Let Your Friends Hold You Up
Review of Firefly Lane from a Developmental Psychology Perspective
Firefly Lane, a TV rendition of Kristin Hannah’s best-selling novel is the poignant story of love and friendship between writer Kate Mularkey and journalist Tully Hart that spans over a period of three decades. Set in the author’s hometown of Seattle, the show chronicles the women’s tumultuous lives through their most formative personal experiences including school years, careers, marriages, and friendships. Through a series of flashbacks, the show does a great job of showcasing the psychosocial development of its two main characters’ identities from adolescence to adulthood. Consequently, the story line provides a rich ground for character analysis using American-German psychologist Erik Erikson’s psychoanalytic theory in which he argues that personality evolves through eight stages each involving a psychosocial crisis the successful resolution of which results in a healthy personality.
From the perspective of developmental psychology, the story is a great example of how our most treasured friendships serve as the healing agent that mend our early wounds. By allowing us to feel safe enough to verbalize our pains, our close friendships help us acknowledge and understand the previously suppressed crises and traumas of our childhood. In other words, to borrow from American developmental psychologist Robert Kegan’s analogy, in the absence of “good enough” mothers who make the soil and water better for the child to grow and expand their thinking, our friends have the potential to become the caring and nurturing environment that support our “good enough” development. Following a quick overview of the theory, the essay will use the main framework of Erikson’s theory to explain Tully’s character evolution and end with references to Kate’s personality development from the perspective of one fundamental crisis that marks her adolescent years. The show’s series of flashbacks and flashforwards render such analysis relatively convenient.
Key Concepts of Erikson’s Theory
According to Erikson, each stage of human development is based on a crisis or conflict. The first crisis is one of trust versus mistrust that occurs during the first year of life. If the baby receives consistent care during this time, they develop a strong sense of trust and confidence in the world that they carry with them to other relationships. The second stage, autonomy vs. doubt occurs when the child between ages 1–3 starts to assert independence from the mom. If the child is criticized during this period, she becomes dependent and insecure whereas if she is encouraged and allowed to exercise some autonomy, she develops confidence in her ability to survive. In the third initiative versus guilt stage (ages 3–5), children explore social skills through play and assert themselves some more. Success in this stage means they are able to lead others and take initiative in the future while failure is feeling a sense of guilt towards others. The fourth stage involving competence versus inferiority occurs between ages of 5 and 12 in which the child feels the need for external approval and takes pride in achievements. Confidence in ability to succeed leads to a sense of competence while being deprived of encouragement from mom/caregivers leads to feelings of inferiority.
The fifth (identity versus confusion) and sixth stages of ego (intimacy versus isolation) corresponding to ages 12–18 and 18–40, respectively, are also the timeframe of the characters’ lives in the show. During adolescence is when we search for a sense of self through an intense exploration of personal values and goals. Failure to explore multiple realities and establish a sense of identity leads to identity confusion while success in this stage will lead to an integrated sense of identity.
It’s during young adulthood that we explore intimacy and long-term commitments. When this stage is successfully completed, we internalize love and safety otherwise we suffer loneliness and isolation. Erikson’s seventh stage (generativity versus stagnation) refers to middle adulthood when we develop a sense of being part of the bigger universe. As a result of healthy evolution during this stage we become involved in careers, family, and give back to the community, otherwise we experience a feeling of stagnation. The final eighth stage is when we reflect on life and either feel a sense of closure and deep satisfaction or regret not having achieved our goals and dreams. Since these two stages happen during the second phase of adulthood and fall beyond the scope of the show’s focus during the first season, there will be no references to them in this writing.
Tully’s Developmental Journey
In Firefly Lane, we meet a lonely Tully who is partially raised by her grandmother since her alcoholic and drug addicted mother (Cloud/Dorothy) is unable and unfit to take care of her. In the absence of Cloud, Gran offers the nourishing holding environment that Tully needs to pass through the nascent stage of her development (ages 1–2) with relative stability. Then one day, when Tully is four years old, Cloud shows up and whisks Tully away to an anti-war rally where she loses her daughter in a crowd of strangers.
Dorothy takes Tully to a VW bus filled with marijuana smoke and three of her friends. Dorothy doesn’t sit next to Tully, but smokes and talks with her friends about how badly she dresses. When Tully tries to give Dorothy a necklace that she made out of macaroni, it’s ignored by the mother. After drifting off to sleep, Tully is woken up by the sound of a busy Seattle street. They head into a war protest where they march all day until the drinking starts at nightfall. They continue walking together despite being tired and hungry until Dorothy loses grip on her daughter’s hand in the crowd while trying to grab another beer from someone else’s cooler[1].
Having been abandoned by her neglectful mother when she is a baby only to be lost in her care just several years later, it is not hard to imagine why Tully longs for love and approval throughout her life. A crucial moment of crisis in her development (stage 3 in Erikson’s theory- initiative vs. guilt), the show is filled with frequent flashbacks to little terrified Tully curled up sobbing on a park bench after being lost among a crowd of strangers. This flashback occurs every time Tully is feeling a strong sense of deep fear, loss or doubt as when she survives rape from her middle school days, experiences harassment early in her career, feels left out when Kate is pregnant, or suffers miscarriage in middle adulthood. In line with Erikson’s theory, being rejected and neglected by her mom in such vividly painful ways from an early age, she loses her ability to trust. And, though, she desperately covets unconditional love, she rejects it every time it’s offered to her as when Chad, her professor who eventually becomes her lover, asks her to relocate with him or when her main love interest Max proposes to her.
Tully is 14 (fifth stage of Erikson’s theory, identity vs. role confusion) when she gets raped during a high school party and is left lying curled on the floor. The agonizing moment immediately evokes painful memories of that time when she is lost in the protest frantically searching for her mom. Her rapist blames Tully for her own rape. This distressing crisis during her adolescence, like the ones before it, is pivotal in the formation of Tully’s identity. As Erikson would have it, it serves as the source of her inner restlessness for years to come and leads her to try to fill the spiritual void for love and belonging with sex, ambition, alcohol and food (donuts).
Ironically and fortunately, this crisis is also the one that spawns her friendship with Kate allowing the two women to become each other’s lifelong holding environment defined in a Winnicottian terms as, relationships that help us manage situations that trigger potentially debilitating anxiety. Without knowing, their friendship becomes the primary bond in both their lives and the stability and shelter they need to weather life’s many crises. Contrary to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs the story shows that love is all we need (like the song says) to keep going even in the absence of physical safety.
In another flashback to the 70s we are taken to a school play starring Tully in a minor role. The scene follows a conversation between Tully and her drunk and fragile mom (looking ethereal on screen in her long flowy dresses) in which she encourages her daughter to dominate the stage and be the best she can be. She promises to show up to watch her daughter perform but in her typical fashion forgets. On stage, Tully’s eyes search for her mom and we can feel her heart sink when she realizes she’s not there. Herein lies yet another let-down at a time when Tully most needs her mom’s affirmation and affection. Other ones follow as when her mom forgets to pay the bills or gives their allowance from Gran to her boyfriend leaving them with no food and no money.
There is also the scene of one of Tully’s birthdays when her mom gets reservations at a fancy restaurant where her boyfriend plays the piano. We see the slightly already on edge Tully turn mortified when her mom publicly humiliates her and Kate by getting drunk and taking the floor to sing for the entire dining room. She then refuses to pay the bill and they are subsequently kicked out of the restaurant. Though filled with humiliation and disappointment, Tully is not in the least surprised. As always, her friend Kate offers her a comforting hand and makes it a point to make every birthday thereafter an extra special occasion for Tully — another good example of a ‘holding environment’ central to Tully’s therapeutic experience and ability to enter and pass through Erikson’s stages.
All of these incidents point to key social and emotional experiences in Tully’s past that impact the way she views herself. The deeply rooted feelings of mistrust, guilt, and isolation fundamentally stem from her disappointment in her mom at different stages of her psychological development. They also explain her defense mechanisms as when she tells everyone that her mother has cancer to hide the truth about her or when she feels left out during Kate’s pregnancy and gets her a puppy (that’s not housebroken) just to seek Kate’s attention.
At each stage of her development until mid-adulthood, Tully is compelled to take on roles outside of her developmental ability leading to pain, confusion, and consequent dependence on work and Kate to survive. She is the quintessential embodiment of Jung’s “Innocent” archetype in the way she depends on Kate’s love for a sense of childish safety and enchants others with her wit and charm. Her pitfall is that when she hurts others she has a hard time seeing it and doing something about it.
According to Erikson, healthy completion of conflicts during adolescence allows one to relate to others and form genuine relationships — a virtue he calls fidelity that’s key to passage to the subsequent stage of development known as intimacy versus isolation. Unable to resolve the conflicts at this stage of development, Tully enters the sixth stage (intimacy versus isolation) confused about herself which explains why she drifts from one romantic affair to another throughout her adulthood, flips out when Max proposes to her, and pushes away intimacy through her miscarriage when she most needs it. At the end of the first season we see Tully using the Girlfriend Hour, her Oprah like TV show, as an opportunity to talk to her guests about their own miscarriages which sparks the beginning of her own self-healing. By allowing her to share her vulnerabilities and form a genuine connection with her audience, her show might just be what she needs to internalize love and intimacy needed to move on to the seventh stage of Erikson’s eight stages of life.
Differences in Kate’s Developmental Experience
Having chronicled the evolution of Tully’s identity using Erikson’s framework, the essay will close following a few words on Kate’s character evolution. Contrary to Tully, Kate comes from what seems like a happy and loving home. Her biggest trauma coincides the fifth stage in Erikson’s lifespan theory (sense of self versus role confusion) when she witnesses her mom’s infidelity. The incident tarnishes her idealized vision of family and (though not covered in the show but briefly revealed through the flashbacks) leads her to leave home to study abroad where she re-examines her life and discovers who she is and what she wants.
Throughout the show, we see Kate striving to live up to an ideal of a perfect mom — perhaps itself a defense mechanism in the form of sublimation to divert her disappointment in her own mom. She not only gives up her professional career to be a stay at home mom but frequently sacrifices her own desires to be there for her daughter (as when she hurries back from a romantic fling because she’s oddly uncomfortable with Marah’s father taking care of her). What’s interesting is that in trying so hard to create her idealized version of life and love, she seems to inadvertently drive others away including her brother Sean who is unable to build up the courage to tell her he is gay, or her daughter Marah who is afraid to open up about going on birth control pills. Ironically, both feel safe enough to do so with Tully most possibly because she reveals herself to be imperfect and therefore real. To successfully enter Erikson’s seventh stage, Kate will need to realize that it is okay to be good enough.
Finally…
What’s beautiful about Firefly Lane is that it’s a story of friendship and love between two women that’s set in the backdrop of their psycho-social development. Both Kate and Tully are storytellers and they help write each other’s. Their friendship is the holding environment that offers the security and strength that Tully needs to survive and the courage that Kate needs to get out of her bubble and find her way. There is a moving scene in which after realizing how reckless she has been towards her husband following the loss of their baby, Tully suggests that they meet at the gazebo where they married and start a new beginning. Some time passes and just when Tully is about to leave, Kate shows up and walks Tully away. In another scene dating back to their childhood, we see Kate smothering Tully with birthday presents including a matching necklace to make her happy and fill the void left by her mother.
In a similar vein, knowing her friend’s fears about her pending divorce, Tully serves as that holding place when she lends Kate her dress and blows off a hot ticket event to accompany her to a school fundraiser. The scene is reminiscent of an earlier memory in a school bathroom when Tully lends Kate her own pants and wears her top as a mini dress upon seeing how petrified Kate is to have stained her outfit with blood on her first period. These vignettes illustrate the importance of leaning on our friendships to heal from life’s traumas and let them serve as the warm cathartic environment that we need to cope with our struggles and find our own path.
The show was a beautiful reminder to keep watering our friendships with love, especially in this age of distancing necessitated by COVID19 when many of us are suffering not only from ruptures of our past but of our current isolation.
References
Cherry (2020). Erickson (summaries). https://www.verywell.com/erik-erikson-biography-1902-1994-2795538
Kahn WA. Holding Environments at Work. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. 2001;37(3):260–279.
J. J. Jonas. The Twelve Archetypes. Based on the research by Carol S. Pearson, Ph.D. CASA. Retrieved from https://www.uiltexas.org/files/capitalconference/Twelve_Character_Archetypes.pdf
McLeod, Saul (December 29, 2020). Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Simply Psychology. Retrieved March 1, 2021 from https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html#gsc.tab=0
Paige, R. (n.d.). R29 Recaps: Every episode FROM “firefly LANE” season 1. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/02/10289555/firefly-lane-netflix-season-1-full-recaps-summary
[1] Paige, R. (n.d.). R29 Recaps: Every episode FROM “firefly LANE” season 1. Retrieved February 17, 2021, from https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/02/10289555/firefly-lane-netflix-season-1-full-recaps-summary
