The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [46]
Foreclosure need not occur only once, or only during adolescence, and indeed identity foreclosure is not experienced by all people during normal development. It is a typically a brief period in a person’s life, and is usually followed by experimentation with possible alternatives (a period Marcia termed identity moratorium) and then strong commitment to some specific identity. But Dexter has not clearly reached a point of identity achievement: he’s still not entirely sure what he wants to be when he “grows up.”
Yet perhaps because he does not have a strongly defined sense of personal identity, Dexter is especially successful at acts of social disguise:
DEXTER: The only real question I have is why, in a building full of cops, all supposedly with a keen insight into the human soul, is Doakes the only one gets the creeps from me? (“Dexter”)
This is an excellent question, and reflects the success of Dexter’s attempts at disguise. In Goffman’s formulation: “an individual who implicitly or explicitly signifies that he has certain social characteristics ought in fact to be what he claims he is . . . others find, then, that the individual has informed them as to what is and as to what they ought to see as the ‘is’” (emphasis original). Dexter acts friendly—witness his daily donut ritual—dresses well, and performs his job quite successfully. The positive stereotype that police are “good guys” concerned with upholding the law is believed by most people, including the police themselves. Dexter thus benefits from a sort of “innocence by association.”21 Dexter is not merely friendly with law enforcement but a functional member of the group, a sort of wolf in blue wool.22
Dexter most often has difficulty in presenting a convincing front when it comes to sexual matters. He often spouts sexual innuendo without even realizing it, to the amusement of his sister and coworkers. He originally chose to date Rita because, after being repeatedly abused by her former romantic partner, she was largely disinterested in sex. Once Rita showed signs of sexual receptivity, Dexter fretted about the consequences: “I can’t have sex with Rita. Every time I sleep with a woman, she sees me for what I really am—empty. Then she’s gone” (“Shrink Wrap,” 1-8). For all of the braggadocio and boasting we find in everyday conversations about sex, it is an act that makes us highly vulnerable both physically and psychologically. While Dexter does not have a normal degree of interest in sex, he does have a very normal fear about it: that our new sexual partners will discover something strange about us—say, a physical abnormality or some unusual kink—and that this discovery will lead to the dissolution of the romantic relationships that we wish to maintain.
The Mask Is Slipping
Many psychologists and philosophers, working from the assumption that the self is a partial product of socialization, have suggested that the self need not be contained within the boundaries of the physical individual. Some theorists have suggested that the closeness of relationships can be usefully quantified in terms of how much the other person is included within a self-representation. Think back to high school math class and Venn diagrams, which use overlapping circles to illustrate associations between objects or categories. In psychological terms, the more overlap of the circle representing “ME” and the circle representing “YOU,” the closer our relationship is likely to be.23 Anecdotally, many of us will have witnessed how new romantic partners happily refer to themselves as “we” or as “a couple” after they reach some basic level of commitment. In the general phenomenon of deindividuation, people temporarily lose their sense of being a distinct person and instead come to think of themselves as part of a social unit. Psychologists have found interesting cognitive consequences of such perceived “we-ness.” For example, a classic study by Festinger, Pepitone, and Newcomb showed that the more individuals identified with the tasked goal of a