Psychology professor Jude Cassidy wrote an important paper on the subjects of secrecy and attachment theory in 2001. Providing an overview of others’ research, she analyzed features of secure and insecure attachments as derived from narrative recollections within the Adult Attachment Inventory (AAI). Narratives drawn from the AAI interviews are classified as either reflecting a secure/autonomous state of mind or they reflect the three insecure states of mind: dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized. In her paper entitled “Truth, Lies, and Intimacy”, Cassidy highlights a criterion put forth by the designers of the AAI: a defining feature of a secure narrative is that it is truthful, although this criterion is not based upon content of recollections, but rather on the way experiences are organized in an interviewee’s mind. An interviewee can describe either a good or bad childhood, but what is required for a secure classification is the matching of global descriptions with specific examples. On the messages of parents, Cassidy further writes, “parents can be untruthful about the reality of the child’s experiences in a variety of ways”. They can ignore, withdraw from, or become angry in response to the child’s behaviors and feelings, and thereby convey that those behaviors and feelings are unacceptable. She cites examples, like a mother who fails to hear her baby’s cries because they trigger painful memories of her own once unanswered cries. In another case, a mother denies the pain of a child after a perceived minor injury: saying “that doesn’t hurt” when the pain does, in fact, hurt. An attempt at reassurance, perhaps, betraying that anti-hard truth bias, plus a disowning of painful memory.
With this concept of insecure narrative in mind, I might observe Tommy Walker seeking to piece together his recent and distant past. Presuming (in contrast to the film) that Tommy’s parents are still alive, I might support the young man’s pursuit of them so as to organize and understand his autobiography, pose investigative questions about his past and theirs. The idea would be that of therapeutic truth-seeking. Hamlet didn’t obtain this, but literature sometimes offers this kind of denouement, with contexts extending from the parent-child dyad to broader perpetrator-victim narratives. In a recent novel, Lilac Girls (2016), a story of American, Polish, and German women whose lives intersect during and after World War II, author Martha Hall Kelly spins a tale based upon true events, blending real-life heroines and villains with composite fictional characters. Caroline Ferriday, a one-time Broadway actress and socialite, is one such heroine plucked from historical obscurity by Kelly’s novel. Concerned about the plight of French orphans, primarily, Ferriday also learns about women victimized by Nazi medical experiments and arranges to bring them to the United States for proper, if overdue medical treatment. Later, Ferriday turns investigator and advocate and helps locate the whereabouts of Nazi doctors still living and practicing in Germany.
One of the composite figures is a once Polish underground soldier and later prisoner of the infamous Ravensbruck (all-female) concentration camp. With Ferriday’s information, Kasia, who was a teen during the war, hunts down a former Nazi doctor who conducted inhuman experiments on herself, her sister and her now deceased mother, and discovers the doctor freely practicing medicine in a small German town years after the war—a one-time prison sentence having been commuted for political reasons. Dr. Hertha Oberheuser, the only woman tried and convicted at the Nuremburg trials, according to history, is portrayed in Lilac Girls as an ambitious, yet naïve character, more indifferent towards anti-Semitism than an ardent perpetrator of cruelty. When initially instructed to euthanize sickly prisoners versus treating them, she is initially repulsed, if ultimately cooperative. Later, when subjecting individuals to dreaded Sulfa experiments, she becomes increasingly detached, and as the story progresses, her character seems to embody the loss of German feeling.
A tragic figure in this respect, Oberheuser elicits the slightest of sympathy when confronted by Kasia in the novel’s climactic passage. Until cornering her in her office, Kasia is dogged and fearless in tracking down the guilty doctor. Shaking, fearful that other hiding, former Nazis may yet persecute or destroy her, Kasia manifests her trauma while on the cusp of revenge. Still, she calms down enough to blackmail Oberheuser, threatening media exposure unless the former Nazi explains, in painful detail, the circumstances of the prisoner’s experience at Ravensbruck. Specifically, she demands that Oberheuser review the scene of Kasia’s mother’s execution, which previously had been shrouded in mystery. The somewhat apocryphal passage portrays the Polish survivor not so much finding revenge (though she does expose Oberheuser) as peace as she conjures her mother’s final moments. Contrary to the doctor’s expectation, she does not play the vigilante role. Instead, upon hearing the doctor’s confessional, she quietly returns home, seeks succor in the arms of her husband, and goes to bed, exhausted. Thus, the woman secures a coherent if not so consoling narrative, and upon that note, the novel ends.
Recently, I watched a film that ended on a compelling, ambiguous note, with a main character undecided over a future path. A fellow viewer, seemingly frustrated by the lack of clarity, posed an interesting question: would the resolution, or lack of it, chosen by the character at the end of the story be enough for you?
Is it enough to discover truth?