Shattered Warrior: The Psychology of the Hero in Lawrence of Arabia - Research Paper Example

?Psychology   Topic:  Movie or Book review Instructions: This assignment provides an opportunity to apply psychological theory in the exploration of a book or film. Choose a film or book of special interest to you. Make sure the book or film has content that can be meaningfully explored through application of psychological theory and research. You might want to look ahead at some of the later chapters in your text that deal with emotion, motivation, personality, the development of the individual over the life span, health and stress, and psychological disorders and treatment, so that you have a more complete idea of the different concepts that might apply. For example, you might pick a movie or book in which the main character suffers from some psychological disorder, or perhaps is merely trying to cope with the everyday stressors of life. You might discuss the kinds of defense mechanisms this person uses, or perhaps refer to developmental stages in the person's life that might have been important, or discuss the effects of abuse, alcoholism and addiction, etc. You can approach the subject matter from different perspectives—psychoanalytical, biological, behavioral, cognitive, and/or sociocultural. You could discuss the role emotion, memory, or motivation plays in the character's development, or the importance of the environment, and such influences as racism and sexism. This is a research-based paper. The film or book provides only the backdrop for your research on some psychological topic. Be sure to use at least one psychological, peer-reviewed reference in addition to your textbook. You will receive more information later in the course about how to find references and the type of references you should use. You can use however many sources you need for this. 2012-02-14 17:39  Deadline:   2012-02-24 15:41 Time Left:  3 days 17h 35m Style:  APA  Language Style:   English (U.S.)  Grade:   n/a  Pages:  7  Sources:   4  Lawrence of Arabia Include pseudo-homo lines from preface of 7 Pillars. Ease with which Allenby manipulated his temperament, vanity, etc. The rape in Deraa as setting the stage for subsequent erratic behavior. His almost teenage love of flamboyant overdressing was part of his magnetic perfomance as if on stage. He even spoke of how he exploited the Bedouins with his fakery. Someone like himself, he wrote, “may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs.” It was, he remarked, a conscious deception, “hollow, worthless.” 24 But it paid off handsomely for the war effort. The scattered but valuable Middle Eastern engagements, in which Lawrence, Feisal, and their Bedouins took part, ended in stunning victories with relatively little loss of British lives Lawrence’s mercurial temperament, sexual confusion, and suicidal inclinations made him an easy prey for the poet and novelist Richard Aldington a Major R. M. S. Barton accused his onetime colleague in Egypt of being “an exhibitionist of the first water After running into Lawrence at Jiddah in 1917, Colonel Cyril Wilson reported to Cairo, “I look on him as a bumptious young ass who spoils his undoubted knowledge of Syrian Arabs &c. by making himself out to be the only authority on war, engineering, H. M.’s ships and everything else.” Everyone from generals and admirals “down to the most junior fellow” thought the same of him. To summarize his case, three major issues stood out. As one of Lawrence’s advocates summed it up as “(a) his illegitimacy; (b) suggestions that he was a homosexual pervert; (c) [the assertion that] he was a habitual and boastful liar.” 35 Aldington claimed that Lawrence was affected from an early age by the family secret, about which T. E. only learned in 1919 when his father had died. That fact alone, Aldington contended, explained Lawrence’s “abortive career and tortuous character.” 36 Robert Graves, Lawrence’s best friend and first biographer, called the notion sheer nonsense. Graves wrote that Lawrence had told him, “My mother was shocked” that he and his brother Arnold “weren’t shocked at her news and that we took it so lightly.” 37 Lawrence had not, however, wished the information to be made public. “There are certain things about my family, which must not be said. Not that I care, but other people had such odd views about marriage.” 38 Mrs. Lawrence, a very devout evangelical Anglican, considered herself in a state of sin. She and her husband were not actually married because he already had a wife in Ireland. Victorian as she was, the old lady feared disgrace and exile from good society, even though by the 1950s few would give it a moment’s thought. Indeed, Aldington may have scored a point on this issue. Beneath the surface of a “happy childhood,” the boys had early recognized what Arnold Lawrence, T.E.’s younger brother, called “a spirit of sin, unnaturalness. Hush hush was great. It perplexed the children, leading to doubts and ultimately to a lack of confidence.” When reviewing Lawrence’s sexual inhibitions, Graves had in mind, one must suspect, Lawrence’s trauma when Turks had seized him at Deraa in 1918. It undoubtedly affected his sexual nature--if that is, if it happened at all. Contemporaries and historians offer different opinions on the misfortune: skepticism; outright denial that it took place; and sympathetic acceptance of his word. Lawrence himself presented differing accounts, understandably so, since it was matter of deep humiliation. “I went in to Dera’a in disguise to spy out the defences, was caught, and identified by Hajim Bey the Governor. . .Hajim was an ardent pederast and took a fancy to me.” The Governor “tried to have me. I was unwilling, and prevailed after some difficulty.” The response to male rape, as prison researchers conclude, takes many forms: denial, anger, confessed guilt, repulsion, depression, and a lost sexual identity or confusion. At one time or another, Lawrence exhibited each of these characteristics. 45 But Aldington took the easy and conventional path of utter condemnation and ridicule about the episode and its psychological consequences. 46 Likewise, in the R. A. F., years later, Lawrence fell for an Apollo-like blond airman, R. A. M. Guy. “People aren’t friends till they have said all they can say,” he wrote Guy. “We never got to that, but we were nearer it daily. . .and since S.A. died I haven’t experienced any risk of that happening.” 47 Robert Graves learned from Lawrence that he had never much wanted sex. “1-3/4 minutes” of pleasure, as he described it, was simply not worth the trouble. Even the thought gave him “a dirty feeling.” 48 Some of his friends commented that Lawrence hated to be touched in any intimate or even casual way. Lawrence’s sense of guilt was so powerful that he took pleasure, not in delivering pain but receiving it. John Bruce, a Scottish Tank Corps chum, reported years later that Lawrence had him birch him severely some nine times. Lawrence mentions in the Oxford 1922 text of Seven Pillars that the flailing he had received at Dera’a had “resulted in a longing for a repetition of the experience.” He continued, “It could not have been my defilement for no one ever held the body in less honour than I did myself.” Instead it was “the breaking of the spirit by the frenzied nerve-shattering pain which had degraded me to beast level.” The incident “had journeyed with me since, a fascination and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps but like the striving of a moth toward its flame.” 49 To confess to sexual deviancy is quite singular at a time--the 1920s--when reticence about every sort of private feeling was still the convention begin at page 15 Fr. Military Review Four times wounded, he struggled with the horrors of psychological shock, the uncertainty of operating within an alien culture, and the usual burdens of protracted conflict. Throughout the long war, he strove to maintain his effectiveness as a compassionate and charismatic leader, but at a high personal cost. his sensitive personal reflections portray the heavy emotional burden and internal turmoil borne of leadership. Lawrence experienced symptoms we now recognize as associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These symptoms directly challenged the integrity of Lawrence’s character and identity and threatened to subvert his ability to lead. recognize the emotional price of his success; that price I have called the leader’s grief. Loss of control and authority over common mental functions, especially the reliability of memory and perception. ? Self-punishment and feelings of guilt. ? Rage and other violent impulses against indiscriminate targets. ? Combat brutalization and its attendant, “psychic numbing.” ? Alienation from one’s own feelings and from other people. ? Substance abuse. ? Anxiety and apprehension about the continued ability to love and trust others. ? Persistent expectations of betrayal and exploitation leading to the destruction of the capacity for social trust. ? Suicidality and feelings of despair, isolation, and meaninglessness. Throughout most of his later life, T.E. Lawrence manifested many, if not most, of these symptoms. Though most biographers attribute much of Lawrence’s quirkiness to his “genius,” in fact as a combat veteran of a long war, he was struggling against the ravages of PTSD, and his struggle began in the Arabian Desert. Lawrence’s grief is a particular type of psychological anguish and suffering shared by all modern combat leaders who undergo protracted, catastrophic, and traumatic war experiences. In Lawrence’s case, the Sykes-Picot Treaty—a diplomatic agreement between France and Great Britain over the final disposition of Arab territories after the war which Lawrence viewed as a sell-out of the Revolt—becomes a betrayal of “what’s right” and an event that threatened his identity and character as a leader. Throughout his book, we see him struggle to maintain his moral and psychological integrity during the long desert war. Finally, on the road to Damascus, a momentary collapse occurs. Berserker rage overwhelms his moral integrity, and the massacre at Tafas ensues—dramatically recreated in the 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia. Essentially, Lawrence loses his ability to lead. Perhaps it is no accident that Lawrence would spend nearly three years translating The Odyssey, a story of another veteran seeking a way home through moral redemption. Psychiatrists have also pointed out that writing about one’s wartime experiences creates a “healing narrative” and helps the veteran reconstruct his shattered identity into some semblance of its former whole. The idea reminds us as well that to heal is to make whole again. Thus, Lawrence’s writing Seven Pillars of Wisdom must have been a very therapeutic process for him. Lawrence had to transcend two distinct cultural challenges: Arab social culture and conventional military culture. Ultimately, he struggled trying to solve this “problem of problems,” how to make a long journey across two cultural “voids.” Lawrence’s greatest military achievement was the bending of these disparate media to his will. His greatest challenge was in shaping the living medium of the Bedouin. In doing so, Lawrence shaped and transformed his own identity and character. “I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger,” he writes, “unable to think their thoughts or subscribe to their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England. If I could not assume their character, I could at least conceal my own, and pass among them without evident friction, neither a discord nor a critic but an unnoticed influence.” To lead the Arab against the Arab’s will, Lawrence became more like an Arab: “In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.” Running head: SHATTERED WARRIOR 1 Shattered Warrior: The Psychology of the Hero in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ Name Class SHATTERED WARRIOR 2 Abstract The release of Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 presented an image of T.E. Lawrence that resembled nothing of the legendary warrior image that admirers and biographers had burnished for decades. Sir David Lean’s desert opus portrayed a deeply flawed,emotionally fragile man driven to perform acts of breathtaking courage and daring by the social stigma of his illegitimacy and the physical abuse Lawrence suffered at the hands of his mother. Lawrence’s reaction was to try and subsume his personality in an Arab pseudo-identity, a problematic situation that placed him in an impossible diplomatic and political situation. The unique stress of these circumstances and the brutalizing effects of the desert war eventually drove Lawrence to highly erratic behavior, which may have led directly to his death. Keywords: Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence, Sir David Lean, Arab, desert war. SHATTERED WARRIOR 3 Shattered Warrior: The Psychology of the Hero in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ “In my case, the effort…to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me.” – T.E. Lawrence Over the past half-century, the Western cinematic canon has produced no more charged psychological profile than Sir David Lean’s classic, Lawrence of Arabia. The lasting (and still-relevant) genius of Lean’s accomplishment lies in its portrayal of the tragic collision between the “invented” Lawrence, the heroic media figure created by American journalist Lowell Thomas, and the complex, conflicted, mentally delicate and brilliant man who personally fomented and led the Arab guerilla war in the desert with the dual (and contradictory) aims of Arab autonomy and British. Few modern figures have have been so burdened by personal psychological residue and unprecedented diplomatic and military leadership responsibilities. Despite the film’s cinematic “liberties,” the mercurial warrior portrayed in the 1962 epic bore at least some relation to the historical Lawrence. Overt hints at latent homosexuality, unresolved emotions stemming from an awkward social and family background and a self-destructive tendency toward masochistic/sadistic behavior have only added to the film’s iconography, and the near-cult status of its fascinating subject. One of the story’s great contradictions is its portrayal of Lawrence as both bold adventurer and emotionally vulnerable victim of his own past. In the film, Lawrence hints at a troubled family history in a scene between Peter O’Toole, as Lawrence, and Omar Sharif, as Sharif Ali, in which Lawrence recovers from the miraculous rescue of an Arab tribesman from SHATTERED WARRIOR 4 the Nefud desert. Lawrence explains that he is not entitled to a noble title, despite the fact that his father is a British lord, because his mother gave birth out of wedlock. There is a hint of regret and sadness in Lawrence’s conversation and one cannot help but dwell on the psychological cost of Britain’s stultifying class system, which precluded Sir Thomas Chapman from officially recognizing Lawrence as his heir. If one accepts that “achievement, independence, social approval, and recognition are all salutary to the conviction of personal worth” (Schneiders, 1951), then we have our explanation for Lawrence’s decision to defy torture and death at every opportunity. Lawrence’s “death wish” is symptomatic of a compulsion to compensate for his social disenfranchisement and to fulfill his mother’s expectations by achieving truly extraordinary things. In the film, Lawrence accomplishes many extraordinary things. The conquest of Aqaba, crossing the Sinai Desert and organizing the desert war against the Turks are all remarkable undertakings in which none but Lawrence, with his knowledge of Arabic and of Bedouin culture, could have hoped to succeed. And yet, in reality, these were hard-earned achievements. Indeed, Lawrence, familiar with the Arab tribes though he was (he had been involved in archaeological projects in the Middle East before the war), was forced to adopt an alien identity to an extent he had not foreseen. “I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or subscribe to their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England” (Schneider, 2012). It was a daring and dangerous mission, and the film portrays admirably the consequent psychological toll and raises questions about Lawrence’s personal motivations. Much has been made of his inner conflict; SHATTERED WARRIOR 5 the stresses of war; and the unique political, personal and diplomatic pressures under which he labored. His biographers have pointed to the contradictory effect of his family background. Growing up as an illegitimate child in post-Victorian England exposed Lawrence to tremendous social and psychological pressures, not the least of which was the obsessive need to redeem what he felt was his mother’s shame. According to biographer John E. Mack, this pressure came directly from his mother, who pushed her son to excel in all things in the attempt to remit the family’s social taint. She “required of him that he redeem her fallen state by his own special achievements, by being a person of unusual value who accomplishes great deeds, preferably religious and ideally on an heroic scale” (Mack 1998, p. 28). As it proved, this charge proved a crippling psychological burden. It drove him to great deeds, but it aggravated feelings of deception and abandonment. Mack explains this in terms of projection, Lawrence having identified with the Arabs, whom he felt he had failed and deceived as he felt mislead and ill-served by his family (1998, p. 26). The film is the story of a man cynically used by his own people, who consistently patronize Lawrence’s sincere desire to help the Arabs gain their autonomy. One of the film’s great unanswered questions is the extent to which Lawrence knew he was part of an active deception. The terrible guilt that the historical Lawrence felt after the war would seem to confirm his awareness of the situation. It was after his return to England that the psychological pressure of his repressed guilt fully manifested itself. Lawrence took to flagellation and intentionally risky behavior, which the film’s opening scene depicts beautifully in the high-speed motorcycle SHATTERED WARRIOR 6 accident that results in Lawrence’s death. In an article published the year the film was released, Irving Howe emphasizes the two-sides of Lawrence’s conflicted nature, which was equal parts bravura and self-doubt. Howe holds Lawrence to account for “condoning” the self-promotional environment that enabled a man like Lowell Thomas to reduce Lawrence’s part in the Arab Revolt to absurdity. Lawrence’s ostensible motivation for writing The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was to undo the manufacturing of his celebrity that Thomas had made his personal mission, and yet the book, which is full of battle action and daring escapes, morphs perceptibly into a “record of (Lawrence’s) search for personal equilibrium and value” (Howe 1962, p. 333). That Lawrence never found personal equilibrium was the outcome of a “sad comedy,” which “was to continue to the end…” (1962, p. 33). Lowell Thomas is portrayed in the film by an American journalist named Jackson Bentley, who accompanies Lawrence on his search-and-destroy forays into the desert with the Arab army. In one telling sequence, Lawrence allows Bentley to photograph him in a grotesque pastiche of heroic posturing. In a subsequent scene, Bentley asks Lawrence if he could “put a question…straight,” Lawrence retorts that he would be interested to hear the journalist do just that. Here the film anticipates what has become a familiar phenomenon in the age of modern celebrity, in which the famous come to loathe their public personas and yet cannot (or will not) resist the temptation to feed their own legend. Lawrence, both in the film and in real life, lived out this conflict, the simultaneous and profoundly incompatible need for attention and desire to be “ordinary,” which Lawrence protests that he is, despite General Allenby’s protestations to the contrary. SHATTERED WARRIOR 7 One of the most controversial sub-texts in Lawrence of Arabia is its intimation of repressed homosexuality. That Lawrence is constantly in the company of males may easily be accounted for, however, indications from Lawrence’s own writings and the personal reflections of those who knew him beg the question. In his preface to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence expresses a surprisingly frank sensuality in writing of his companionship with his Arab comrades. “The men were young and sturdy; and hot flesh and blood unconsciously claimed a right in them and tormented their bellies with strange longings…We had no shut places to be alone in, no thick clothes to hide our nature” (Lawrence 1997, p. 12). The exact meaning of these words has been debated and Lawrence’s brother, Arnold, has written that his famous brother was ill-at-ease with physical intimacy of any kind, though “Homsexuality disgusted him far less than the abuse of normal sex…” (Mack 1998, p. 424). Lawrence may indeed, as some have argued, simply been describing the personal habits of young male Bedouins forced to make do without female companionship. However, the “sexual frankness which would cause most authors to be run in by the police,” as novelist E.M. Forster describes the passage, bespeaks an undeniably charged sexuality (1998). Lawrence’s sexuality was influenced by the social norms of late-19th/early 20th-century England and the “personal sense of sin” that suffused his parents’ illicit relationship and the life of their famous son (Mack 1998, p. 417). Lawrence’s unresolved sexuality is portrayed in one of the film’s most sordid, yet compelling, scenes. Having been captured by the Turks at Deraa, Lawrence is beaten then raped by a Turkish bey, an event which still invites speculation and raises questions as to its veracity. Peter O’Toole evinces self-loathing, morbid fascination and a SHATTERED WARRIOR 8 glimmer of attraction. In his biography of Lawrence, Mack contends that it is likely Lawrence never engaged in a sexual liaison for pleasure or intimacy. This scene offers a glimpse into what Lean’s film indicates was a source of considerable psychological angst. According to Mack, and Lawrence’s other biographers, there is evidence that the beatings and sexual assault he suffered in Deraa invoked a masochistic tendency that can be traced to his youth and the beatings he suffered from his mother. Indeed, Lawrence’s startlingly frank account of his captivity in Deraa would seem to lend considerable credence to this belief. Lawrence wrote that “a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me” (Mack, 1998, p. 230). In later years, behavior that others considered erratic and self-destructive may well be attributed to the degradation he suffered. “In Deraa that night the citadel of my integrity had been irrevocably lost” (Mack 1998, p. 231). In the opening of the Deraa scene, Lawrence is purposely taking unnecessary chances, which results in his capture. It is evident that Lawrence expected to be caught and “punished” for having egregiously and presumptuously sought to assume the character of an Arab. In so doing, Lawrence initiates a form of self-purgation: the “naughty boy” whose mother beat him for slight provocations seeks a form of perverse absolution through sex and violence. Lawrence of Arabia does not substantively address Lawrence’s life in England after the war. As previously mentioned, the film’s opening scene introduces us to a Lawrence lost and aimless, seeking cheap thrills to fill the void. His masochistic inclinations, awakened by his war experiences, appear to have reasserted themselves after the war. In The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia, Philip Knightley and Colin Simpson claim that Lawrence had himself beaten. The SHATTERED WARRIOR 9 reasons for such an act are doubtless complex, but Lawrence was clear that he felt tremendous guilt over his failure to help the Arabs secure independence and his own complicity in Britain’s double-dealing policies in the region (Knightley & Simpson 1969, pp. 83-84). As was the case with countless survivors of the Great War, Lawrence was plagued by a combination of psychological effects, known colloquially as “shell shock.” In recent times, psychologists have developed a more informed and sophisticated understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which may help provide a more in-depth understanding of Lawrence’s post-war behavior. Lawrence himself wrote that the physical degradation he suffered at Deraa had forever compromised his physical and psychological integrity. It may fairly be argued that Lawrence suffered a unique level of psychological wear-and-tear occasioned by the unprecedented political-diplomatic-military role he played in the Middle Eastern theater of war. Sexual torture; emotional remorse; the constant danger of capture and execution; and the hovering presence of social and familial pressures combined to erode Lawrence’s self identity. Lawrence exhibited a number of PTSD symptoms, ranging from self-punishment and feelings of guilt to suicidal tendencies. Lawrence would later freely admit that the war had had a brutalizing effect on him, a fact that was depicted, perhaps spuriously, in the film in his responsibility for the massacre at Tafas. There can be little doubt that Lawrence wrestled with other PTSD symptoms, including feelings of “despair, isolation and meaninglessness” both during and after the war (Schneider, 2012). Indeed, Lawrence may be said to have entered the war bearing symptoms of traumatic stress, acquired through an abusive relationship with his SHATTERED WARRIOR 10 mother, the social stigma surrounding his illegitimacy and a manic need to prove himself on a heroic level. Today, Lawrence of Arabia remains an unparalleled psychological study of the dark undercurrents that animated the actions of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatically fascinating personalities. SHATTERED WARRIOR 11 References Howe, I. “T.E. Lawrence: The Problem of Heroism.” The Hudson Review. 15(3). Autumn 1962. p. 333. Knightley, P. & Simpson, C. (1969). The Secret Lives of Lawrence of Arabia. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd. pp. 83-84. Lawrence, T.E. (1997). Seven Pillars of Wisdom. New York: Wordsworth Classics of World Literature. p. 12. Mack, J.E. (1998). A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 26,28, 230, 231, 417. Schneider, J.J. “A Leader’s Grief: T.E. Lawrence, Leadership and PTSD.” Military Review. January/February 2012. Schneiders, A.A. (1951). Introductory Psychology: The Principles of Human Adjustment. New York: Rinehart and Company. Read More