Terry Stawar
Posted: Friday, December 19, 2014 8:30 am
News and Tribune
As a psychologist, I’m afraid that there is some antagonism between my discipline and the Christmas season in general and Santa Claus in particular.
Gary Kustis, an Ohio-based psychologist, says that many people’s introduction to psychology as a profession is in the film, “A Miracle on 34th Street.” In this 1947 Christmas classic, Granville Sawyer is a psychologist at Macy’s Department Store who is asked to evaluate their new Santa, Kris Kringle. The dour and deceitful Sawyer takes an immediate dislike to the relentlessly jolly Kris, concluding that he is delusional, with “maniacal tendencies,” especially when his delusion is challenged.
Sawyer is also providing some amateur psychotherapy to Macy’s young stock boy, Alfred. Sawyer has convinced Alfred that his desire to impersonate Santa and distribute toys at the YMCA stems from an unresolved guilt complex.
Blogger Ariel Herrlich from Overthinkingit.com maintains that while it is probably all right for Kris to impersonate Santa, because he really is Santa Claus, Albert’s preoccupation is “kind of creepy” à la Michael Jackson.
Never-the-less in the film, Kris takes great exception to Sawyer’s meddling with Alfred’s psyche and confronts him, questioning his qualifications and threatening to expose him to Mr. Macy. The sneering Sawyer so infuriates Kris that he ends up bonking him upside the head with his cane.
Kustis says, “It doesn’t bode well for your profession when even Santa wants to open a can of whoop-a** on you.”
Sawyer retaliates by getting Kris committed to Bellevue’s Psychiatric ward. Mr. Macy is called as a witness in the sanity hearing, where he says to Sawyer, in a contemptuous voice dripping with sarcasm, “Psychologist! Where’d you graduate from, a correspondence school? You’re fired.”
My wife Diane, who is also in the field, and I both occasionally enjoy pronouncing the word “psychologist” in the same venomous manner as Mr. Macy.
Unfortunately, the Santa-psychology conflict is not confined to just this movie. Around this time of the year, it is not usual for psychological assessments of St. Nick to appear in the popular media as well as professional journals. A newspaper article titled, “A Psychological Profile of Santa Claus” written by Akron school psychologist E. Bard illustrates this genre.
Bard theorized that Santa might be referred for psychological assessment because, “he laughs all the time, gives away all that he has, never seems to be depressed, but will only work one day a year.” Santa could be described as having “post-juvenile obesity syndrome” and alcoholism might be suspected considering “the jovial nature of the client” as well as “the glowing nose of his pet reindeer.”
Bard speculated that Santa’s black gloves and rugged backpack could suggest “unconscious sadomasochistic involvement” while his “long soft head cover with white rabbit fur and feminine looking rouged cheeks might be interpreted as “sexual identity confusion.”
Bard also imagined that Santa wouldn’t take the evaluation very seriously and would probably laugh, touch the side of his nose and try to give the examiner small gifts. Bard concluded that Santa would most likely be diagnosed as having “an overwhelming preoccupation with happiness, kindness and generosity accompanied by a denial of the harsh realities of the everyday world.”
He also predicted that Santa would have “difficulty coping on an extended basis in the real world” — a conclusion not all that different from Macy’s villainous Sawyer.
Even illustrations of Santa have been psychoanalyzed. Romanian psychologist and Rorschach Inkblot Test expert Lucia Grosaru provided a psychological interpretation of cartoonist Thomas Nast’s iconic image of St. Nick. Besides Santa’s obvious jolly presentation, Grosaru points out his pipe as a sign of possible “oral dependency” and a desire to regress to a earlier developmental stage where he felt safer.
According to Grosaru, Santa’s “little round belly” indicates greed and a probable fear of deprivation. His prominent belt suggests that Santa might be a control freak. Belts like Santa’s symbolize authority and may serve as a demarcation between thinking and feelings. Thus Santa may deny bodily needs and impulses.
Grosaru also discerns more than a little obsessive-compulsiveness. Who else would make such an enormous list and check it twice. Santa’s large hands suggest a desire for power and his facial hair signals mature sexuality, although Grosaru says that his feminine hat may be a way to hide his masculinity.
I’m not sure why psychologists fixate upon Santa’s hat, but to paraphrase Freud, sometimes a hat is just a velveteen and fur head covering.
Other Christmas figures haven’t escaped psychology’s scrutiny either.
Karen Eveland, from Texas AM, wrote a paper describing what a psychological evaluation of Ebenezer Scrooge would look like. She imagines Scrooge’s nephew Fred might have questioned his uncle’s competency after he suddenly started giving away his money.
Significant background data for such an assessment would include Scrooge’s isolated childhood, poor relationship with his father, loss of his beloved sister and the termination of his engagement due to his growing preoccupation with money. Scrooge also experienced the recent loss of his only friend — Jacob Marley.
After Scrooge’s supposed encounter with ghosts, Eveland would have ruled out bipolar disorder, due to Scrooge’s ability to remain calm and his lack of depressive symptoms. The sudden onset and short duration of the hallucinations and delusions wasn’t consistent with a schizophrenia diagnosis.
Eveland concluded that Scrooge probably suffered from a “brief psychotic disorder.” She suggested that “some type of food poisoning” might have been responsible. She also speculates that this psychosis was superimposed over an underlying obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, as evidenced by hoarding money and compulsive work habits.
Unlike Santa, she predicted that Scrooge would be found competent and able to “assess the risks of his behavior.”
Finally, there are those psychologists who say that encouraging belief in Santa is destructive for children. They echo the sentiments of the cynical character Doris, in “A Miracle on 34th Street,” who maintained that this belief harms children by “filling them full of fairy tales” so that they consider life “a fantasy instead of a reality.”
To such so-called experts I can only respond, “Psychologist! Where’d you graduate from, a correspondence school?"
— Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring the local community mental health center. He can be reached at tstawar@gmail.com. Checkout his Planet-Terry blog at planetterry.wordpress.com and follow him on Twitter @tstawar.
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Friday, December 19, 2014 8:30 am.
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