The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [56]
Jeremy Clyman is currently pursuing his doctorate in clinical psychology at Yeshiva University in New York. In 2007, he earned a master’s degree in print journalism from Northeastern University. He has written about psychology and cinema for numerous publications including PsycCRITIQUES, a research journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association. He also maintains a bi-weekly blog for Psychology-Today. com called Reel Therapy. He is grateful for the opportunity to join BenBella’s team of gifted writers.
If you want to believe that you have nothing in common with Dexter, do not read this chapter. The authors argue that we all have our own “Dark Passengers”—okay, maybe not murderous ones, but dark all the same. So what do we do with our shadows so we are not so scared of them? Do we bring them out into the open, then try to banish them, as Freud might recommend? Or do we recognize that darkness is part of human nature, and we need to coexist with it or even put it to good use, as Carl Jung might advise? The battle between good and evil has enthralled generations of psychologists, and inspired tales that stretch from the myth of Zeus and the legend of King Arthur through Pinocchio and the Lord of the Rings to Star Wars and Harry Potter. Dexter is a descendant of these classics—with his own unique and breathtaking twist.
THE DARK PASSENGER IN ALL OF US
MELISSA BURKLEY AND EDWARD BURKLEY
“I just know there’s something dark in me and I hide it. I certainly don’t talk about it, but it’s there always, this Dark Passenger. And when he’s driving, I feel alive, half sick with the thrill of complete wrongness. I don’t fight him, I don’t want to. He’s all I’ve got. Nothing else could love me . . . Or is that just a lie the Dark Passenger tells me?”
—Dexter Morgan (“An Inconvenient Lie,” 2-3)
In the Dexter series, one major character is never given any dialogue or physical screen time, and yet still manages to play one of the most important roles in the show. What character, you may ask, could play such an integral role and yet stay so suspiciously hidden? This entity is known to the audience as Dexter’s Dark Passenger.
Although the audience never gets to meet the Dark Passenger, we are given brief glimpses of him through Dexter’s eyes. As expressed in the ominous quote above, Dexter often describes a kind of “tug-of-war” that wages within his mind between what he is told is the “right” thing to do and what his Dark Passenger tells him to do.
Dexter’s internal struggle between these opposing forces forms the foundation for much of the series and is a key reason for the show’s appeal. Dexter is such a captivating character, in part, because he often experiences the same struggle found in us all.
The balance of good and evil within humankind is an age-old tale, bound by neither time nor culture. Tales of such a struggle can be found in both ancient myth and modern story-telling. The idea that people harbor a “dark side” and therefore must struggle to find the balance between light and dark, good and evil is not a new idea. Such a struggle is not only seen in literature and mythology; it also plays a central role in several psychoanalytic theories.
Freud, Jung, and the Psychology of Evil
Many psychologists have theorized about humankind’s struggle between good and evil, but this dialectic tension plays the most central role in the theories of Freud and Jung. Sigmund Freud met the young psychiatrist Carl Jung in 1907 and the two became fast friends. Jung stated that he was immediately struck by Freud’s remarkable intelligence, and Freud