict (differences) and an image used to characterize human enemies within our own religious and political traditions. This can influence people to “split” human objects into “good” and “bad” parts. If you’re “white” then you are “good.” But if you are “black,” you are “bad.” This was the primary thesis of white supremacy and Nazi philosophy, but today we don’t just have “white supremacy” we have “black supremacy” and every other “ethnic minority group supremacy”. I argue in a Capitalistic society, no matter how you look at it, groups will all be categorized into two parts; by the value they represent and the contributions they make to the larger “social order” or they will be categorized into “devalued groups”, those groups that contribute very little, if nothing to the social order. And I support this statement with the fact that devalued groups or those groups affiliated with the “lower-class” status, in American U.S. history have had unethical human medical experiments performed on them. Groups such as black slaves, prison inmates, retarded children, children in NY foster care, and men who solicited prostitutes in a California brothel (2) (3) at Telegraph Hill Apartments, 225 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA between 1955 and 1965. This building was the site of “Operation Midnight Climax” — a top-secret mind-control program in which CIA agents used hookers to lure unsuspecting johns from North Beach bars to what they called “the pad,” then dosed the men with LSD and observed the X-rated goings-on through a two-way mirror while sitting on a portable toilet swilling martinis.

“And now unto the last of all the circles
Had we arrived, and to the right hand turned,
And were attentive to another care.
There the embankment shoots forth flames of fire,
And upward doth the cornice breathe a blast
That drives them back, and from itself sequesters.” ~Dante, Canto XXV, The Terrace of Lust, Purgatorio (**)

All my life I have always been a fan of science fiction and the television network The CW which incorporates a lot of science fiction themes and superhero characters into its productions. https://www.cwtv.com/ One of my favorite shows on this network has been “Charmed,” a TV series about three sister “witches” who fight evil and demonic forces. As a student of Christian religious philosophy, the theme of Good vs. Evil is one of the primary topics in biblical literature. It has been one of my favorite topics because it also draws on Ethics and Morals of human behavior in philosophy. The Canon starts off with the book of Genisis which is an account of God, Creation, and Evil. It details how sin entered into man’s heart and thus the world. The account really is a metaphor or allegory for leadership and fellowship. That is rulers and subjects. It describes in a story of mythical legend the concepts and notions of a benevolent good ruler (God), a disobedient act which instilled sin (violation of law), and the retribution (legal punishment) that ensued as a result of this human indiscretion. These are fundamental concepts in teaching young children right from wrong. The law and punishment.

In “When Sparks Fly” which aired on the CW this past Friday, November 15, 2019 at 8:00 pm, I couldn’t help but feel a connection with this particular episode in that it described a form of “splitting” of human Objects into “good” and “bad” parts. This story could be used as a metaphor or allegory in teaching object relations theory, particularly that of the paranoid-schizoid position. (4)

An interesting facet to understanding psychopathy in populations has involved the cultural influences of spiritual and religious faith. It just might be that in certain cultures, psychopathy may be less prevalent because of long-held traditions that incorporate the notion of “respect” and “value for life.”

In the episode “When Sparks Fly” the White Lighter character named “Harry,” who is an Angel, is split into his “bad part” or dark side. Thus, Harry’s “Dark Lighter” was created. Harry’s Dark Lighter body, his bad object part of his identity, is stolen and transformed into a cloud of smoke, a gas-like substance that does not evaporate but that can be contained and imprisoned inside a glass jar. The Dark Lighter, the bad object is immobilized and kept from trouble. His jar is kept on a shelf with other Dark Lighters who have been imprisoned just like him to protect the world from Evil.

In this episode, Harry’s Dark Lighter self recites a quote from Dante, “From a small spark starts a great flame.” Often times aesthetic beauty creates a spark that can grow into a great flame. The flame of Love. If one wanted to prevent the spark from igniting into a great flame, one would have to tamper with the ignition source. The taking or “stealing” of a woman’s aesthetic beauty, her facial image, sexualized body parts, her gendered representation of Self , in essence her power, which might be construed as her “bad object parts” which to the paranoid personality would entail her aesthetic beauty, breasts, hips, waist, all that make up her feminine image would be feared and an attempt to thwart her “Evil doings” much like the vaporizing of the Darker Lighter’s body into a smokey essence in the episode of “Charmed.” There are threads of connection here to the paranoia of the anorexic to her own body parts as well as those with other disorders like gender dysmorphia. In the episode of Charmed, after the Dark Lighters bodies have been stolen and turned into a smokey gas, rendered mute in silent denial, demonstrates a representation of the paranoid-schizoid personality’s approach to “solving the problem” much like the German Nazis did with their “Jewish Problem.” It is sometimes rendered as Chassguet-Smirgel’s “creative perversion” of hubris and hybrid.

This “stealing” “immobilizing” “tearing down” of the body Object is at the heart of Freud’s Castration Complex which can be a fixed unconscious drive or it can be triggered by an event such as a traumatic event such as war, or a rejection of a lover for example. In the psychoanalytic theory of object relations, we determine whether or not a person has a fixed unconscious drive if the behavior is repetitive, consistent, and part of their routine behavior. In some incidents, acts that mimic a paranoid-schizoid “splitting” may be the result of a traumatic event and never re-occur again. Like in the case of Leon Gary Plauche, the man known for the vigilante killing of Jeff Doucet in 1984. Jeff Doucet had kidnapped and sexually assaulted Plauche’s son, Jody Plauche. Surveillance footage captured the killing on film as Doucet walked through an airport, Plauche hid out near some pay phones, directed a gun at his head as he walked by him and killed him. Leon Gary Plauche received a seven-year suspended sentence for this act in which no prison time was ever served. I believe Leon Gary Plauche never had any other violent run-ins with the law again. (5)

The scene in “When Sparks Fly” when Harry’s Dark Lighter’s body is “immobilized,” turned into smoke, then kept in a jar on a shelf describes a form of “kidnapping” in allegory or metaphor. It can also describe the incarcerated inmate in a prison facility, kept immobilized for reasons of safety to the general public. The “reincarnation” of the body and then the “killing off” of the body is similar to the methods used in sadistic serial rape/sadistic serial murder in which an Object body is “immobilized,” “used as a vehicle for hate and brutalized,” and then “killed off.” The aspect of keeping the Dark Lighter’s smokey essence in a glass jar is similar to the taking of “trophies” or “souvenirs” observed in serial rapes and serial murders. We can draw parallels and conclusions about various psychic “theaters of the mind” when we look to aspects of the death penalty which used to be a spectators sport or to the rehabilitation of the insane through the “mind control” experiment known as “psychic driving” and in the acts of violence that fill the different police blotters. This particular scene in “When Sparks Fly” can also describe the rehabilitation of the criminal through incarceration. In the symbolic therapeutic space of psychoanalysis, it would be the “cure” to the problem of definitively deciding on gender re-assignment. There are re-occurring themes in human nature that are at the heart of Chassgeut-Smirgel’s “Creativity and Perversion”, the re-writing of reality as the anal-sadistic knows it, the creating of a new universe, the anal universe in which there are no discussions, no renderings of opinion in philosophical debate. Man has a creative mind and it has been with this cleverness and ingenuity that the lobotomy was discovered. Seeking out new problem-solving strategies to solve old problems that continue to plague him has been of great interest to him. Sometimes these creative solutions are to the detriment of the greater good. Nobel foundation admitted a grave mistake in awarding Portugues neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his development of the prefrontal lobotomy. A procedure in which the connection is cut to a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex in mentally ill, depressed or learning disabled people. (6)(7)

In Freud’s theory of the Castration Complex or in theories of matricide we have the element of “splitting” of Objects in the person’s object-relational world into “good parts” and “bad parts.” (8) It has been called the psychotic text of Western patriarchy by some feminist writers. No matter how you look at it, any attempted act to “immobilize” “steal” “tear down” “rip apart” “chew up” “spit out” “thwart” or “obstruct” represents the paranoid-schizoid position. It’s opposite is negotiation and the working through of a problem by both parties that may or may not result in a solution or amicable agreement. If this occurs, it is the loser’s responsibility to creatively find a solution to constructively mourn through their loss. This usually can be achieved through creative expression, writing, poetry, film, autobiographical, music, dance, visual arts, or re-directing behavior to a new endeavor, a new lover, or more constructive modes of behavior.

In the Epoch Times, a recently created newspaper that reports on political issues like the 2016 Russian collusion conspiracy and the flip side of that conspiracy known as “Spygate” we see the combined paranoia that unfolded as democratic political leaders weaponized certain branches and leaders within the intelligence community such as the CIA, FBI, Justice Department, and State Department with power to bring about a presidential impeachment of Donald Trump. (9) Although Donald Trump’s behavior affected political groups to resort to paranoid warmongering behavior, I believe it was all done with the intention to protect a national treasure, to keep pure the highest seat of U.S. leadership. Epoch Times questions whether or not it was the result of decades of U.S. political corruption. “In fact, at the heart of the Origins of Satan are the basic differences that tend to alienate one group from the other. What is interesting are the specific social implications of the figure of Satan: how he is invoked to express human conflict (differences) and an image used to characterize human enemies within our own religious and political traditions.” (10)

Elaine Pagels in her book “The Origins of Satan” suggests that Satan, along with other diabolical colleagues like Belial and Mastema, whose Hebrew name means “hatred”, did not materialize out of thin air. Instead, these figures emerged from the turmoil of 1st century Palestine, the setting in which the Christian movement began to grow.

The anthropologist Robert Redfield has argued that the worldview of many peoples consists essentially of two pairs of binary oppositions: “human” / “nonhuman” and “we” / “they.” These two are often correlated, as Jonathan Z. Smith observes, so that “we” equals “human” and “they” equals “not human.” The distinction between “us” and “them” occurs within our earliest historical evidence, on ancient Sumerian and Akkadian tablets, just as it exists in the language and culture of people all over the world. Such distinctions are charged, sometimes with attraction, perhaps more often with repulsion — or both at once. The ancient Egyptian word for Egyptian simply means “human”; the Greek word for non-Greeks, “barbarian,” mimics the guttural gibberish of those who do not speak Greek — since they speak unintelligibly, the Greeks call them barbaroi.

Yet this virtually universal practice of calling one’s own people human and “dehumanizing” others does not necessarily mean that people actually doubt or deny the humanness of others. Much of the time, as William Green points out, those who so label themselves and others are engaging in a kind of caricature that helps define and consolidate their own group identity:

“A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them, by selecting isolating, and emphasizing an aspect of another people’s life, and making it symbolize their difference.”” (10)

This practice of consolidating people into groups, according to Jordan B. Peterson, a professor of psychology, can become a dangerous facet in philosophical institutions that serve communities. The political philosophies that are both Marxists and Postmodernist theories have a tendency to group people by gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. to counter Marxists notions that the powerful oppress the powerless by making corporations maintain a balance of equal representation of different gender, ethnic, and gender-orientated groups. By doing this he states political policy can obliterate individual differences that make each individual unique like their level of individual intelligence, individual temperament, individual interests, and a unique opinion. (11) In this way, Postmodern radical thinkers obliterate the real potential a group can make by making mandatory requirements on hiring based on these group hiring requirements. But still I argue that in a Capitalistic society, no matter how you look at it, groups will all be categorized into two parts; by the value they represent and the contributions they make to the larger “social order” or they will be categorized into “devalued groups”, those groups that contribute very little, if nothing to the social order. We see this in the devalued status of domestic services, cooks, janitorial, bus drivers, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoG9zBvvLQ

Source References:

(1) Jordan Peterson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson

(2) Gary Kamiya. “When the CIA ran a LSD sex-house in San Francisco. San Francisco Chronicle. (Retrieved online November 18, 2019). Published April 1, 2016. Updated Sept. 5, 2019. https://www.sfchronicle.com/…/When-the-CIA-ran-a-LSD-sex-ho…

(3) Joshua A. Perper; Stephen J. Cina. (2010) When Doctors Kill: Who, Why, and How. New York. Copernicus Books. (pg. 97)

(4) The CW Network. “Charmed.” Ep. 205. Aired November 15, 2019 (Retrieved Online November 18, 2019) https://www.cwtv.com/shows/charmed/when-sparks-fly/?play=8a1197b3-f866-47de-a729-9c57430bfe21

(5) Gary Plauche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Plauche

(6) Egas Moniz Article. nobelprizeorg. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1949. (Retrieved online November 18, 2019) https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1949/moniz/article/

(7) Natalie Wolchover. Top 5 Nobel Prize Goof Ups. Live Science. October 5, 2011. Strange News. (Retrieved online November 18, 2019. https://www.livescience.com/16391-top-5-nobel-prize-goof-ups.html

(8) Amber Jacobs. (2007) On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis, and the Law of the Mother. New York. Columbia University Press. (pg. 78–79)

(9) Spygate Part 1: How Obama Officials Plotted to Take Down Trump. The Epoch Times. Published March 28, 2019. (Retrieved online November 18, 2019). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PseDla0l9xE

(10) Elaine Pagels. (1995) The Origins of Satan. New York. Penguin Random House.

(11) Postmodernism and Cultural Marxism by Jordan B. Peterson. The Epoch Times. Published July 6, 2017. (Retrieved online November 18, 2019). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLoG9zBvvLQ

Quotation Reference:

(**)Dante Alighieri. (2005) The Purgatorio. New York. Barnes and Noble Classics. Translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (pg. 142)