Scrooge Is My (Existential) Hero - Part 1
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is a familiar story that seems to take on a slightly different shade each year when I revisit it around Christmas. As a kid, Ebenezer Scrooge was little more than a cartoonish villain to me, a grumpy old man who I enjoyed seeing dragged around time and space by a few ghosts, until he finally came around and enjoyed Christmas like I thought he should!
But with each year that I grow older, I’ve felt more and more compassion for Scrooge. I can better understand how his past led him to his present and toward his awaiting future.
Though the name “Scrooge” continues to be synonymous with being a grumpy old miser, that’s just the starting point for Ebenezer. Take a look at the entire picture, and I think it’s clear that he’s really a kind of existential hero!
The Trauma of Loss
When you hear the name “Ebenezer Scrooge”, what do you picture? Something like this?: “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”
Dickens describes Scrooge with such detail that I can’t help but imagine him as if meeting him as a new client for the first time. He’s all coldness, sharpness, and hardness, in how he carries himself both physically and emotionally. He wishes to be left alone to mind his own business, and for others to do the same.
It can be tempting to stop at the initial reaction of “What’s wrong with this guy?” But as Trauma-Informed Care has taught us, there’s more to be learned and more empathy to be found in instead asking the question “What happened to this guy?”
As it turns out, a lot of pretty terrible stuff! As the story either implies, hints at, or directly illustrates, Scrooge had a cruel father, spent a lot of time as a child away from his family at a boarding school feeling lonely, lost his only sister to ill health, fell in love but saw his relationship deteriorate and end, and then lost his partner and only friend Jacob Marley on Christmas Eve.
That is a LOT of loss. No wonder Christmas is a particularly rough time for this guy! No wonder he gets angry when he sees the happy relationships of others! All of his relationships have ended tragically, whether parental, sibling, romantic, friendship, or business. This is someone who thinks that building relationship is just going to come back to bite him, that it will inevitably end in tragedy, and so isn’t worth the risk.
Scrooge’s reaction to the pain of his losses is so deeply understandable. And unless we have yet to be visited by the brutality of loss, it isn’t hard to look at our own losses and see that it’s very easy to take on Scrooge’s self-protective hard edge and withdrawal. Maybe there are ways that, like Scrooge, we have already created protective walls in ourselves, withdrawn, or over-focused on those things that feel within our control still.
And maybe, like Scrooge, there is opportunity for healing, for transformation, and for new ways of being in the world.
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