The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [67]
Identifying with a parent to get positive attention is also seen in Christine, the daughter of the Trinity killer. Christine was never part of Trinity’s “regular” family; she had always been left out, a secret. She explicitly told Trinity that she tried to get his acceptance by emulating him, and she even murdered Lundy and shot Deb to get this approval. When Trinity rejected her even after this supreme effort, Christine’s mind simply couldn’t handle it, and she committed suicide. In Christine’s case this defense mechanism backfired, leading only to tragedy.
The Dark Defender: Dexter’s Mind
The person at Miami Metro who has the most need of defense mechanisms is Dexter himself. He certainly has more unbridled complexity for his unconscious mind to rein in than most people; his entire life is based on his ability to convince himself that his actions are just, righteous, and morally acceptable. To achieve this feat, Dexter uses all of the protective methods described above, as well as additional ones we haven’t yet discussed.
One mechanism used by Dexter that we don’t see in any other character is repression. Freud believed that when we witness something so traumatic that it will break us, our memories are pushed so far into our unconscious mind that we don’t even realize they exist. Instead, we simply have a blank spot in our personal biographies.
When Dexter was three, he and his brother witnessed their mother being murdered, saw her chopped into pieces with a chainsaw, and then were left in a freighter cargo box with no food, sitting in two inches of blood, for several days. This incident was so traumatic that Dexter blocked it from his memory for years. Unfortunately for him, his older brother Brian did not use repression, and became obsessed with helping Dexter recover this memory. Dexter didn’t even know that he had a brother until Brian brought the memories back by re-creating them; when the memories surfaced, they brought back all the original anxiety associated with the event. Although the repression helped Dexter temporarily, it eventually backfired on him and put everyone in his life at risk.
Sublimation was used by the Trinity killer to make his socially unacceptable tendencies praiseworthy, but the king of this mechanism is Dexter himself. Dexter simply loves blood. Blood is beautiful to him, fascinating, poetic. His obsession with blood clearly stems from his childhood trauma, but Dexter knows that his fondness for blood is not socially acceptable. This is clear in every interaction he has within Miami Metro’s police station, but was even more explicitly taught to him in the Code of Harry. So what can Dexter do? His unconscious solved this problem for him by steering him toward a career where he could sit in blood all day: a blood spatter expert for the police. He can know everything about blood and get paid for it: a perfect sublimation.
Like Lundy, who used intellectualization to stay objective in his search for serial killers in the FBI, Dexter often intellectualizes his own life, telling himself that he feels no emotions. Although we know this is not true (Dexter certainly feels anger toward people who threaten his family, and remorse when he makes mistakes), Dex has been taught to intellectualize his tendencies by his father (and note that Dexter’s clinging to the “Code” with almost biblical devotion is also an example of identification). Harry encouraged Dexter to think about the evidence first before killing someone, and to avoid personal grudges or feelings of anger. While Dexter occasionally breaks this bylaw of the code, he realizes that letting emotions guide his choices is a slippery slope to avoid.
In “Truth Be Told” (1-11), Dexter thought about his newly recovered memories from childhood: “I’ve never had much use for the concept of Hell, but if Hell exists, I’m in it. The same images running through my head, over and over. I was there. I saw my mother’s death. A buried memory, forgotten all these years. It climbed inside me that day, and it’s been