Barbie’s America: How Psychoanalysis Can Help with the Patriarchy, Climate Change, and Exploitation

Review of Karyne E. Messina’s Barbie and the Great American Identity Crisis: The Unfortunate Reality of a Nation Plagued by Racism, Patriarchy, and Stark Hypocrisy (Chevy Chase, MD: PI Press, 2024), ISBN 978-1-7362388-1-3, pages 119, paperback, $19.99, Kindle, $11.99.

In this short but wide-ranging book, Maryland-based psychologist and psychoanalyst Karyne Messina tries to explain how America became the problematic country that it is today. She uses Barbie and her world, as portrayed in Greta Gerwig’s 2023 movie, as her inspiration and an ingenious way to interest her readers.

Messina’s conceit is that, in the Barbie movie, the titular

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character suffers an existential identity crisis; similarly, the U.S. is now suffering a national identity crisis. To explain what Americans stand for, the author treats topics such as patriarchy, climate change, and the displacement of our indigenous populations. In terms easily accessible to the layperson, she uses psychoanalytic concepts to discuss these and other topics intelligently.

In essays (she calls her chapters essays) one and two, Messina introduces the idea of patriarchy by talking about the manosphere, a collection of online misogynistic forums that have recently increased. In these imaginary online spaces, men can feel dominant and believe themselves to be hypermasculine. The author points out that misogyny, an offshoot of patriarchy, is a way that men “toughen up” to “protect themselves” against experiencing painful emotions that are related to the loss of love. In other words, misogyny is a defense against loss. In patriarchal societies, aggression, competition, and dominance are valued, and men feel pressured to conform to strictly defined roles, perhaps as a defense against loss. Thus, men, as well as women, suffer under patriarchy.

In essay three, Messina has Barbie come to her for psychoanalysis, and she explains crucial aspects of psychoanalytic treatment. For example, she notes that, in the safety of the psychoanalytic relationship, changes in the self can occur “in concert with another person” (p. 55). A newly developed state of mind may “emerge” as part of the process of change; this is a benevolent part of the self, a creative “inner other” (p. 55, note 8). During Barbie’s fictional treatment, she decides that she wants to do something positive for the world.

Having completed her analysis, Barbie, in essay four, is now ready for a career—she becomes a champion for environmental change. Climate change is Messina’s passion; she is at her best in describing climate issues and the accompanying climate-mental health crisis. “It’s time to recognize, if not embrace, our collective grief for our imperiled planet, and mobilize our efforts to mitigate the damage before it’s too late,” she writes (p. 71). Trump promoted climate change denialism, and his administration rolled back climate mitigation efforts by years. “Even basic facts were called into question under Trump’s presidency,” the author notes (pp. 76-77). Trump’s tactics of politicization and dismissing data made it almost impossible to have honest communication about climate change.

Interestingly, Messina, quoting a 2022 United Nations re-

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port, points out that women worldwide are “more vulnerable than men to the impacts of climate change,” as they are the majority of the poor and are “more dependent on threatened natural resources” (p. 81). According to the author, often-ingrained cultural beliefs prevent women from pursuing opportunities to enhance their lives and improve the environment. Therefore, “to create change” by enabling people to heed advice, “we’ve got to help” them “into the right mindset”—they need to think of “change as something” they themselves are involved in, not “something” outsiders “force” on them (p. 82). Messina advises that, while large efforts toward climate mitigation are key, so are the small endeavors undertaken by ordinary citizens. “Each of us doing one thing is better than most of us doing nothing” (p. 82).

In writing about the psychological effects of climate change, Messina points out that the psychological community must “identify and treat mental health disorders caused by a warming planet” (p. 83). One surprise was that in this otherwise excellent essay, the idea that Barbie herself is working toward environmental change was dropped without explanation.

Essay five treats the “original identity crisis in America,” exploitation of our indigenous and Black populations (p. 89). As American settlers moved westward, they were responsible for the deaths of 56 million indigenous people (Koch et al., 2019). The process of pursuing Manifest Destiny meant the deliberate killing of indigenous people and destroying their traditions. Messina also describes the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. She explains how the White people responsible for the massacre—to “get rid of … negative thoughts or feelings about themselves” at having caused so many deaths—projected “bad” feelings about themselves onto the Black victims of the massacre (p. 96). In the process, the Tulsa massacres were reinvented as riots begun by Black people that had to be quelled by White vigilantes. The author explains this process of “blame shifting” by White people onto Blacks as projection or projective identification.

In essay six, Messina details four psychological processes that could help to heal our divided nation: taking back projections, mentalization, reparative leadership, and truth and reconciliation processes (TRC). For me, understanding the psychological underpinnings of TRC—and that it is possible to repair the damage we have done to each other nationally—is heartening. That this worked not only in far-off South Africa and Rwanda but also in

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neighboring Canada with its indigenous people is indispensable knowledge. This book shows how we as a country can attempt healing by “accepting responsibility for wrongdoing” (p. 115)—although the author acknowledges that a TRC probably won’t happen in the U.S. anytime soon.

Messina uses psychoanalytic ideas as the scaffolding for this healing process, suggesting how we, as psychoanalysts, can be directly helpful in alleviating our country’s societal ills. We can hold onto the hope that doing so is within the realm of possibility and communicate this to our colleagues.

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