The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [107]
Spider-Man has his webs, Superman his flight, and Batman his high-tech know-how. What’s Dexter’s superhero ability? Discipline. Obsessive and absolute, the “Dark Defender” must live by Harry’s Code, because he knows that any deviation from the strict moral code Harry taught him can only result in disaster—for himself and the innocent civilians he loves, in his own reptilian way.
Dexter’s well-intentioned cultivation of a disciplined numbness to others’ pain isn’t unique—or even unusual. A surgeon cuts into living human bodies, week after week, until she feels nothing at all anymore. It’s just work. It’s not a person under her scalpel so much as an object, a thorax, a liver. If she felt the trauma and horror most of us would feel at slicing into a living human being, she would be useless in the O.R. and lives that could have been saved would be lost. An essential part of a surgeon’s psychological structure and training involves the cultivation of this ability to not feel what “normal” people feel deeply and immediately. Ask any doctor about that first experience with cadavers in medical school. She’ll tell you about the joking, the nicknames the students give the bodies, the rituals needed to cultivate functional numbness.
In their 2007 book about post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of recent wars, Haunted by Combat, psychologists Daryl S. Paulson and Stanley Krippner describe PTSD as “a condition that results from experiencing (or witnessing) life-threatening events that extend beyond one’s coping capacity, emotional resources, and/or existential world view.” Many first-year medical students work hard to extend their coping capacities and worldview in order to accommodate the presence of the dying and the dead. Adults have a fighting chance of finding their way through these sorts of traumas with their psyches intact—maybe even strengthened by their experience.51 A child like Dexter was, locked in the bloody container with his mother’s body for days, would have no such capacities or existential worldview to help him overcome such an experience. But the developing consciousness demands integration, so Dexter embraced his horrific experience, making the blood, the death, and the resulting numbness core parts of his being. Like a physician or nurse, Dexter has found a way to help alleviate others’ pain by leveraging his own inability to feel it.
Should Dexter ever get caught and face trial, his defense attorney might consider arguing that his client was like a well-intentioned surgeon operating on the social body of Miami, removing malignant tumors, cutting away infected tissue, clearing blocked arteries. Yes, pain was involved, and sometimes unintended death as well. But even the best surgeons lose patients sometimes, and overall, Dexter’s is a positive effect on society, right?
No? Why not? Do you object to the illegality of his dark campaign? Do you hold that we need strict, transparent rules regulating those who have the power and authority to kill? Or are you perhaps unwilling to accept the sacrifice of an occasional innocent bystander in this generally righteous process? If you’re waiting for the police to catch the murderers first, remember that by definition “serial killers” keep getting away with it. The police have had their chances. If Dexter doesn’t stop these monsters, who will? And when?
It’s not just surgeons and soldiers who turn not-feeling to their professional advantage. We all do, in one way or another. In the mid-1980s, I twice hitchhiked from my preppy college in upstate New York to Alaska, looking for adventure and work in salmon canneries to finance the trip. I found both. The first summer, I got hired at Kenai Packers, the best place for that sort of work in Kenai. Unfortunately, I was assigned to the worst position in the whole place: slime-monkeys, they called us. At the time, I was, I cringe to admit, an over-sensitive, pedantic, vegetarian poetry student (who else carries a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s collected verse