Encanto, Transactional Analysis and Psychotherapy
Article originally published by Psychreg - for this edited version visit here
My seven year old daughter invited (dragged) me to the cinema at the beginning of 2022 to see a new Disney movie. This was all I knew in advance of the screening, that and I’d be buying a bucket of tango ice blast in some god-forsaken flavour that had more sour than a Jeremy Clarkson article concerning women. I also knew to expect end credits filled with some saccharine version of a relatively modern song all TikTok-danced by each character (including the whacky grandpa who can helicopter-break-dance). You might say I’m a cynic. You’d be absolutely right. I went in with my expectations lower than Suella Braverman's opinions of people, but of course, we parents are willing to sacrifice entire days (and a day’s wage) on these excursions with our beloved children.
How wrong I was. Not about the radioactive bucket of iceblast or the day’s wage spent on said, but about my low expectations. You see, the movie in question here is Encanto and that first viewing raised goosebumps and drew tears from me. And I’m sure it was the movie’s doing and not the sneaky sip of neon iceblast I took when I refused to pay £10 for bottled water.
Since that first screening I have probably watched Encanto 10 times (Disney+ might have The Simpsons seasons 1-7 but my daughter is yet to cede control of the app to her father. And hey, when kids like a story, they like to hear it a gazillion times - which is actually a very important process toward understanding, on a level deeper than consciousness the metaphorical impact of what they’re hearing/seeing). With each renewed viewing of Encanto and with each high volume singalong of Surface Pressure by Jessica Darrow on every morning school run (DAB radio might have channels devoted entirely to the golden era of the 80s but my daughter is yet to cede control of the car radio belonging her father…to her father. But hey, when kids like a song, they like to hear it a bazillion times) I am hit with the impetus to talk about Encanto. My family watched Encanto last night and again I had that urge to get something on the page about this film that inspired a whole cosmos of thought and feelings every time I rewatched it. I assumed that Encanto would have been talked about already. Its themes and its values seemed so obvious that somebody (some expert, far better than me, I told myself) would have surely analysed it and written wonderfully about it. I Googled it, and yes, some writing about Encanto and its psychological themes exists, but not as much as I’d expected. In any case, my writing about Encanto did not exist yet. My aim is to analyse Encanto specifically through the lens of Transactional Analysis (TA) and for both practitioners and those affected by the story to find a good many things of use within this writing. I am aware of the cultural significance that the movie holds for Latinx people but I don’t feel I am the person to comment on this, nor does this seem totally germane here save for the comments I make about diasporic living and its relation to traumatic experience.
So for those unfamiliar, here is the gist of the Encanto plot. Fair warning - SPOILERS from hereon. A family known as The Madrigals live in La Casita in the enchanted town of Encanto, a fictional location based in Colombia. The matriarch of the family is Abuela Alma Madrigal who, fleeing armed violence years prior relocates to Encanto with her young children. Abuela endures not only the trauma of this violent upheaval but she also loses her husband, Pedro. Some unaccountable force protects Abuela and surrounds her in her new location, sending the attackers running. This magical power (in the present symbolised by unwavering candlelight) imbues each of Abuela’s children and children’s children with gifts upon their fifth birthday. That is, every child save for the movie’s protagonist and Abuela’s granddaughter Mirabel who mysteriously receives no gift. Also, Bruno, son of Abuela, is the archetypal black sheep who is excluded from the family both physically and figuratively - we don’t talk about Bruno. Why not? Because his gift is one of prescience; he sees the future and the future looks bleak for the family. Mirabel begins to notice cracks in Casita and tries to convey her concerns to her grandmother. However, Abuela, ears already deaf to her exiled son, refuses to allow Mirabel’s worries any credence. Tensions rise between all three generations of the Madrigals until a literal fissure opens within Encanto, razing Casita and extinguishing the magical flame. Abuela, contrite and reflective faces her past trauma and the multiple influences it has wrought upon her family. From here the family (including Bruno), along with their community rebuild Casita.
The striking thing to me as a Psychotherapeutic Counsellor who works with Children is the depth of the family’s story and the treatment of intergenerational trauma. As a result of Abuela’s traumas, her children and grandchildren are beholden to her immutable and inflexible standards. Mirabel spends much of the movie cloaked in doubt and low esteem because she was never the recipient of the magic that Abuela so treasures. Mirabel’s sister, Luisa (of the Surface Pressure fame) has fashioned a persona of unflinching strength and resilience from her gift of literal physical power. Isabel, the other sister, possesses the magical ability to make flowers grow and has crafted an identity that most prizes flawless beauty. Both Luisa and Isabel demonstrate adaptations to the messages received from their caregivers (informed as they are by generation-spanning traumas). Whilst this Disney movie is hopefully insightful for children and child practitioners I have experienced quite potent instances of connection with some adult clients thanks to this movie’s portrayal of Luisa specifically. Whether directly naming the movie (and Luisa specifically with reference to my perception of a client’s experience) or contemplating a client’s case through the lens of this character, I have found a useful means of understanding and empathising with two adult clients who, like Luisa have suffered filial trauma and have subsequently lived in a wilful mode of resilience (and therefore, pressure). This, in TA relates to the Driver, Be Strong. Pressure is the operative word here because it is the pressure exerted upon us from our parents/caregivers as children that can exert tremendous influence upon us and how we choose to react/behave (it is the philosophy of TA that we are autonomous and no influence can make us decide anything, as if we were completely passive). In TA there is the concept of the Early Decision and this, basically is the decision we make as young children as to how we view the world and the strategies we employ in order to survive. The father of TA, Eric Berne wrote about injunctions in 1972 but it was the Gouldings who, in 1976, identified 12 core injunctions related to the negative Early Decisions made by people. Injunctions are said to be pre-verbal messages received from parents - there appear to be a few that might have been sent from Abuela to Luisa.
Don’t Be a Child
Stewart and Joines write, ’Don’t Be a Child is also given out by parents who were never allowed to be child-like themselves and feel threatened by child-like behaviour. They may have been reared in times of depression or in a stern home where worth and value were related to doing.’
Therapists will try to piece together the details of their clients’ respective lives through what is included at initial assessment/referral forms and through what is shared in sessions. From here a case is formulated and a treatment plan devised. Let’s think about Luisa in this way; what do we know about her family? (Encanto being a work of fiction we won’t ever really know, but in real life this can often be the case too). If we consider Luisa’s mother, Julieta we see that she is a nurturer with the magical ability to heal through her cooking. Julieta may be a healer because she had to parent her own mother, Abuela and has subsequently made the decision to live in this way, from the Driver to Please (people). Julieta’s decision to please her mother kept her safe. How might this affect Luisa? Julieta’s compulsion to please may have led her to lose her own identity and to miss Luisa’s needs. Luisa likely received the pre-verbal message (injunction) to run herself ragged as people who please others tend to. Her counter to this may have been to Work Hard as she likely had to for her mother’s love and approval. I can hear this with adult clients who tell me about their clingy children who still sleep in the same bed as them and experience what appears to be separation anxiety. These clients are warm, considerate people like Julieta, but the sad irony is that their chronic pleasing often leads to exhaustion and their own children feeling like they have to work for their attention above the attention their parent metes out to everyone. I must stress, there is no room for fault or blame here. Pre-verbal messages are almost unavoidable and as in the case of Abuela, we are exploring how her survival strategies in the face of traumas then converged upon her family, without intentionality or some kind of neglect on her part. Julieta might not be completely attentive of the needs of her children but no-one could be.
Stewart and Joines again: “Don’t Have Fun” and “Don’t Enjoy” are sometimes listed as variants of Don’t be a Child…in some families, if you are having too much fun you are labeled as lazy or sinful. There may be a magical belief that if you feel too good something bad will happen.’
This is something Luisa literally sings about in Surface Pressure:
'But wait, if I could shake the crushing weight of expectations/Would that free some room up for joy/Or relaxation, or simple pleasure?/Instead, we measure this growing pressure/Keeps growing, keep going’
The movie is a vivid visual rendering of Magical Realism and this is mirrored in the magical thinking of its characters. Abuela, in particular invests so much faith in the candle that she wilfully denies Bruno’s foretelling and values the magical gifts of her children above the children themselves. If the magic goes then so goes life.
Don’t Exist/Be Perfect
In the face of the Don’t Exist injunction (that Julieta has imparted to her daughter through being chronically distracted pleasing others/feeling exhausted) Luisa might decide that her best option is the Counterinjunction, Work Hard! In doing so, Luisa is justifying her existence to her mother. Along with this, Luisa also implies some of that Please (people) that her mother is driven by when she sings, ‘Under the surface/I'm pretty sure I'm worthless if I can't be of service’. Luisa’s inner-world is entirely dystonic with the outer.
Isabel, the eldest sister demonstrates the folly or at least the consequences of placing stock in beauty and more specifically perfection. From Julieta, Isabel may have received the injunction Don’t Be You. It may be that in being the eldest child of Julieta (herself the eldest triplet) and Agustin, Isabel felt the pressure/responsibility of looking after her younger sisters as well as gaining the love of her distracted and perhaps emotionally unavailable mother, Julieta. Perhaps Julieta had an idealised version of a child who was beautiful and creative and reacted ‘positively only to the aspects of her actual child which resemble that image, and discounts the rest’ as mentioned in TA Today. We see Isabel’s passivity in accepting to marry the ‘ideal’ man even though as she later realises, it’s not what she wants. Her inner world is not consistent with the outer.
In the flowers of Isabel and the food of her mother, Julieta we see the archetype of Gaia; the bountiful birth-giver, Mother Earth. Whilst Julieta is able to fill her children with healing food, somehow there is a void left, as if that of The Hungry Ghost. Marion Woodman writes beautifully about the masculine principle and the feminine principle. When we speak of these principles we speak of the energies inherent to the whole of the person (whatever their sex), as in the light and the dark, the yin and the yang. There seems to be a good deal of confusion about and conflation of sex or gender in a literal, biological sense in the eyes of some people and what we talk of here (to the point that many metaphors are clumsily interpreted, as in ancient mythologies. This is something I aim to explore in another essay). Though Isabel flows with the seeds and potential of life, her own life, in a sad/ironic twist will refuse to blossom. Why is this? Why is it Isabel is so driven to Be Perfect?
Most of our mothers "loved" us and did the very best they could to give us a good foundation for a good life. Most of their mothers from generation to generation did the same, but the fact remains that most people in this generation, male and female, do not have a strong maternal matrix out of which to go forward into life. Many of our mothers and grandmothers were the daughters of suffragettes who were already on the way to a new role for women. Some of them longed to be men; some related to their masculine side and dominated the household with masculine values so the atmosphere was geared to order, to goal-oriented ideals, to success in life, success that they themselves felt they had missed. The gall of their disappointment their children drank with their mother's milk.’
Melanie Klein pioneered theory around child development, but most salient here is her writing on object-relations which ‘exist from the beginning of life, the first object being the mother's breast which to the child becomes split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in a severance of love and hate.’ I shall leave it to the reader to further explore the profound works of Klein but for the purposes of this essay I draw a line from Julieta as mother feeding the world and healing it and yet her inability to heal her own children with the food she produces. The Be Perfect Driver lives within those striving for acceptance. Isabel, perhaps not fully sated by her mother’s food has internalised the message ‘You ought to be better’ creating an endless hunger for the impossible, and we have the Hungry Ghost, always craving, always gorging but never filled.
Woodman explains this sense of craving:
'Unrelated to their own feminine principle, these mothers could not pass on their joy in living, their faith in being, their trust in life as it is. Geared to doing things efficiently, they could not surrender to allowing life to happen. They dared not allow themselves to react spontaneously to the unexpected… consequently, the child lives with an elusive sense of guilt, the personification of the mother's disappointment less in her child than in herself. The child grows up attempting to justify its very existence, an existence which in psychic reality it has never been granted.’
I have worked with adult analysands who spend considerable time lamenting what they don’t have or the ‘things’ they want and feel will fix things. These societal pressures which are rooted in the masculine principle of achievement and attainment is explored in Encanto with the focus on émigré women and the residual wounds wrought by forced displacement on families down the family tree. I have met with adults who are so clearly affected by what I realise is the intersection of Capitalist society with the personal problems they experience. It is no one’s fault that societal norms or expectations exert an influence over their lives, of course. As a therapist though, it has to be acknowledged that clients’ challenges are fundamentally exacerbated by such broad and complex vagaries. Woodman identifies this present-day mode of living as rooted in the masculine principle of rational, goal-oriented, perfectionism. Women like Abuela, Julieta, Isabel, Luisa and Mirabel live underneath this all-encompassing, Globalist sky. Woodman’s writing speaks to the pressures exerted by ‘the perfect computer’ and the manifold demands of Social Media;
‘…Perfection perfect efficiency, perfect world, perfect clean, perfect body, perfect bones, but they being human, and not prime-time TV advertisements, falter into perfect chaos and perfect death.’
We are all beholden to these standards in one way or another. The huge concern is for daughters like these characters in Encanto such as Luisa and Isabel striving to find acceptance and worth through work and perfection as a result of parenting from mothers (who of course, tried their best) who perhaps experienced the same lack from their parents whom ultimately, also live in a world where the masculine principle has been vaulted to preeminence. The world without is dystonic with the world(s) within.
In 1982, Woodman neatly summarises this oppositional dynamic of within/without and how this is borne out by our relationship to advances in technology:
‘However hard we try to eradicate nature it eventually exerts its own value system and its own painful price. Our generation is a bridge generation attempting to make a giant stride in consciousness. Faced with atomic power, faced with the possibility of our own self-destruction, we are trying to reconnect to roots that have lain dormant underground for centuries (the food of Julieta, the flowers of Isabel) in the hope that the nourishment from those depths may somehow counterbalance the sterility of the perfect machine. Most of us have no model. Although we may have loved our homes and our families we have to be ruthlessly honest in evaluating our heritage.’
Heritage, is of course central to Encanto. Abuela is unwilling to be ruthlessly honest in her evaluation, clinging desperately to her magical thinking about her family, frantically gathering around the ultimate metaphor for precarity; the flickering flame of a candle. It is not just Isabel who is addicted to perfection; Abuela demands perfection through the repetition of norms like the family tradition of gifts bestowed.
Which leads us to Mirabel.
Mirabel spends the movie confused and beset with self-doubt. She cannot seem to find her place within the family constellation as a result of her absent gift. When Mirabel perceives the cracks in the Casita she is confronting her grandmother with the honesty that the protective walls she has shrouded everything in since losing her husband are tumbling down by degrees. This reminds me of an Alan Watts essay,
‘Man can only become alive in the fullest sense when he no longer tries to grasp life, when he releases his own life from the strangle-hold of possessiveness so that it can go free and really be itself’.
Abuela is not only in denial of Mirabel’s warnings she is evidently also not wont to take Mirabel at all seriously on a personal, relational level. When we think back to the ‘The gall of (the older generation’s) disappointment their children drank with their mother’s milk’ it is clear that Mirabel has ingested of her grandmother’s trauma. What she has not inherited, however is the magical gift, which not only causes a lot of her own doubt and sense of being outside of the family, but means that Mirabel is not at all in accordance with the expectations of her grandmother. But Mirabel has drank of the milk that her mother and grandmother have provided, soured as it is with their disappointment. It is therefore Abuela who is projecting onto Mirabel her own sense of disappointment in herself. Mirabel picks up this mantle and like her grandmother she adopts magical thinking. She sings a song called ‘Waiting for a Miracle’ which not only demonstrates this but also hints at Mirabel’s passivity. Discounting was written about by The Schiffs and Mellor and is said to be an internal mechanism that becomes apparent through passive behaviour. Discounting serves to minimise the significance of the person, another person or the reality of the situation and could therefore be seen as another form of denial (like Abuela’s denial). What we have are sisters terrified of making mistakes but more heartbreakingly, being mistakes. Because so much stock is placed in the magical gift, Mirabel feels an acute lack that displaces her from the family who are so filled, so it seems. Mirabel apparently hasn’t noticed that her gifted sisters are also trying to adapt (overadaption is a form of passivity too) to largely masculine values whilst inside they are yearning to be enough just as they are; the feminine principle of nature. As Mirabel alerts everyone to the facade of the perfect and magical Casita cracking and falling away so too does each individual mask adopted by each of these women; masks adopted to cope with their shared suffering. Like Alan Watts posits, life is in the letting go and it is when Abuela finally releases her grasp from life that is never in the present that she can integrate all of the conflicting energies within her. The gifts were a ritual adopted, as Woodman writes, to ward off the fear of annihilation.
‘Coupled with this dread of extinction is the natural propensity of compulsives to live in the future. Often intuitive by nature, they don't clasp the here-and-now reality with which they cannot cope; rather they dream about what they could be, should be, were meant to be in the future. The gap between reality and dream is often filled by the obsession.’
Abuela clings to the gift, the ceremony and ritual of it all and its cardinal significance. Casita is treat with the reverence of a sanctified temple where everything is clutched inside with white knuckles. This is in discordance with, is dystonic with the potent communal spirit of the outside.
What hit me the most on the first viewing was the final song, ‘All of You’. The gift might operate as a metaphor for futurity and protecting the lineage of family (in short, survival) but my initial reaction to it was in thinking of (or rather, feeling of) talent. I thought about the children I work with. How so many of them discount their creative abilities, furiously scribbling out a doodle, declaring ‘I can’t draw!’ In ‘What Else Can I Do?’ Isabel belts out the joyful realisation that her gift is one of spontaneity and that letting go the strictures of perfection contains limitless potential. I thought of the pressures of modern life, of social media. Children watching YouTube with its kaleidoscopic display of savants from around the world performing extraordinary feats on musical instruments, on the sports field or on the page. The crushing weight of wanting to be gifted. Of wanting to be accepted. It’s not normal to be normal, sadly. As the line ‘You’re the real gift, kid’ was sang out I hoped that children would see this - really hear this. ‘Normal’ is more than enough. Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment burrows into the fairy tale as well as myth and endorses the incredible merit of both in conveying to children true value and meaning in life. Mirabel, like the mythical Fool is the destroyer of order, the creative force who, (most relevant to Encanto, thematically) is always in the moment. Mirabel is the catalyst of the Madrigals’ healing. She is the Adult Ego State of the here and now, that brings the family’s Script into consciousness. Hopefully, children who repeatedly watch Encanto internalise this message from an isolated character reaching out to them in their isolation, gently to say ‘You’re enough. You’re OK.’
Addendum
My 7 year old daughter was intrigued when she saw me writing about one of her favourite films. She asked if she could write ‘a word’. Below are more than a hundred words that she typed herself.
I love Dolores because of her fab red hair bow yeah also I don’t like Abuela because she and Mirabel has a fight and Abuela says really rude and upsetting words to her and she’s always been too protective about the house more than a living person, how is Mirabel’s parent’s not totally furious with her? Anyways she’s always acting like the sky is falling down, she is also so nosy about everything because in one of the scenes when Mirabel is ending the song “the family Madrigal” she says “what are you doing?” She always has to be apart of a scene ruining pretty much everything or she has to be nosy. Her voice also sounds like she just been hit by one of Luisa’s
Rocks when she was carrying one, it fell on Abuela and made her voice like broken?
References
Bettelheim, B., 1975. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Penguin
Goulding, R., and Goulding, M., 1976. Injunctions, Decisions and Redecisions, Transactional Analysis Journal 6:1 January pp.41-48
Kushwah, R., A., 2022. Disney’s Encanto: We Don’t Talk About the Cost of the Promise of Futurity, Hindu College Gazette, accessed via https://www.hinducollegegazette.com/post/disney-s-encanto-we-don-t-talk-about-the-cost-of-the-promise-of-futurity on 9 March 2023
Klein, M., 2013. Envy and Gratitude, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge
Schiffs and Mellor, K.,1975. The Cathexis Reader, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 4-22
Sensini, P., and Mercurio, A., 2023. The Unification and Harmonization of the Masculine Principle and Feminine Principle, accessed via https://www.sur.it/en/our-values-our-mythes/the-unification-and-harmonization-of-the-masculine-principle-and-feminine-principle/ on 8 March 2023
Stewart, I., and Joines, V., 1987. TA Today: A New Introduction to Transactional Analysis, Lifespace
Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2021. Encanto
Watts, A., 1947. Zen Buddhism, accessed via https://www.organism.earth/library/document/zen-buddhism on 9 March 2023
Woodman, M., 1982. Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride, Inner City Books
Comments