The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [60]
In addition to creating a fractured psyche, denying or repressing the Shadow can lead us to project our negative traits onto others. For example, a man who denies his own hostile thoughts may assume that those around him are hostile and out to get him. Therefore, according to Jung, a key part of the human experience is to find a way to deal with our Shadow in socially appropriate ways in order to limit its influence on our thoughts and lives.
This struggle to deal with the Shadow—a process sometimes referred to as a “Shadow Dance”—forms the basis for Dexter. The show’s main premise asks: Can Dexter find a way to incorporate his Dark Passenger into his everyday life? Will he ever find a balance between the dark and light aspects of his self? That is, the show is really an exploration of Jung’s idea of incorporating rather than denying the Shadow self.
Just as Dexter struggles to find a way to merge his Shadow with the rest of his life (e.g., moving his “tools” out of his apartment and into the shed in his new home’s backyard), we too must find a way to accept and express our own Shadow side rather than deny it. Interestingly, this struggle to deal with our own Shadow is the very reason we enjoy watching Dexter. Watching a show about a man who kills killers allows our own Shadow to essentially “come out and play” for a while. For one hour each week, we exercise our Shadow by allowing it to imagine the things we would do if we were in Dexter’s shoes. Therefore, the audience enjoys Dexter because it gives them a socially acceptable way to feed their own Dark Passengers.
HERO ARCHETYPE
Any story with a villain must also have a hero. What makes Dexter so unique is that these two opposing personalities are housed within the same person. Although a portion of Dexter’s psyche is devoted to his dark, murderous impulses, another part of his psyche wants to be good.
In one of Dexter’s flashbacks, we saw how Harry, Dexter’s father, taught a teenage Dexter how to use his murderous impulses for good by molding his Shadow into a vigilante. Harry told Dexter, “Okay, so we can’t stop this. But maybe we can do something to channel it. Use it for good. There are people out there who do really bad things and the police can’t catch them all” (“Dexter”).
The Hero archetype forms the basis for nearly every mythology. The Hero’s primary purpose is to overcome the monster of darkness, but in addition to this objective, the Hero archetype typically includes a number of other defining features. First, the Hero’s birth usually involves “unusual circumstances.” Second, as a child, the Hero often escapes from a murder attempt (e.g., myth of Zeus). Combined, these two traumatic experiences play an important role in the Hero’s development and sense of purpose.
Both of these hero qualities could easily apply to Dexter. As the show progressed, Dexter discovered the circumstances surrounding his birth and childhood: Harry, Dexter’s adopted father, was having an affair with Dexter’s mother, a criminal informant named Laura. When the drug lords overseeing Laura found out about the affair and her role as a CI, they made an example of her by slaying her with a chainsaw in a shipping container while her two sons, Brian and Dexter, watched. The boys escaped the brutal attack, but were left to sit in the bloody container for several days until Harry recovered them. According to Harry, it is this traumatic experience that instilled in Dexter the need to kill.
In order for Dexter to be a true Hero, though, he must be pitted against a separate evil entity, the “monster of darkness” mentioned above, and this takes place in two ways. First, each episode usually features Dexter pursuing, catching, and killing a criminal who managed to escape the justice system. Second, and more integral to the series storyline, is the fact that a new adversarial character is introduced each season and Dexter must spend the entire season