COLUMN ONE : Putting a Holiday Classic on the Couch : Call it insightful or absurd, a flurry of analysis peers at the emotional power and darker side of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to appreciate “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the 1946 Frank Capra movie in which fatherhood is honored, small town values celebrated, greed thwarted, God’s existence validated, a suicide averted and a world war won.

But critics and academics recently have been psychoanalyzing the beloved Christmas story in professional journals, dissertations and interviews. And via the Internet have come numerous e-mail responses to a reporter’s query asking why the movie turns so many sober American adults into tear-sodden wrecks.

Part of what has prompted the recent flurry of psych-minded commentary is that the movie, which turns 50 next year, has gone beyond mere celluloid diversion and entered the heady realm of American Ritual. “It’s an official public event,” said Richard Jameson, editor of Film Comment magazine.

The movie stars James Stewart as George Bailey, an addled Everyman rescued from despair by a feckless guardian angel who reveals what a wretched world it would be without him. It usually is served up as yuletide cheer. And yet a growing body of psychological literature has discovered cold, dark, even paranoid depths beneath the reassuringly warm surface.

An article in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis last year says that Stewart portrays Bailey as a “supremely divided neurotic” plagued by “incompatible longings.” Freudian theorists roll their eyes over George’s relationship with his father, from whom he uneasily inherits the job of running a building and loan association. Family therapists worry that he’s an “enabler,” covering up for his Uncle Billy’s drinking problem.

Granted, a great deal of psycho-criticism of art is impenetrable and not a little absurd. Describing the moment when George and Mary Hatch (Donna Reed) finally kiss, one critic wrote: “What makes the erotics of this orgasmic embrace so complex is Stewart’s swiftly suppressed urge to murder the madonna who has just seduced him.”

Psychologists cannot reduce such a complex and mysterious work of art to a formula, any more than chemists can “explain” the beauty of a Vermeer canvas by analyzing its pigments. Then again, a painting of a Dutchman in a feathered hat does not make people bawl their eyes out.

The emotional power of “Wonderful Life,” said Stuart Fischoff, a psychologist and screenwriter at Cal State Los Angeles, is that it “taps into unconscious strivings and urges and needs.”

In his 1971 autobiography, Capra said that “Wonderful Life” was not only his favorite of the 50 films he made, but the “greatest film anybody ever made”--a boast that might put any psychotherapist on ego alert.

Capra said he wanted the movie to “tell the weary, the disheartened and the disillusioned” that “no man is a failure” and “no man is poor who has one friend.”

He accomplishes that, ingeniously and mawkishly, when the angel shows Bailey what his family and hometown of Bedford Falls, N.Y., would have been like if he had not been born. His mother would be a poor boardinghouse widow, his uncle a lunatic, his wife a spinster. And “home” would be honky-tonk, vice-ridden Pottersville, taken over in Bailey’s absence by the venal financier Mr. Potter.

The “gift” that the angel gives Bailey--allowing him to see that he mattered in ways he had never imagined--is roughly analogous to what a person might learn in a successful course of so-called existential psychotherapy, said Todd C. Reiher, a psychologist at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.

“Many people discover through the existential exploration process that the bulk of the meaning in life comes from people and relationships with people,” he said. “Based on my own viewing, I believe there is definitely a therapeutic quality to the film.”

“It’s a journey to the heart of the self to recognize who one really is,” said film theorist Harvey Greenberg, a clinical psychiatrist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Fischoff invoked the mystic Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung to explain Bailey’s dilemma. It was Jung’s belief that certain needs were “archetypal”--as ingrained in our being as the need for hearth and home that Bailey’s father says is “deep in the race.” A Jungian interpretation, Fischoff said, would be that Bailey is in the grips of the age-old dilemma “to understand where he fits in in the universe.”

Bailey as ‘Enabler’ for Uncle Billy

If filmmakers and psychologists have any authentic interest in common, it is human conflict. And there is a wide variety of theories about what’s really eating Bailey.

Greenberg, taking what he called a “pop psychology-Freudian” approach, emphasized Bailey’s relationship with his father, Peter, founder of the building and loan that is Bailey’s ball and chain.

In developing one’s own identity, he said, one tries to “remodel” the self after the parent of the same sex. Bailey suffers from a particularly powerful case of “conflicted identification with the father,” Greenberg said, because he inherits not only many of his genteel traits but also his business.

“It’s profoundly difficult for most adults, especially men, to step into a family business the father started,” said Lillie Friedland, a Century City psychologist specializing in family therapy and business dynamics. “I think it’s very advisable to work outside the family business at first to establish your own identity.”

Obviously, Peter Bailey’s influence isn’t all negative, Friedland said. Bailey’s warmth, modesty and his pronounced sense of responsibility can be traced in part to his father.

Paternalism and the burdens of American manhood are recurring themes in modern critiques of “Wonderful Life.” Kaja Silverman, a psychoanalytic film theorist at UC Berkeley, devoted a chapter of her 1993 book “Male Subjectivity at the Margins” to Bailey and his struggle to fit into the masculine role that postwar society expected him to fill.

She views the famed Pottersville sequence, that nether-Bedford Falls bathed in neon and soaked in gin, as symbolizing the chaos that results when a man shirks that role. “When he refuses to take his cultural position, it leads to the end of the world,” she said in an interview. “It’s only when he embraces his father’s legacy and accepts where he is that the world is affirmed and comes into being again.”

Another notable drama-within-the-drama involves Bailey and the absent-minded, hard-drinking Uncle Billy, who sets in motion the climactic financial crisis when he loses $8,000 of the building and loan’s cash. All along, Bailey seems to tolerate Billy’s drinking, perhaps “unconsciously promote it,” said Friedland. (Bailey looks the other way when Billy takes a nip in the office.) In addiction-therapy terms, she said, Bailey is a typical “enabler.”

“One admires that he accepted this eccentric uncle,” she said. “But he didn’t draw a limit. He didn’t see that Uncle Billy’s drinking and associated behaviors--being forgetful, not being responsible with money--impinged on other people. That’s when acceptance isn’t healthy.”

In this heyday of co-dependency, the right thing to do would be for Bailey to bring in a therapist and conduct “an intervention.”

Critic Doesn’t Buy the Happy Ending

It is a staple of Freudian theory that whatever a person tries hardest to repress comes back in spades in dreams. And a number of scholars view the Pottersville sequence as a sort of dream, a nightmare perhaps, in which Bailey’s submerged desires are garishly displayed.

In Bedford Falls, the character Violet is a mere flirt; in Pottersville, she appears to be a prostitute. That transformation reflects Bailey’s long-buried sexual longing for her, said Krin Gabbard, a film scholar at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

More generally, Gabbard said, Pottersville represents America’s bubbled-up “unconscious,” in which long-restrained capitalism and family values suddenly go mad. “The film is so powerful because it lets us dip into the unconscious, letting us delve into that forbidden repressed territory,” he said.

Similarly, Gabbard doesn’t buy the film’s happy ending, in which Bailey takes new joy in ordinary life and is saved from jail by carol-singing townsfolk. Gabbard, among other critics, believes that this is so forced it betrays Capra, hinting that this Italian immigrant actually had grave doubts that Bailey, who never left home, could be truly happy.

In addition, continues Gabbard (who admits to hating the movie), the story inadvertently shows not the security of American life but its thin-ice fragility. “Your Uncle Billy screws up once and it all comes crashing down,” he said.

Other scholars have echoed the sentiment that Capra, in effect, failed to resolve the conflicts he let loose. For that reason, “Wonderful Life” is actually a “dark, disturbing tale,” said Andrew Gordon, director of the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the University of Florida.

Writing in the American Journal of Psychoanalysis last year, he argued that “George embodies incompatible longings in the American character--between the desire to serve the family and the community selflessly and the desire for personal financial success--by being a supremely divided neurotic split right down the middle.”

Where many see Bailey as just a troubled guy who finally finds happiness, critics such as Gordon argue that he is doomed to self-loathing, his wanderlust and his domestic sides forever at odds.

That does not necessarily blunt the film’s emotional impact. Some argue that it only adds to Bailey’s pathos. “I cry along with the rest of them,” Gordon said.

An Intellectual Sleight of Hand

Over the years, many analysts have viewed Capra as anti-intellectual, a mere “cockeyed optimist” and “populist.” When “It’s a Wonderful Life” premiered, the New Yorker magazine condemned it as “baby talk.”

Ironically, though, some critics today suggest that the key to the power of “Wonderful Life” is an intellectual sleight of hand.

Aside from the money showered upon Bailey in the end--a physical symbol of the townspeople’s fondness, which also happens to keep him out of jail--everything tangible about his life and hometown remains the same. Potter is still in power. Bailey is still broke. The banister knob in his “drafty old barn” is still loose.

“Nothing has really changed for George,” said Randall Fallows, a freelance teacher whose 1993 UC San Diego doctoral dissertation was based in part on the movie. “Nothing has changed except his understanding that his life has gone from meaning nothing to meaning everything.”

And audience members, struggling with their own internal contradictions, sensing that their own skyscraper dreams have been foreshortened, share in Bailey’s newfound insight. Thus Capra joins angels and psychotherapists in the art of releasing us from the prison of our old careworn and negligible selves.

“It’s a nice time of year to feel that,” Fallows said.

“But I still wish George got to leave town at least once.”

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‘A Wonderful Life’ on the Couch

Psychologist and film theorists have analyzed the beloved Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” trying to figure out what was really bothering George Bailey (James Stewart).

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“George had a particularlly bad case of ‘conflicted identification with the father.”’-Harvey Greenberg, psychiatrist, New York City

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“He didn’t see that Uncle Bill’s drinking. . .impinged on other people. That’s when acceptance isn’t healthy.”- Lillie Friedland, psycholgist, Century City

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“George embodies incompatible longings in the American character. . .by being a supremely divided neurotic.”- Andrew Gordon, Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts

Copyrighted, 1986 Hal Roach Studios Film Classics, Inc. and Copyrighted 1989 Video Treasures Inc.