Literary and Cinematic Examples

Literary Character: Claus and Lucas

From The Notebook (El gran cuaderno, 1986) By Ágota Kristóf Analysis by Javier Miranda

The Notebook is the first volume of the Claus and Lucas trilogy, written by Ágota Kristóf (Csikvánd, Hungary, 1935 – Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 2011).

Published in 1986, this masterpiece of modern European literature unfolds in an unspecified wartime context, which reinforces its universality and timelessness. Between the lines, however, it is clear that the setting is Eastern Europe during World War II, specifically Hungary. The story narrates the experiences of twin brothers — Claus and Lucas — who are sent by their mother to live with their grandmother in a rural region, to protect them from the ravages of war. Unable to care for them, the mother makes this decision out of despair.

The grandmother, known as “The Witch,” owns a garden and sells vegetables — a luxury in those times. She receives them with coldness and mistrust, marking the start of a period of extreme poverty and violence.

Her first words to them are:

“I’ll teach you how to survive.”

And she constantly calls them:

“Sons of bitches.”

The Lesson

During dinner, the grandmother says:

“You’ve understood it by now. Shelter and food must be earned.”

The boys reply:

“That’s not it. Work is heavier still — especially if you’re old.”

She sneers:

“Sons of bitches! You pity me?”

“No, Grandma. We just don’t want to be ashamed of ourselves.”

Later, they go to the forest to gather firewood.

From then on, they do every job they’re capable of doing.

The Hardening

The twins soon understand that survival will be difficult. They develop a system of self-discipline and hardening, both emotional and physical. Their goal: eliminate any trace of weakness, whether emotional or bodily. To endure the brutality of their world, they subject themselves to hunger, pain, and humiliation. They deliberately injure themselves to grow insensitive to pain, insulting each other to train indifference. They learn to ignore insults, to beg, lie, steal, and even kill, because “one must know how to do it.” They abandon the innocence of childhood and become merciless young men.

“We never played,” they say. Cynical, cruel, pragmatic — that’s how they face the world.

Its Worldview

Their worldview — like that of the Self-Preservation 8 — is marked by survival and the satisfaction of immediate needs. Their morality adapts to the brutality of their surroundings. From petty theft to extreme violence, everything is justified for survival. The novel’s tone is cold, objective, devoid of sentimentality. Written in the first-person plural, it emphasizes their indissoluble bond, eliminating any subjective or emotional perspective. Their journal, the titular “notebook,” records events with surgical precision, which amplifies the horror of what they describe.

Excerpt

Grandmother: “When an animal must be killed, call us. We’ll do it ourselves.”

“You like it, don’t you?” she asks.

“No, Grandma, that’s just it. We don’t like it. That’s why we must get used to it.”

“I see… It’s a new exercise. You’re right. One must know how to kill when necessary.”

“We started with the fish. We grabbed them by the tail and smashed their heads on a rock. We got used to killing quickly — chickens, rabbits, ducks. Later, we killed animals that didn’t even need to die.”

Claus and Lucas

Claus and Lucas are identical twins, physically and emotionally — at least on the surface. This initial equality allows the narrative to explore themes of identity, connection, and depersonalization in wartime.

Still, subtle differences emerge. Claus is the decisive and pragmatic one, clearly embodying the Self-Preservation 8. He takes a protective and leadership role, assuming responsibility for survival. While both harden themselves, Claus shows greater control over his emotions — his coolness and need to act reveal an authentic E8 temperament. He also displays an innate ability to adapt strategically to critical situations. His logic and resistance to pain make him the driving force of their survival.

Lucas, on the other hand, though similar, shows a more introspective and sensitive side. His humanity occasionally emerges in subtle ways, through reflection and empathy — making him a more complex emotional figure.

Symbiosis and Identity

Their relationship is defined by a symbiotic unity — less conflictive than complementary. Claus and Lucas function as one indivisible being, reinforcing the novel’s psychological and philosophical questions:

Are they two people — or one?

Do they even share the same letters in their names to suggest that unity? How responsible are we for our actions under extreme survival? How do morality and humanity redefine themselves in a world stripped of compassion?

Their bond forms a microcosm of human relationships, where survival becomes mutual dependence. Together, they embody the fusion of brutality and tenderness that defines existence under collapse.

Excerpt

Grandmother:

“Sons of bitches!”

People:

“Witch’s children! Bastards!”

Others:

“Idiots! Pigs! Criminals!”

“When we hear these words, our faces turn red, our eyes sting, and our knees shake. We don’t want to blush or tremble.

We want to get used to the insults and the words that hurt.”

“We sit at the kitchen table, facing each other, staring into each other’s eyes, and call each other names: —‘Idiot!’ —‘Bastard!’ —‘Faggot!’ —‘Son of a bitch!’

We continue until the words no longer pierce our ears.

Half an hour every day, until we are immune.”

Later they rehearse old words from their mother:

“My darlings! My beloved ones! My life! My adored little angels!” They repeat them again and again, until the pain fades. “By repeating them, the words lose their meaning — and the pain they carry softens.”

One Self-Preservation 8 — or Two?

E8 is characterized by strength, autonomy, and the need to control their environment to protect against vulnerability. Within the Self-Preservation subtype, this manifests as constant vigilance — the search for physical and emotional safety.

Claus exemplifies this through:

• Control and protection: assuming responsibility for both, determined to survive.

• Resistance to pain: through self-hardening, a classic E8 defense.

• Independence: avoiding dependence on others, distrusting authority.

In its darker form, this type becomes aggressive, authoritarian, emotionally detached. Claus often crosses moral boundaries for survival. Lucas, meanwhile, supports him — yet sometimes acts like a Type Six (out of loyalty) or Type Four (through inner conflict). Both are energetic, hard, decisive, but pay a high price: losing contact with tenderness and compassion. They reject vulnerability and any sign of incapacity.

The Escape

Their world is merciless — yet they persist in bending it to their will. When their father finally returns from the war, the reunion is cold. Later, under the new occupation regime (implied to be the Soviet invasion), the twins decide to flee across minefields and barbed wire.

“We hide behind the tree, cover our ears, and open our mouths as the explosion sounds. One of us crosses — the other stays.”

The one who crosses escapes to another country; the other returns to the grandmother’s house.

Portrait of the Twins

Their psychological portrait is clear: there is revenge, denial of affection, and a life understood as a permanent battle where there is no place for the weak. They reject tenderness, addicted instead to intensity — even that of pain and danger.

A key scene shows this vividly:

The twins find their neighbor, “Hare Face,” dead in a pool of blood and semen — raped and murdered by soldiers. Her mother, dying in agony, begs them to end her suffering.

“Do you really want to die?” “What else could I want? Burn the house. I don’t want anyone to find me like this.” “All right. If that’s what you want.”

They slit her throat and set fire to the house.

The grandmother later comments matter-of-factly:

“The neighbor’s house burned. The daughter and mother were inside.”

The cruelty combines with a strange clarity of purpose — not malice, but survival in its purest form.

A Dark Trilogy

The saga continues with two more books — The Proof and The Third Lie — forming a trilogy of independent but interconnected novels centered on Claus and Lucas. In the first, both share protagonism; in the second, Lucas dominates the narrative; in the third, both reappear — though with the story seemingly leaning toward Claus.

The trilogy transmits a pervasive sense of despair and cruelty that provokes both fascination and rejection. Even the grandmother, a symbol of harshness, becomes a paradoxical figure of reference and attachment — cruel yet stable, brutal yet essential.

In some way, Kristóf’s harshness also speaks to us of the world we inherited from the Second World War, a world whose very foundations have been profoundly corroded by the competition for bare survival—by that ruthless game of “the squid” in which only the strongest and most cruel appear fit to live. Moreover, the work invites us to realize how war affects even childhood, leaving very long and deep consequences over time.

The Notebook establishes from the start a literary rule that the child protagonists follow with rigor: “The writing must be true. We must write only what is. What we see, what we

hear, what we do.” This implies a narrative stripped of adornment, devoid of emotional ambiguity, where the reader discovers that all characters—main and secondary alike—are marked by precarity, horror, and atrocity. From this perspective, the work stands beyond conventional morality.

However, these hardened children develop their own moral code. They protect Harelip, their deranged and marginalized neighbor, and face the sadists of the village—other equally desperate children. They even endure sexual abuse without passing judgment on their aggressors. In an act of justice, they force the priest who abused Harelip to feed her during the winter. The priest, surprised, confronts them:

—“It’s monstrous. Do you realize what you’re about to do?” —“Yes, sir. Blackmail.” —“At your age… It’s deplorable.” —“Yes, it’s deplorable that we’ve been forced to this point. But Harelip and her mother need money. They really need it.”

The priest stands up, removes his robe, and says:

—“This is a test sent to me by God. How much do you want? I’m not rich.” —“Ten times what you’ve given us. Once a week. We’re not asking the impossible.” He takes money from his pocket, hands it over. —“Come every Saturday. But don’t think for a moment that I do this to give in to your blackmail. I do it out of charity.” We answer: —“That’s exactly what we expected from you, Father.”

As can be seen, beyond the appearance of a story about brave, indomitable children, the work presents a moral alternative born from a chaotic and dehumanized environment. The story unfolds amid extreme violence—sexual abuse, war crimes, occupations, hunger, and devastation during the Nazi and Soviet invasions. In that world, the twins survive by developing a minimal yet firm ethical code to face the world’s brutality.

The trilogy transcends the dark-tale genre, like Hansel and Gretel, by reinterpreting childhood not as a stage of invulnerability thanks to play and absolute union, but as an arena of exposure and loss. Kristóf dismantles the literary illusion: what we read is not real, and she rejects literature as refuge or escape. With an implacable style, she forces us to confront our own reality, making clear that literature should not serve as comfort, but as an act of truth.

Though many prefer the brutal, direct strength of The Notebook, the following books add complexity, expanding the trilogy’s scope of desolation and loss. Ultimately, the work

stands as testimony to human resistance through writing—and to the impossibility of escaping our broken humanity. A faithful reflection of this type of personality.

Cinematic Character

Tony Soprano The Sopranos, HBO series (David Chase, 1999–2007) By Marc Fresquet

Preliminary Confession

Those of us who had a disturbed and sadistic mother—who, instead of transmitting maternal empathy, projected cruelty and animosity toward her son or daughter—often develop a defensive or protective amorality to integrate and coexist with reactive feelings that are not accepted within the social framework of what is morally correct or expected of a child toward their mother.

Amorality is not exactly a lack or absence of morals. It is rather a cognitive instrument that allows one to tolerate certain acts and principles without subjecting them to the limits of strict moral judgment. Such acts were, to a large extent, those that we ourselves witnessed and suffered as victims of a criminal mother and, on the other hand, the sanction of an antisocial environment in which we did not fit—perhaps due to the very temperament that the family setting transmitted.

In that context, conventional moral or ethical principles are rejected as belonging to a world that has abandoned us and is founded on self-righteous prejudice. Expressed amorality, in this case, is resentment toward social values that neither included nor protected the subject’s fragile position. It belongs to an ideology and semantics of love invented for repression and idealism—by those who seemed luckier in childhood, and who therefore cannot question anything about life itself.

What is judged as evil under conventional morality may, in fact, arise from suffering, from the desire for just reparation. Criminal morality, mafia codes—this alternative, antisocial morality—can expose the immoral aspects of conventional virtue. Defensive amorality is an effort not to be defeated—an armor forged against maternal contempt. It is a fight maintained over time that leaves emotional traces akin to anxiety disorders or post-traumatic stress, resulting from prolonged exposure to terror: loss, aggression, humiliation. Mute anguish beneath a violent life within the family itself becomes the survivor’s core anxiety.

“Are you a mobster, Dad?”

In episode seven of The Sopranos, during one of Tony’s therapy sessions, the drama of transmitting violence and criminal life from parent to child arises. Tony observes how his children slowly uncover his true identity, and in his son Anthony he recognizes the same internalization of the paternal role that Tony himself received—and internalized—from his own father, also named Anthony.

He perceives—though unable to verbalize it—how ignorance and unconsciousness reproduce the same patterns and suffering: how his son prioritizes loyalty in a confused form of paternal love; how he himself harms his sister, as he was once hurt by his father’s preference.

Tony accesses the memories and emotions tied to all this, drawing near to the existential dilemma between inherited force and free will. Recognizing one’s own pain in that of one’s children is a cruel trial, which ought to lead to transformation.

Tony’s mother exemplifies the borderline personality with a sadistic component. Absolutely egocentric, her dramatic scenes always pass for hysteria in performance. If she shows empathy, it’s feigned—her narcissistic rage is always ready beneath her eyes. One could hardly decide if she was more stupid or evil, yet her theatricality before Tony’s childish needs easily translates into: “I wish you were dead,” or “I feel like killing you.” These are the echoes of the childhood experience of the Self-Preservation 8 and his mother.

The sadistic love leaves an imprint of aggressiveness and hatred toward the world as well as toward oneself. The mere possibility of being abandoned provokes a terror accompanied by rage: “If you betray me, I’ll kill you,” because the only love that once felt authentic was a murderous one.

The Survivor’s Anxiety

Tony Soprano is not the first fictional mafia boss characterized by a symptomatic picture of generalized anxiety. The politics of organized crime are sustained by constant tension for control and fear of annihilation.

His psychological profile reveals a lack of emotional resources to sustain himself and confront his conflicts—and even less for self-review or inner growth. Tony must devote most of his energy to strategic planning, maintaining apparent composure in leading the clan.

“The famous imperturbability of Don Vito Corleone has disappeared forever,” noted one of the many psychological analyses of the genre. The type of pain for loss and for love of people and ideas persists. The damage suffered in self-concept and self-esteem during childhood manifests as adult conduct marked by mistrust.

The Self-Preservation 8 is often an anxious type. Though he does not usually display the manic euphoria of the sexual subtype nor the social self-assertion of the dominant, the survivor’s anxiety governs Tony: in truth, anxiety is his real boss. Hardness and arrogance coexist with fear and a constant sense of threat. This anxiety is common and unconscious among people of this subtype—suppressed through motor insensitivity for most of their lives.

Tony is saddened by the departure of the duck family from his garden, but his inhibited sensitivity turns such emotion into panic attacks. “Sad over ducks? What nonsense!” The problem cannot be that—a mafia boss must not show feelings interpretable as weakness. Control and power allow no such sensitivities, and that’s what he tries to fix in therapy.

The presence of certain emotions undermines the political mask of the boss, challenging the typical diagnosis of psychopathy. It’s different to speak of a pathological amorality that rejects sensitivity yet occasionally erupts, creating conflict in experience and decision.

This is the key to the character: a damaged person, with a malformed emotionality oriented toward survival. Another trait: Tony always sees his father as a weak man and his wife as an unempathetic, selfish, vengeful woman. His mother, cruel and irresponsible, represents mortal danger to her own son. This effort to remain firm leaves him with enormous difficulty in relationships and painful distance from his children, fruits of blocked tenderness.

Tony’s narrowed eyes, which seem to bear pain or resist it, and his unsettling, half-ironic smile reflect the emotional hardness of one who survived a hostile environment. Childhood taught him to hide his feelings before a mother who used him to humiliate, and before an inefficient father with no paternal skill.

The Self-Preservation 8 learned to grit his teeth—to distrust, to guard his sensitive inner core. His emotionality is visceral and explosive. Repressed for fear of being hurt, it builds an image of ruthless strength, yet he burns like a volcano because the inner child within him rages furiously.

Tony’s entire life is, essentially, a lie destined to uphold a criminal business and its laws. His identity is built upon falseness: neither his father was the true leader Tony imagined, nor his mother the model of morality he longed for. In her, guilt transforms into a perverse will to destroy him—to castrate him, to reduce him to a non-man. And yet, the internalized model

repeats itself: Tony has inherited her talent for deceit and emotional manipulation. His way of speaking, desiring, and relating always carries a trace of what he absorbed emotionally.

The “criminal” business of Tony and his lifestyle form an inseparable part of the E8’s relationship to the limits of norms—especially in the Self-Preservation subtype, for whom acting secretly or covertly is common. His disobedience toward parents and authority figures, as a consequence of violence and humiliation, inevitably projects onto social conventions. There’s always a tendency to evade norms—not openly, but subtly—always performing acts that escape the rules most follow.

Tony’s world operates by a “parallel law”: what remains hidden or disguised from what is allowed by legal dimension, escaping the law’s demand. It’s a way of conceiving all areas of life as negotiation with its limits. Schemes, bargains, favors, debts—these define this Enneatype’s understanding of relationships. Amorality turns into immorality when it tolerates and includes conscious manipulation of reality to one’s benefit, even at the cost of harming others.

The defensive mechanism of Tony’s amorality becomes a kind of moral disconnection that allows him to perform two ethically opposite acts at once: accompany his beloved daughter on a college visit, while secretly executing an old traitor from the clan.

He cannot live with his paternal self, since both acts derive from the same sentimental code: toward his daughter and the codes of honor, toward the family and the memory of its dead. Vengeance becomes an obligation that repairs pain—gives meaning where none would otherwise exist—to fill the emotional voids of the Self-Preservation 8.

Thus Tony loves and asks for love: bringing sweets to his mother whenever he visits (the first act of love, through food, always remains one). Favors, gifts, protection, reparation of honor—all are expressions of attachment. From bringing coffee to Dr. Melfi in their sessions, to ordering a car repair, or punishing someone who offends a loved one. Or the typical mafia gesture of compensating loyalty or respect with money, information, or gifts. Those envelopes stuffed with cash at weddings and celebrations: the more money, the more love, the more bond.

To love is to give. Yet it is a generosity steeped in debt—a network of loyalties belonging not to love, but to control. As if the web of debts between people were itself the structure of love: a way to build and preserve the bond.

Blackout of Conscience

Prisoner of a self-imposed role as head of the family, Tony must take charge of its members, especially his mother. Everything that this role entails — the politics of business, vigilance, intrigue, etc. — feeds his anxiety symptoms, leaving him little psychic energy to see beyond his own nose or recognize the power games of that mother. It is a very basic emotional pattern, compulsive and unconscious, typical of the visceral tone of the lustful type.

The absence of paternal structure and maternal control prevented Tony from developing emotional resources, leaving him impulsive, unable to handle frustration and severely lacking emotional stability. This appears in his anxiety, anger outbursts, and violence. His neurotic need for grandiosity tries to compensate for a damaged self-concept, reacting with fury to any sign of contempt. His compulsions also express themselves in addictions to food, drugs, or sex — not to affirm masculinity, but to discharge tension or escape distress.

Tony builds his self-esteem on the approval of other men, on “being someone important,” a trait often observed in male E8s. That is his notion of success. There lies the value of camaraderie — in the loyal and generous conduct among male peers. Betrayal by those he considers “one of us” is the most unforgivable sin: “People have become soft, easy traitors…” he laments with nostalgia for lost codes of honor and respect. He develops no deep affection toward women, except for the maternal and protective role projected onto one — Dr. Melfi, who represents the sweet, loving mother or simply the supportive one he never had.

The Question of Indiscriminate Violence

The issue of indiscriminate violence and the inclusion of necessary “collateral damage” to third parties in his work and objectives leads to a discussion of Tony’s supposed psychopathic traits and his apparent lack of empathy. This is a frequent debate around the Lustful Enneatype. Tony does not present a real absence of empathy; rather, by virtue of the subtype’s functional egoism, his empathy is limited to the circle of people he loves or who matter to him — those who return loyalty and affection. The rest of the world can be used instrumentally if business or other affairs require it: an empathy easily diluted within amorality.

The E8 is a peculiar type of empathy. He may hold visceral convictions rooted in respect or dignity toward what he can or cannot tolerate in another person — a primitive empathy of species. Still, this empathy coexists with a firm conviction in punishment for behaviors he considers unworthy.

The presumed psychopathy of a mobster cannot be simplistically equated with the character structure of E8, whose will to define a “bad guy” actually reinforces his self-image as one of the “good guys.” In truth, Tony belongs to the little-known family of neurotic needs of justice and honor. Except for fits of anger or vengeance, Tony does not seek to harm for its own sake. That, in turn, is what distinguishes him from a sadist: he is not sadistic, but he does not repent for the vengeful or punitive harm done in the pursuit of his goals.

His tendency toward “blackout of conscience” appears in his fainting spells — the extreme expression of his inability to sustain emotional pain. The blackout is the radical mechanism by which his body responds to anxiety it cannot consciously process. That blackout of consciousness — and of self-awareness — can be seen both in his symptoms and as a metaphor in analytic interpretation.

Without Hope of Change?

The conventional cognitive-behavioral therapeutic perspective, which aims to normalize conduct, holds little hope for change in a case like Tony Soprano’s. Without substitutes for his addictive sources of self-esteem, how could such a man sustain himself in an inner void so vertiginous? The fear behind this vision points to a fatal disintegration of his self-concept. Who knows — they fear — if a lapse in his business vigilance might trigger renewed clan wars, ending with his own death.

For official medical models, one cannot expect emotional adaptation or an improvement in regulation mechanisms toward “normality.” “What a horrible world,” says The Last Don (Mario Puzo, 1996), “that drives people to sin.” Don Domenico Clericuzio, the dying mafia boss in that novel, performs a last-minute examination of conscience about the destructiveness of passions and the greed for power that led his clan to self-extinction instead of prosperity.

Acquiring awareness of the harm one inflicts — to oneself and to others — does not lead the Lustful type to “normalization.” It leads rather to recognition of the pain of being at war with the world, watching the spread of lovelessness and hate. And, as with Tony, to a comprehension of emotions like sadness for illness or for a friend’s death — the small but genuine gestures of sincere love for close family.

The Tragedy of Denial

Throughout the series, Tony undergoes a limited personal process, bounded by his family culture, ignorance, and cognitive deficiencies. Still, he attains a degree of maturation in awareness and responsibility for his life and emotions, in his own way.

For resistant characters like him, taking charge of reality does not mean overvaluing “what others make me feel,” nor defending a “healthy egoism.” Beyond that, the E8’s grandiose striving carries a special capacity for transcendence or existential meaning once transformation begins and awareness of consequences develops.

Tony’s energetic leadership, strategic vision, and particular primitive empathy can be re-channeled through generosity and solidarity — virtues inherent to E8’s potential. Though it may be asking much of therapy, his first step of genuine character work appears in his positive transference toward Dr. Melfi.

His initial difficulties take the form of distrust, paranoid projections, and fantasies of manipulation by the psychiatrist — a defensive stance rooted in inferiority before someone with academic authority. He even allows himself to leave sessions when confronted or to investigate her private life.

And, of course, the desire — the compulsive sexualization of the woman above professional boundaries. Given the mother he had, who would not desire or fall for an intelligent, educated, gentle woman, respectful and even protective of the wounded child within? In truth, sexuality with women is not mere discharge or lustful distraction. Emotionally, it’s the search for a loving mother, for a maternal tenderness that gives him peace and cares for him. Thus his attraction to Dr. Melfi reveals the same positive transference:

“I’m starting to understand what talking helps with,” says Tony. “Nobody ever helped me or made it easy for me.”

Though frustration and confrontation recur in therapy, that inertia gradually turns into productive work. Over time and with Melfi’s patience, Tony begins to recognize constructively the help her professional stance offers. His daily struggles, the deceptive faces of his anxiety, start to reveal his true nature — a tragic dimension showing the life Tony has built.