With a need to be persecuted, victimised and rescued, it’s as if the Duchess of Sussex was written by the Brothers Grimm
“I wanted to share a story, a story that I wrote about the man that I love and the way that we met. Let’s call this a modern fairytale.” The newly minted Duchess of Sussex opened her wedding speech with lines that could have been read in the honeyed tones of Julie Andrews in the voiceover of a Disney film.
“Once upon a time there was a girl from LA, some people called her an actress, and there was a guy from London, some people called him a prince,” continued Meghan. “All of those people didn’t fully get it, because this is the love story of a boy and girl who are meant to be together.”
Mere hours into the marriage and we already had our hero and heroine – and the first inkling of the baddies to come in “those people who didn’t fully get it”.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are therapy veterans – but they are also unusual in that a good psychologist should teach you how to understand not only yourself but the people around you. Meghan in particular displays little empathy in the Netflix documentary, Harry & Meghan, and it would be interesting to know whether the term “princess syndrome” was ever raised in one of her sessions.
“Princess syndrome means exhibiting behaviour akin to in fairytales,” says retired psychotherapist Sheri Jacobson, founder of Harley Therapy.
“It is about putting yourself at the epicentre of every story and being overly concerned with how things appear. I think that when it comes to Meghan, there are definitely visible traits – her reflex to look at things externally, her overemphasis of herself and this idea that others revolve around her.”
A childhood spent in the home of storytelling with a father who worked in film may have had a profound effect on the Duchess of Sussex. In her interview with Oprah last year, she compared herself to Ariel from The Little Mermaid. “I went, ‘Oh my God, she falls in love with the prince, and because of that, she loses her voice’,” she said of the film. In the Netflix documentary, she reflects on how little royal life was like the Princess Diaries, the Disney film about an awkward American teenager who discovers she is the royal heir to a European principality.
“This is very American. In the US, things tend to be more amplified and dramatised,” says Jacobson. “I think there is less of that in the UK, but in the end we’re still human and humans are drawn to stories.”
At the heart of every Grimm fairytale, every Disney film and, yes, every gripping Netflix documentary is a battle between good and evil. Watching the series, I found plenty to sympathise with Meghan about, but I also found her inability to see any shades of grey – and her determination to cast herself in the role of innocent, naive victim battling a cruel media and a heartless Royal family – somewhat jarring.
“The need to be persecuted and victimised and therefore the need to be rescued – it’s all quite simplistic, whereas life is very much harder to define than this,” explains Jacobson.
Interestingly, while Harry speaks in the documentary about regretting some of his choices, at no point does Meghan look at her actions critically. Instead, the Sussexes are portrayed as an idealised example of marriage and parenthood: they watch hummingbirds with their children at sunset, chase a giggling Archie around the garden and dance together at home. I’m sure these loving moments were real, but they also felt too intimate to be displayed to the world by a couple supposedly desperate for privacy.
“This goes back to the same desire to centre herself in a great love story, say, or a perfect family,” says Jacobson. “It perpetuates a certain narrative that has been built in her head and that’s very genuine for her.
“I have observed that the happiest people aren’t necessarily the ones who display their happiness loudly, they’re the ones who are content to keep it private.”
Jacobson also notes that Meghan’s need to place herself at the centre of the story was always going to be somewhat problematic for the Royal family.
“I think there has been a lot of imposition of her values onto, not only how the family works, but the whole of Britain. The Queen and monarchy is about service and sacrifice and [Meghan’s] principles and attitudes are at odds with the institution – but what is interesting is that there was something in her that thought they should change, not her.”
Equally, the couple’s determination to right some of the wrongs that have been done to them was undermined by their implications around the Waleses – about the couple being cold, or about the Prince of Wales shouting at and scaring his brother.
“We have choices as to how much our defences, in protecting our suffering, protects not only us but other people,” says Jacobson. “Shows like these create division and more rancour in other people’s lives. It’s one thing to portray your fairytale life, but in this case other real people are being dragged down in order for them to rise higher.”
As for Harry, at times it is almost touching how often he compares his wife to his mother, and Jacobson notes that this is common in people who have lost a beloved parent in childhood and want to reconnect with them.
“Harry buys into it all,” she says. “He has suffered and so has she – however there seems to be a measure of supplication and bowing down to her and it is probably because she makes a compelling case for a perfect unified family.
“This can be very attractive to a man like him, because he becomes part of her fairytale story and through her he has found his happy ending. It is the sort of narrative that is innately appealing to all of us – but we shouldn’t mistake it for being healthy.”
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