The cost of turning our kids Inside Out Children have become old hands at therapy talk

Strangely, I didn’t find this scene so terribly poignant. But my younger two kids did. The Bing Bong death scene undid them like it was supposed to undo me. Of course, my younger, who was only four, had simply grown fond of this Bing Bong fellow and was sad to see him die. But his older sister was an intelligent seven-year-old. She’d always had a spooky sense for adult meanings, and I had to suspect she was experiencing Bing Bong’s death in the way adults were supposed to, that is, abstractly and nostalgically. It wasn’t just cute funny Bing Bong she was mourning. It was the idea of the extinction of the memory of Bing Bong, and the adorable time in Riley’s life betokened by that stack of concepts, and the way the sweet stages of a child’s life slip from your awareness before you can think to preserve them. In that moment I was wondering — and this might have blocked my own sweet impalement, come to think of it — if it was “developmentally appropriate” for a seven-year-old to be getting sad and nostalgic about how the sweet stages of a child’s life slip from your awareness before you can think to preserve them.

Of course, it wasn’t just a seven-year-old who saw that scene and was induced by its virtuosic manipulations to weep when it ended, or at least to grasp it as really sad. It was millions of seven, eight and nine-year olds taking in this vivid rendering of a child’s inner life as the content of powerful melodrama, something so intense in its significance that, when they watched it, the adults around them got weepy too. For some, if not most, of those young viewers, it wasn’t just Riley’s inner feelings being rendered as tearful climax, but their own selves being touched with this second-order melodrama, these soaring and piercing emotions about emotions. I can’t say without further study that kids being induced, via the saturating medium of Pixar animation, to get nostalgic about their own childhoods and emotional about their own emotions is harmful. I will venture that, in historical terms, it’s pretty weird, a narrative archetype rarely invented by prior cultures. 

In the sequel, because Riley is now 13 and entering puberty, the five core emotions have been joined by four new teenage emotions of Embarrassment, Envy, Ennui, and Anxiety. One more feature of the maturing Riley joins these nine feelings inside her brain, her Sense of Self. This appears as a pale blue entity that luminesces on a pedestal behind the emotions, its weave of shapes suggesting an even mix of the two main parental influences in San Francisco — genetics and yoga. 

This Sense of Self is just a passive, pretty object. The emotions are the real characters, and they’re impressively accurate, even as comic exaggerations. I was dubious going into the original Inside Out, suspecting that a children’s movie about a child’s psyche would fall back on the corny and tired inner-child schema, and its dramatic form would be the usual doltish Hollywood story of emancipation, the freeing of this inner child from emotional repression so that the kid can be herself. But I was quickly surprised at the complexity and sophistication of Inside Out’s psychological mapping. Watching that movie, I thought: “Wow. Those Pixar people are smart.” As I’ve already suggested, though, this level of smartness, when applied to mapping the inner workings of children’s brains, and then presenting the map for children to consume in movie form, is a little unsettling. It hints at other achievements eerily tinged with reflexivity and promethean insight — like unlocking the power of the atom, decrypting our own genetic code, or programming computers to think like we think. There’s probably minuses as well as pluses, in other words. 

Inside Out 2 is no less smart than the original in its mapping of Riley’s mental terrain, and in its dramatic control of the stuff that happens there. It all makes impressive sense, starting with the main character in its augmented cast of emotions, fast-moving, speed-talking Anxiety, who simply appears one day and makes herself the boss of Mission Control. It’s not just the centring of this emotion in the brain of a high-achieving teenage girl that feels apt. It’s the stuff Anxiety gets up to. When, by way of justifying her authority, she announces to all the other emotions that her specialty is the future, coming up with possible scenarios that Riley should consider in advance, she’s describing what’s practically useful and what’s potentially volatile about this capacity we have. Anxiety’s self-accounting rings true, to the adult who knows this emotion, and it promises a Pixar sort of comic wildness, which the movie quite delivers.

In the end, Anxiety’s power is reassuringly reined in by the other emotions, and by the importance assumed by the non-emotional things that make up Riley’s sense of self, her beliefs about how she should act, the kind of person she should want to be. Anxiety starts out spinning her future scenarios, which appear on little oblong TV screens, in sepia tones, and then she spins faster and faster until she’s spun herself into a literal tornado of movement, producing new scenarios so fast that Riley is finally overwhelmed by them and has a panic attack.  

Again, the portrayal of this anxiety mechanism makes both intuitive and conceptual sense — the increasing pace of worry, the way these worries seem to generate other worries. But one important detail is missing from Anxiety’s scenarios, one character, if you will, that should appear and reappear in these TV dramas of Riley’s worries but does not. That character is Anxiety herself. Surely one of the classic fears that overcomes the anxious person at some point in her descent into paralysis and panic, hastening that descent, concerns her own anxiety. She realises that the thing she’s anxious about is more likely to happen because she’s anxious about it, and then she gets anxious about her anxiety, and then anxious about this new anxiety she just gave herself by thinking about the old anxiety, and then she’s really screwed. She’s trapped, at least subjectively. Every effort to think her way out of her trap just pushes her deeper into it. 

Not making this move seems like a missed opportunity. Had Anxiety thought to place herself in one of her own scenarios, it would have given Pixar’s animators a chance to do something very Pixarish — portray a plunging regress of worried scenarios, Anxiety staring bug-eyed from a TV screen, on which is another, smaller TV screen from which another bug-eyed Anxiety stares out, on which is another, even smaller TV screen, and so on, two mirrors-style, infinitely and instantaneously. 

Then again, even if doing this could have yielded a very funny frame — the infinite duplication of Anxiety’s very funny face — it might have struck the movie’s creators as too scary as well. Or, it may have hit too close to home. Riley’s ability to escape her climactic panic attack, with the help of emotions and friends which together lift her from her worried spiral by turning her outward, is reassuring on several levels. To the young viewer it shows that a panic attack is not a death sentence, that there are practical ways to escape a spiral of worry. And to the older, philosophically stodgy viewer, it reveals the Pixar team to be working from a sort of pop-Aristotelianism, which is no less praiseworthy for being easily digestible. They show Riley’s thoughts and feelings, her individual self and her social life, training each other, teaching each other how to be in the world. They show concrete practice and concern for others as moral and psychological touchstones, healthy and virtuous corrections to vanity and selfishness, at both their common registers and their neurotic extremes. This all gave me a warm feeling as the movie ended. Gratefully I thought, “These Pixar people are not cretins.”

On the other hand, had they shown Anxiety making herself regress infinitely on TV screens, it might have pointed a little too directly at what this movie, like its predecessor, is also doing. Inside Out 2 sends a message of escaping from the individual self, of combating its unhealthy fixation on itself, but it also feeds our culture’s intensifying focus on individual psyches, especially the psyches of young people, which, one would suspect, makes those selves ever harder to escape. Let’s not forget, young viewers of Inside Out 2 are watching a movie about the dangers of selfishness and self-obsession that spends most of its time inside the head of a 13-year-old girl, and this head is obviously an avatar for their heads. This, for a child or adolescent of our therapeutic culture, is par for the course. 

A six-year-old enters his school for the first time and is confronted with a colourful poster announcing the school’s anxious interest in his Mental Health. Perhaps a school nurse or psychologist makes a visit to his classroom to reiterate the poster’s message, to let all the children seated at their little desks know that if any of them ever needs to talk to someone, about something they’re sad or worried or troubled about, the school takes their Mental Health very seriously. Six-year-olds of prior eras had literally no occasion to ponder their own psyches, especially from the outside perspective of a doctor or school functionary openly worried these psyches might need medical treatment. They just lived in their psyches, mindlessly as it were. But our six-year-old gets to confront his psyche as a topic, an institutional theme, every day, with that poster in the entry to his school, and the occasional visits and solicitations of outside helpers who tenderly address themselves to his Mental Health. And he’ll get to do this every year of school, as his psyche matures and, from the changing perspectives of those different years, revisits itself as a reification, a topic, an object of observation because a potential source of medical trouble.

A 10-year-old gets an iPhone and immediately signs up with TikTok, whose algorithm nudges her to follow near-peers, girls a couple years older who’ve won lots of views and likes by talking about their Mental Health. Thanks to their own training in their own schools, these kids are old hands at therapy-talk. They might even have an entry or two in the DSM memorised. Our 10-year-old, already school-equipped with a therapeutic vocabulary, enters an online market of status and imitation where fluency in this vocabulary gives an apparent advantage. Casually, she and her friends start diagnosing themselves and each other and other kids they know at school. By anatomising her self in therapeutic terms, she may or may not be improving her Mental Health, but she’s definitely adding new symbolic matter to this self, new traits and definitions and layers of significance she can dwell on, wonder about, perhaps worry about. 

This is in addition to the intensified self-awareness summoned from her as she consumes and contributes to social media, even when the explicit theme isn’t teenage self-diagnosis — all the new occasions to think about herself and compare this with other girls as they submit their own selves to these new forms of publicity. By this process of constant self-publicising and self-diagnosis, her mere participation in a youth culture formed by social media and informed by psychotherapy, she has made her self much more interesting to itself than was the case with prior cohorts of young people, whose selves were quite neglected by comparison. Thanks in turn to this neglect, these selves had much less symbolic matter attached to them and were, thus, much lighter to lug around. 

These are just a few of the many ways in which our culture of augmented selfhood has grown into a many-tentacled system of spiritual meaning that changes those who live within it. I’m trying to limit myself to expressions of wonder at the historical strangeness and novelty of these processes and technologies of selfhood, rather than claiming that they’re objectively harmful. But documents claiming with some persuasiveness that they are harmful are multiplying. Ethan Watters’s 2013 book Crazy Like Us tracks the migration of American-style therapeutic understanding to non-Western countries. It shows how these understandings don’t just corrode the ways other cultures cope with spiritual pain. They sometimes propagate, as if virally, the disorders whose Western names and diagnoses they introduce into these new places. This should make us wonder about our own selves and our own culture, which are much more systematically exposed to the therapeutic paradigm. And more recently, within just a few months, the idea that therapy culture is untherapeutic has moved from figures of controversy like Abigail Shrier to arbiters of mainstream common sense like The Atlantic. 

It appears that our modern way of understanding and inhabiting and attending to our selves has turned itself into a feedback loop, a trap, that the greater cultural and institutional influence of psychotherapy begets greater need for psychotherapy. This places the subpopulation of scrupulous, virtuous, therapeutically useful people who work in the larger world of mental health in a tragic bind. At least some of the trouble they’re enlisted to treat is likely the result of the therapy apparatus they are a part of and whose influence they increase as they do their useful work. 

The creators of the Inside Out movies are in a parallel bind. They strive to portray young selves in a way that is as scientifically faithful, and as philosophically serious, as one could hope for in a computerised cartoon that’s also expected to make a billion dollars at the box office. But they do it by feeding children a picture of their spiritual lives that, while smarter and more scrupulous than what happens in schools and on social media, is still part of the same machinery of selfhood. A movie that shows anxiety as a barely controllable tornado inside an adolescent girl’s self, even if the anxiety is eventually brought under control, is still making anxiety, as well as the many other characters that animate a self and contend with anxiety, and that self itself, very urgent things for its young viewers to be aware of. It’s still adding more emphasis on the self to the culture of childhood, and a picture of that self as a place where some disturbance with a scientific name might happen at any minute. It’s still making the selves of children more interesting things for them to dwell on than the selves of prior eras ever were.  

I have hinted that the makers of Inside Out 2 are hip to these dilemmas, their involvement in the mechanisms of hypertrophic selfhood. As I described above, the first Inside Out gave a dramatically central role to nostalgia, cueing its child-viewers to cry about the evanescence of their own childhoods. This, I noted, was pretty strange, and perhaps not age-appropriate. 

The makers of Inside Out 2 seem to be thinking the same thing. A funny emotion-character makes a handful of cameo appearances throughout the sequel. In obvious ways she doesn’t belong with the other emotions. They’re young and she’s, well, old, with a pile of white hair and reading glasses worn low on her nose. This character is, yes, Nostalgia. Nostalgia periodically dodders in through a side door, wistfully, weepily reminiscing about the younger Riley, and the other emotions yell impatiently for her to get lost, because neither Riley nor the children watching are ready for Nostalgia yet. Dutifully, old Nostalgia backs through her door and disappears. This is pretty clever, the sequel’s creators taking a dig at themselves about the original. Yes, they seem to be saying, the first one did jump the gun a little, with the weepy nostalgia stuff about Bing Bong. They seem to be admitting that, in portraying the selves of children to those children, they might also be forming those selves in unknowable ways, and they are aware of this. Part of me wanted to give them credit for these cheeky metatextual moments, the hints of seriousness they contained. But another part of me just wanted to say, “Sorry. Too late.”