The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [94]
Rita was not easy to connect with. As another viewer said to me, “Rita was getting annoying. I am glad they killed her off.” But the question remains, was Rita annoying because she became stronger? Or was she annoying because of her entrenched need to deny aggression, and because of that, never seemed real to viewers? In the end, what matters most may be how her death contributed to Dexter’s story. In life and on television, we all want to get away from destructive feelings. Dexter the man, and Dexter, the series, allows us—like Rita—that freedom.
Tamara McClintock Greenberg, PsyD, MS, is an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the author of Psychodynamic Perspectives on Aging and Illness and The Psychological Impact of Acute and Chronic Illness, and she currently writes for Psychology Today online and The Huffington Post. She teaches and speaks nationally on a wide variety of topics, including health psychology, the culture of Western medicine, psychotherapy, psychoanalytic psychology, and medical consultation. She is in private practice in San Francisco.
Dexter fans can easily identify the key characteristic that separates our hero from all those other serial murderers, who are just vile: Dexter aims to kill only those who deserve to die. Paul Wilson gives the issue a fresh and stunning twist. He puts Dexter and other serial killers together in one category, and considers them far less frightening than a category of normal people: those who fit no official clinical diagnosis yet calmly and systematically contribute to the death of thousands. There’s more. Wilson argues that under similar circumstances, many of us would do the same thing. See what you think.
WHY PSYCHOPATHS LIKE DEXTER AREN’T REALLY ALL THAT BAD
PAUL WILSON
Psychopathic serial killers are ruthless executioners who stalk their prey and dispatch them, often by the most sadistic means. Their victims, by definition, number in the tens or, in extreme cases, even the hundreds. Dexter is a stellar example of the psychopathic serial killer. Like others of his ilk, he can be charming, insightful, and even soft and gentle at times. Similar to many killers with predatory inclinations, Dexter hides behind the respectable coat of family and work. But in common with his psychopathic brethren, he delights in ritualistically dissecting his victims and then keeping a trophy of his handiwork—in Dexter’s case a small glass slide of their blood.
Despite their commonalities, Dexter does not quite fit entirely into the serial killer species. He is the Robin Hood of serial killers and is unlike some of the other villains in the show, motivated as they are by sexual thrills or desires to brutally dominate other human beings. The fictional psychopaths in the Dexter series have no aspirations to wipe the evil-doers off the planet. Dexter alone is cannibalistic in his pursuits he kills his own kind rather than seeking the marginalized or defenseless. These killers, who eventually ended up as Dexter’s own victims, did not give a damn about the ideology of those they killed—only about their victims’ physical attributes and how those characteristics fulfilled their murderers’ dark and horrible fantasies.
What is different about Dexter is that he knows exactly who he is and what he has to do in life, because Harry equipped him with the mental tools necessary to control his urges. Most of the other serial killers, though their personalities are not as well-developed as Dexter’s, certainly don’t have his code of conduct. Take his long-lost brother Brian, for example, a guy without Dexter’s sophistication or subtlety or, for that matter, sense of morality. Arthur Miller, too, had no code of honor, no mission to rid the world of undeserving killers. He murdered and murdered again and again because he enjoyed the dark mysterious pleasure of killing.
Despite the differences between Dexter and the other predatory violent psychopaths in the series, one key thing they