Mind Matters:Stieg Larsson’s novels and their significance

Lisbeth Salander has been on my
mind a lot lately. She is the protagonist in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy of novels,
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
These Swedish novels are now also rendered in Swedish films.

Interestingly, the first
novel’s Swedish title was Men Who Hate
Women
. Why I address these books and movies here is that I believe they are
far more than entertainment. There is, I think, a profound significance that
they appear now, to capture the psyches of so many of us.

Briefly, The trilogy
intertwines the lives of the characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist.
Lisbeth is a young woman who witnessed the brutal abuse of her mother by her
father, and was then brutally abused herself over the years by so called
professionals and caretakers.

However, she used her brilliant
mind and her cunning to face traumatic events with a solitary sense of “I will
not be a victim.” Blomkvist is the investigative reporter whose life becomes
entangled with hers. Together they solve in the first book, a mystery
disappearance of a young woman of a wealthy business family, only to discover
sexual abuse within the family, along with vicious hate crimes against many
women.Abuse of women is not “over there,” somewhere or nowhere—“only a movie.”

Domestic violence, rape, sexual
abuse remain in all societies to one degree or another. Stieg Larsson’s novels
and the movie versions thereof are graphic and difficult, but somehow also
compelling because their portrayal of violence against women is not
gratuitous.There has been both a fear and a putdown of women for thousands of
years with the rise of patriarchy. Just as in the dialectic of master and
slave, neither men nor women win in patriarchy.

When we denigrate a people by
nationality, gender, religion, socio-economic class, we eventually denigrate
ourselves. And so the patriarchy, in its creating a hierarchical structure
based on power, greed, wealth, material resources, territory—in the end
subsumes itself. Patriarchy, in its denial of the feminine principle (within
all of us) cannot sustain itself forever.

I think Stieg Larsson got this.
His novels are not simple escapism/crime fiction. I believe he had set out to
influence—perhaps even unbeknownst to him—the collective psyche to see the
elephant in the living room. That is, that the abuse of women, the rape of the
feminine, was not only to individual women (millions though they are) but that
there is a global rape created by a patriarchal, hierarchical perspective which
cannot abide the rising feminine.

Larsson’s Lisbeth depicted the
young wounded feminine evolving from her abusive history to reclaim her power.
Larsson’s alter ego Blomkvist was the epitome of the new man—carrying his own
gentle receptivity to meet the assertive feminine embodied in Lisbeth.

Fiction can be like a parable.
Some people get the message. Others simply twist the message into some literal
narrow meaning. My hunch, however, is that there’s got to be something afoot in
the collective mind (interesting image—foot in mind) that prompts Larsson’s
trilogy to be as ubiquitous as a Sarah Palin pun. And there the similarity
stops—cold as a snowy day in Sweden.

* Kayta
Curzie Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private
practice in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments at
MindMatters@DrGajdos.com or
(610)388-2888. Past columns are posted to
www.drgajdos.com.

About Kayta Gajdos

Dr. Kathleen Curzie Gajdos ("Kayta") is a licensed psychologist (Pennsylvania and Delaware) who has worked with individuals, couples, and families with a spectrum of problems. She has experience and training in the fields of alcohol and drug addictions, hypnosis, family therapy, Jungian theory, Gestalt therapy, EMDR, and bereavement. Dr. Gajdos developed a private practice in the Pittsburgh area, and was affiliated with the Family Therapy Institute of Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, having written numerous articles for the Family Therapy Newsletter there. She has published in the American Psychological Association Bulletin, the Family Psychologist, and in the Swedenborgian publications, Chrysalis and The Messenger. Dr. Gajdos has taught at the college level, most recently for West Chester University and Wilmington College, and has served as field faculty for Vermont College of Norwich University the Union Institute's Center for Distance Learning, Cincinnati, Ohio. She has also served as consulting psychologist to the Irene Stacy Community MH/MR Center in Western Pennsylvania where she supervised psychologists in training. Currently active in disaster relief, Dr. Gajdos serves with the American Red Cross and participated in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts as a member of teams from the Department of Health and Human Services' Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.Now living in Chadds Ford, in the Brandywine Valley of eastern Pennsylvania, Dr. Gajdos combines her private practice working with individuals, couples and families, with leading workshops on such topics as grief and healing, the impact of multigenerational grief and trauma shame, the shadow and self, Women Who Run with the Wolves, motherless daughters, and mediation and relaxation. Each year at Temenos Retreat Center in West Chester, PA she leads a griefs of birthing ritual for those who have suffered losses of procreation (abortions, miscarriages, infertility, etc.); she also holds yearly A Day of Re-Collection at Temenos.Dr. Gajdos holds Master's degrees in both philosophy and clinical psychology and received her Ph.D. in counseling at the University of Pittsburgh. Among her professional affiliations, she includes having been a founding member and board member of the C.G. Jung Educational Center of Pittsburgh, as well as being listed in Who's Who of American Women. Currently, she is a member of the American Psychological Association, The Pennsylvania Psychological Association, the Delaware Psychological Association, the American Family Therapy Academy, The Association for Death Education and Counseling, and the Delaware County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Board. Woven into her professional career are Dr. Gajdos' pursuits of dancing, singing, and writing poetry.

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  1. brandywinebard

    EXCELLENT!

    Maybe you could lead a book group and discuss one or more of the trilogy in the Chester County Night School etc.

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