Daddy’s Gone Away
ANDREW KEY
Can psychoanalysis tell us anything about creative collectives? Freud’s individual-centric psychoanalysis tells us a lot about sublimation, the process of rerouting socially unacceptable and often consciously inaccessible thoughts and memories. For Freud, sublimation explains why individuals are driven to produce art. But when it comes to groups, Freud only discusses the broader social function of art, never quite entertaining the possibility that art can be made by more than one person—even, by a family—or what the psychosocial dynamics tell us in these cases.
In life, we find ourselves in groups, whether we like it or not—and, often, we do not like it. Wilfred Bion tells us that “the individual is a group animal at war, not simply with the group, but with himself for being a group animal and with those aspects of his personality that constitute his groupishness.” The family is the first group we encounter, and it sets us up for all the groups that follow, which often end up replicating those same old familial dynamics—an unfortunate repetition compulsion that psychoanalysis has made a killing trying to help us understand and ultimately fail to overcome. With its members intimately and formatively involved in one another’s lives, The Beatles were a group that was so close that it constituted a kind of family. Ringo Starr—an only child—once sentimentally said in an interview that the best thing about being in The Beatles was having three brothers. Like all families, The Beatles did not exactly have a horizontal arrangement of equal partners. Each member had (and was often put in) his place in the group, frequently chafing against his role, ambivalently embracing or refusing the various power struggles that ensue from these too-close bonds. In Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back, we see intense conflicts and dynamics play out between the band’s members and their broader family circle, evincing the deadlocks, dramas, and breakthroughs of psychical transference to the creative work of groups. It’s a process to which we often wish we could just say, "Let it be,” rather than be embroiled in the turmoil or led down the nostalgic road back to where we once belonged.
In life, we find ourselves in groups, whether we like it or not—and, often, we do not like it.
Instead of presenting the mythical finished object—the album, the single, the polished and practiced performance—Jackson’s Get Back gives the viewer an intimate glimpse into how this band of brothers worked together to make their art, how they tolerated and loved and hated each other. Jackson’s eight-hour documentary series about the writing and recording of the 1970 album Let It Be, which had the working title Get Back, gives us a rare insight into the mal/functioning of one of the most influential musical families of the twentieth century. It also gives us an insight, often ignored in psychoanalytic inquiry, into the role of groups in aesthetic production and creativity. Jackson has recut and edited footage originally shot and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg for his 1970 documentary Let It Be, and, by finally bringing this previously unreleased footage to light, the series offers an opportunity to watch the slow, painful effort that goes into creative work and collaboration—and the explosive dynamics and plots that unfold therein. We see false starts, procrastination, goofing off, failure, tedium, irritation, anger, resentment, bitterness, and loathing. We see humor, tenderness, warmth, and moments of close intimacy. Like you find in any family, and then some.
To understand the dynamics played out over weeks of intense creative work, we must turn from Freud’s individual analysis to group-analytic thinking. Developed in the decades after the Second World War by Bion (among others) in England, group-analytic thinking is a matter of analyzing how groups, replete with the harmonies of pairing off and mutuality and the antagonisms of exceptional members, try all the same to preserve their coherence and identity. Groups are judged by all their members, Bion tells us, by whether they are “life-giving or the reverse.” One of Bion’s major texts on groups and their processes, Attention and Interpretation, is more or less contemporaneous with the work The Beatles were undertaking during the recording of Let It Be; both appeared in 1970. Bion’s first substantial book on group work, a collection of essays with the title Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, was published in 1961, the same year The Beatles were in residency in Hamburg. These are perhaps coincidences of history, but nevertheless they offer a route toward making sense of the dynamics at play in the series. The group work of The Beatles and the group analysis of Bion’s texts mutually illuminate one another once the largely inarticulate gasps and grasps of collective creative endeavor are clarified by Bion’s analytic gaze.
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As we know, families don’t exist in a vacuum; they are part of a larger social world, and their contact with other groups and individuals impacts how they function. Get Back presents the band as a mutable collective composed of relationships that are constantly evolving in response to new and sometimes transient members. There are four members of The Beatles, so there are six interpersonal relationships inherent to the group: John–Paul, John–George, John–Ringo, Paul–George, Paul–Ringo, George–Ringo. But, as we observe through the series, the relationships fluctuate depending on who’s around, and many come and go throughout. We see friends, partners, acquaintances, employees, hangers-on, various men in suits, all of whom have an impact on how the members of the band behave. Peter Sellers drops in for a while and then leaves quite promptly.
Yoko Ono infamously affected the group dynamics of The Beatles. In the series, she’s mostly silent, sitting next to John, occasionally joining the band in their improvisations by screaming into a microphone (some of the best scenes in the entire series). As a member of the group, Yoko has relationships with everyone else present, even if, for the most part, she acts as if she only has a relationship with John. In Bion’s account of group dynamics, one of the basic assumptions (the patterns of behavior that a group can adopt that will interfere with the task that group is trying to accomplish) available to a group is that of “pairing.” Pairing happens when two individuals take center stage against the silent backdrop of the group’s other participants, who watch with a kind of satisfaction, sometimes even imbuing the pair with a kind of messianic hope. This messianic hope is often disappointed because, in creating an independent subgroup, the pair actually risks the dissolution of the larger group. A pair is thus not always a source of satisfaction: it can be a disruption, and it fundamentally undermines the work the group as a whole has set out to accomplish. This is why speculation about Yoko Ono’s role in the demise of The Beatles is so interminable.
The ghost of Brian Epstein, the band’s dead manager, seems to float around, making Paul McCartney in particular feel uneasy. About an hour into Get Back, Paul starts talking about the lack of direction he’s felt since Epstein’s death a few years earlier. He’s speaking more or less to the whole room:
Ever since Mr. Epstein passed away, it’s never been the same. I mean, we’ve been very negative since Mr. Epstein passed away. And that’s why all of us, in turn, have been sick of the group. It’s discipline we lack. We’ve never had discipline. We had a sort of slight, symbolic discipline. Like Mr. Epstein. You know, and he sort of said, “Get suits on,” and we did. You know, and so we were always fighting that discipline a bit. There really is no one there now to say, “Do it.” Whereas there always used to be. Daddy’s gone away now, and we’re on our own at the holiday camp. I think we either go home or we do it.
In many ways, Get Back is a study in the band’s experience as a group to come to terms with the death of their symbolic father, and the ambivalence they feel, collectively and individually, about the need to replace him. They are not unlike the “company of brothers” who band together to kill and eat the father who leads the patriarchal horde, about which Freud writes in Totem and Taboo: “They hated their father, who presented such a formidable obstacle to their craving for power and their sexual desires; but they loved and admired him too.” As Didier Anzieu writes, in a passage relating Totem and Taboo to group analysis, “Often the absent, dead or idealised leader becomes all the more powerful because fascination with an imago of authority is stronger when the leader is not continually present in the flesh.” The unanswerable question for the brothers, of course, is which of them ought to playact that impossible role of the parent—or, perhaps worse, the child.
Some of the most insightful footage into the band’s struggle to function is of George Harrison’s efforts to break free from the almost Oedipal dynamic he finds himself locked in with Paul and John. George is the youngest Beatle—twenty-five when the footage was recorded—and he itches to express his own creativity rather than be a mere conduit for Paul’s or John’s. Desperate for his own work to be taken seriously, in the majority of the footage George is seething with muted resentment toward Paul, who dominates and micromanages him, stifling his attempts at creativity with a pedantic tiresomeness, like an overbearing helicopter dad. George appeals to John—his beloved, nourishing older brother/mother—for help. John is distant and refuses to be seriously drawn into anything: he is in the process of actively shrugging off any mantle of leadership, capable only of acting in opposition to authority, despite clearly being the band’s leader—if only, by this point, a leader de jure. John’s exhaustion and abandonment of this role allows McCartney to position himself as the band’s sovereign—to nobody’s satisfaction. George quits the band just over two hours into the series, a week into the sessions. We don’t see the other members comment on this vocally at first, but the film shows us them responding by performing a chaotic improvisation, accompanied by Yoko’s shouts—a collective acting out of what couldn’t be articulated explicitly in the group roles. George is enticed back to the studio, off camera, but by the end of the series, something has shifted permanently in his relation to the group, and he’s decided to focus on his own solo compositions.
The John–Paul–George triangle forms the knotty core of The Beatles, but John and Paul’s dynamic is enticing for its marital intimacy. Only very occasionally do they speak openly with each other, usually off camera—most strikingly in a conversation they don’t know is being recorded, captured by a microphone hidden in a vase of flowers, where they explicitly debate the topic of leadership. Despite their relatively rare conversations, the two communicate constantly through playing music together—and here play is very opposed to work: much of the footage consists of the band slacking off and singing other musicians’ songs, performing old classics in stupid voices. There is an enormous amount of procrastination going on throughout the whole ordeal, and Paul and John are often looking at each other deeply in the eyes, like lovers. As Bion put it: “Whenever two people begin to have this kind of relationship in the group … it seems to be a basic assumption, held by both the group and the pair concerned, that the relationship is a sexual one.” This is another pair, the McCartney–Lennon partnership, an independent subgroup within the larger group, in which the two take equal credit for their songwriting. It is a subgroup that both preserves the group’s work and threatens its dissolution. Paul and John’s closeness excludes George and Ringo, though Ringo seems less infuriated by this than George does.
“The function of the group is to produce a genius,” Bion writes in Attention and Interpretation. For Bion, the “genius” is an exceptional individual capable of manipulating psychotic mechanisms to encourage societal growth or the development of new ideas. Bion also uses the word “mystics” to describe these extraordinary people. Without exceptional individuals, groups—societies—undergo atrophy. Groups sustain themselves through convention, laws, habit, but they require the exceptional individual to propel them forward and develop the group’s potential for change and development. Opposed to the exceptional individual is what Bion calls the Establishment: the members of the group who embody and enact the law, the conventions, the traditions that have enabled the group to survive so far. The Establishment is necessary for the group to function because it creates the conditions needed both for the group to sustain itself as it is and for the exceptional individual to appear and alter the group. “The group and mystic are essential to each other; it is therefore important to consider how or why the group can destroy the mystic on whom its future depends and how or why the mystic may destroy the group.”
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From a certain vantage point, there are multiple exceptional individuals working together in The Beatles. In Bion’s framework, nevertheless, we might say that the Establishment is embodied most by Paul, with his slide toward a kind of authoritarianism, and by Ringo, who has a deeply sentimental investment in the band’s perpetuity. John Lennon has already been called a genius enough by other people. In this documentary, the viewer can see him drifting away from this role in the group, moving toward a deeper entrenchment in the pair he forms with Yoko. But it’s George who seems most at odds with the functioning of the group, the one who expresses most clearly a narcissistic aggression toward with The Beatles: for him, “instead of providing an empathic mirror for the individual, the group is experienced as neglectful, depriving, and undermining.” Through George’s anger and John’s boredom, we can watch the formation and consolidation of what Morris Nitsun has called the “anti-group,” whereby “the group as object becomes impregnated with the hostile projections of the membership. The attitude to the group takes on a negative valence that may undermine the cohesiveness required to sustain and strengthen it.” Sometimes the feelings emerging from an anti-group can be used to sustain and revitalize a group. In the case of The Beatles, they brought it to an end.
In The Beatles: Get Back, we are offered a kind of spurious intimacy: a suggestion that, along with the other people floating around the band, we spectators become temporarily involved in the work. By showing us the functioning of a close and troubled group, the series encourages us to reflect on the difficulties of working together creatively. We see various responses to the problem of being close to other people: Paul’s assertive dominance, John’s disconnected refusal of authority, George’s struggle with the narcissistic wound that being in the band has inflicted on him. Ringo, meanwhile, seems remarkably placid and free from the neurotic hang-ups and conflicts of the other Beatles. He’s a calm presence throughout. But this quietness and his easygoing nature also have the character of defenses against the hostility and violence—both expressed and repressed—that he’s surrounded by. It’s as though he can’t quite bring himself to participate fully in the group; he sits quietly behind his drums, waiting for the others to stop arguing. Does he struggle to bring himself into the dynamics fully, to assert himself, or has he adopted a depressive position of resignation out of fear of inflicting further harm? Probably both. He wants the band to continue to exist, but he seems helpless to stop the deepening fractures.
Get Back encourages the viewer to reflect on their own presence in groups, their own ways of participating, their own responses to conflict and collaboration. In doing so, the series gets toward something fundamental about being with other people: it is a necessary ordeal. Groups reveal our inescapable dependence on the other, a dependence that chafes and frustrates us. Borrowing an image from Schopenhauer, Freud compares human intimacy to freezing porcupines who huddle together for warmth, only to find themselves injured by one another’s quills. We jostle for a position near others that will warm us without also hurting us; we can tolerate a certain amount of pain in exchange for the warmth of another, but not too much. Satisfaction—creative or sexual—cannot be found in isolation. We need others for our fulfilment. But maintaining a group in the pursuit of creative satisfaction is no easy feat, and Get Back shows us the ways that the internal working of such a group can frustrate the very purpose for which it was formed. After a certain point, maintaining the group lead more towards suffering than creative satisfaction. Frustration dominates; flows of expression become blocked; tensions boil over. Group work enables creativity up to a point, but only so far. Sooner or later, the pair dominates, or the exceptional individual breaks free, or the anti-group’s destructive tendencies are unleashed. There is no analyst figure in The Beatles, no conductor who can take responsibility for the functioning of the group without fully participating themselves; perhaps this is what Brian Epstein had provided. Instead, John, Paul, George, and Ringo become the fatherless brotherly horde, struggling to know which direction to take. The group fractures, and the members go their own way. But their involvement in the group has enabled an intense period of creativity and expression that is almost unparalleled. Without going through the ordeal of the group—the pains of collaboration and intimacy—what would have become of them? It’s agony inside a group. Outside is no better.