The Death Drive in The Good Wife
ROGER HUNT
Murder, rape, torture for pleasure, swindling someone out of their life savings, predatory sexual behavior toward a minor—these all count as examples of evil, with some being more or less evil, obviously. Evil is the malicious, unjust, intentional physical or psychological harm caused to a creature capable of being harmed.
Fact: sometimes people do evil things. Consider the horrible actions of The Good Wife character, Colin Sweeney, which are similar to the real-life murder, deception, and manipulation we see documented on shows on the Investigation, Discovery, and Biography channels. Are these people Satan incarnate? Did they suffer as children? Do they lack certain neural connections in their brains? Are they just plain amoral?
One of the many issues facing the viewer is: what are we to do with this evil? Give in to it? Play by its rules? Fight it? The Good Wife doesn’t admonish evil wholly, but rather understands it as part of the real world as something that can be used, rather than resisted. But used how? In general, evil is a choice and should be resisted under most circumstances. I say most because the idea of using evil to reach noble ends is not new, and we’ve all heard that sometimes the “end justifies the means”—where the end is something good while the so-called means has to do with something evil. Nowadays, many would argue that it’s evil to torture a terrorist, even if by doing so we can get him to reveal where he hid the bomb. Of course, many would also argue such torture isn’t evil, given the circumstances!
Evil and Perspective
The Good Wife gives us two views of good and evil. In one case, we observe the law in practice, in particular how messy, petty, and personal it can be. In the other, we observe good and evil in personalities. In the law, there are pretty clear guidelines. At times it’s messy, but an acceptable decision is often reached through negotiation, argumentation, and a sound jury. I might call this an idealized or absolute form of evil. Throughout the centuries moral scholars have worked out a set of moral guidelines that we then codify into a set of legal norms. However, we can question the inspiration for those guidelines. Did they come from purely rational investigation? Are they a product of divine command? Did some people get together one day and hash it all out?
In order to develop an absolute moral philosophy, we need a positive answer to these questions. I have trouble accepting any of these answers, and instead prefer to think that the concepts of good and evil begin with us as individuals. When someone judges something to be good or evil, that person is primarily considering how such an action affects her life. It’s from those experiences of good and evil that we have since developed the idea of absolute moral laws.
We make generalizations based on our experiences. These generalizations are not always incorrect, at least in the sense that we could find anyone to disagree. A few years ago in Boston, a drug deal went wrong and an infant was murdered in cold blood. I don’t think anyone would consider this good, in fact everyone would probably consider it evil. Not all of our responses to events are so clear-cut, but as we engage in discussion, we tend to come around to a judgment that most of us can live with.
How do we come to these judgments? Where do the intuitions originate? Contemporary brain science—neuroscience—gives us intriguing answers to these questions. For instance, neuroscientists have found the some of our basic moral instincts are closely associated with the activation of the amygdala, a small peanut-sized part of the brain. There is another, different part of the brain in the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, which is activated when we consider morality from an abstract perspective.
With the advent of fMRI, we see that our basic moral intuitions occur first in the amygdala area, and then are processed at the abstract level. Unfortunately, neuroscience has only come this far, and there are many speculations about the structure of this process. While the popular atheist writer Sam Harris has argued that these discoveries will lead us to a new science of morality, we only have a few suggestive correlations up to this point.
Prior to the advent of neuroscience, many theorists attempted to explain and understand the processes of moral intuition. One of these theorists was Sigmund Freud. Freud had a wide-ranging knowledge of many areas. A neurologist by training, he also wrote about society, culture, religion, psychology, anthropology, and art. His understanding of the mind came from his ideas about morality.
Freud understood the mind in several ways over the course of his career. One way is his theory in which the mind consists of the id, ego, and super-ego. The id contains the instincts, which motivate the ego (the self), which is carefully supervised by the super-ego. Freud thought of morality as tied to the super-ego, holding down the devilish instincts from the id.
However, I prefer one of Freud’s later theories, popularly known as drive theory. According to this theory, the human mind is composed of two kinds of motivation, a life drive and a death drive, or Eros and Thanatos. We can think of the life drive as motivating us to be with other people, while the death drive motivates us to be away from other people; the extreme of the former being a return to the mother’s womb, and the extreme of the latter being death.
Freud described these drives as interacting, or fusing at various levels to create more complicated structures. For example, the action of having sex contains instincts to unite with another, but also to escape. The unite part is simple to grasp. The escape aspect comes from the orgasm, sometimes known as “the little death.” The experience is one of extreme euphoria, where the other person almost doesn’t exist, at least for a few seconds.
In a healthy person, Freud speculated that the death drive comes into the service of the life drive. Or rather, that the sometimes aggressive and hostile instincts associated with death are used to attain the goals of the life drive. Think of someone who tries desperately hard to impress a date. He is being aggressive, but in a good way.
Problems occur, however, when the relationship is the other way around and the energy of the life drive serves the death drive. We may call this type of mind diseased or pathological, because of the various kinds of destruction those with mental illness or extreme anger may inflict. Think of the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado or the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. These young men were likely motivated to destroy, they did so, and we hope to subject them to the full extent of the law, moral or legal. There are more subtle examples of this pathology; instances where the transgression may not become a legal or medical issue, but still seem evil.
It’s this category of evil that’s explored so brilliantly in The Good Wife. The evil perpetrated isn’t absolute in the sense of breaking any moral code, but rather it is evil from the perspective of the other characters. The show gives us three prime examples of pathological or evil characters (life drive in the service of death drive): Louis Canning (Michael J. Fox); Peter Florrick (Chris Noth); and, my favorite, Colin Sweeney (Dylan Baker).
We’ll look at these three characters as psychiatric cases. A case has three parts: description, dynamics, and drives.
• First, describing the person: What feelings does he report? What is our experience of him? What kind of person does he seem like?
• Second, the dynamics: What kind of relationship is he in? How does he interact with other people? What kinds of things does he buy? Where does he spend his free time?
• Finally, making inferences about the fusion of his drives: Is the life drive or the death drive dominant? Are his impulses mature or childlike? Does he repeat any particular scenarios? What motivates her?
The conclusion of each case will have two parts:
1. Do the drives fuse in a way that favors the life drive, the death drive, or is neutral between them? (It’s doubtful whether anyone achieves the third—maybe the Dalai Lama, but more likely only Buddha or Jesus achieved this level of Enlightenment.)
2. Do the drives discharge (stimulate action, feelings, or thoughts) at low, medium, or high levels? This refers to the kind of pleasure we get from the drive achieving its aim. Pleasure in marriage or having children would be high; making friends would be medium; and manipulating others would be low; sadistic pleasure would be the lowest (at least according to Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle).
Colin Sweeney
Description: Colin Sweeney is introduced to us as the CEO of an investment fund, and he has been accused of his wife’s murder. He immediately evokes that creepy tingle one gets from a true weirdo. Alicia visits his apartment and he shows her a grotesque painting, making her, and I bet most of the audience very uncomfortable. He always makes these creepy stares and smiles which make it seem like he’s hiding something or putting one over on the lawyers and the judge. We continuously see a brooding, self-serving maniac, out to save himself or to pull the wool over someone else’s eyes. I once heard someone say that ten percent of CEO’s are pathological; Sweeney certainly seems to fit this mold at face value.
Dynamics: While Colin Sweeney certainly seems to have an inherent knack for dealing with, motivating, and manipulating other people, he also seems to lack any kind of deep connection to them. Even his wife’s death hardly fazed him. At one point, we see Sweeney exhibit some feelings for Alicia, but we later realize that he was capitalizing on the predispositions of her own character (which are the focus of the show). He’s a man who seems to be absolutely devoid of any deep relationships, and he likes it that way.
Drives: Would we say that Sweeney is more likely to be motivated to be-with or be-without others? Intuitively, the answer is be-without. It also seems that his actions, feelings, and lack of relationships support this. Any chance for him to get close to someone is immediately curtailed by his ulterior, often insidious, motives. Sweeney represents the most basic form of being-without, or the death drive. He seems to get a basic kind of pleasure from seeing people in pain, much like the rest of us might get from getting married or eating really, really, really good chocolate cake (note to my wife: I said really, really, really good). All of his life drive energy is in the service of fulfilling this sadistic pleasure, or helping him to escape punishments that might defer such pleasure.
Sweeney is not mentally ill in any sense of the term. He’s not behaviorally unpredictable, socially deterred, nor neurologically disabled. It is as though there is no internal life for Sweeney, except when he needs to escape punishment, in which case he can feign being a person. Sweeney’s drives fuse in a way that’s primarily directed towards the death drive and discharge at the lowest level, except when he is threatening, in which case they discharge at a low level.
Peter Florrick
Description: The show begins with Peter apologizing for his infidelity. However, it’s not clear then, nor is it ever clear later, whether Peter’s feelings of remorse come from genuine guilt or political damage control. It is always ambiguous: sometimes it seems like he genuinely has feelings, other times not. It seems likely that Peter may not be fully aware either. He always seems conflicted, torn between saving his marriage or his career. His feelings are never clear. On the other side, he demonstrates a particular ability to discover plots. He has a piercing intellect, oftentimes directed towards revenge. I do not want him as an enemy.
Dynamics: Peter seems to love Alicia and his children very much. He shows pride in watching his children, especially his son, grow up. While his actions deserve hatred from those around him, others still see good in him, or at least opportunity. Even Alicia is weakened by his charms (and circumstance), and decides to be with him on the campaign trail. We can’t overlook his mother, who treats him like some kind of glass doll that needs to be protected, and her efforts trickle down to the children (not in an effort to help them, but ultimately to help Peter). It’s like Peter has a kind of protective barrier around him composed of many different people (Eli, Jackie, Alicia, Cary, the DNC) who are not trying to protect him, but simply following their own hearts. At the same time, Peter always has some enemy, which makes this barrier necessary. What often appears as a ‘lucky escape’ is usually a confluence of random factors geared towards saving him from danger.
Drives: Peter is ambivalent, well protected, and has enemies: textbook paranoia. Does this mean that Peter is motivated to be-with or be-without? The safest places for a paranoid person is away from everyone. The second safest place is locked in a castle with servants protecting him. I think we find Peter in the latter, politics; the former would be a mental institution. While Peter’s drives fuse in a way that favors the death drive and discharging at the mid-level: he is able to develop the kinds of relationships required to protect him from the evil (Childs, Scott-Carr, Kresteva in his view) surrounding him, but unable to truly honor or develop a mutual fulfillment in them. His relationships are designed to protect him.
Louis Canning
Description: The first thing we notice about Canning (and the first thing he brings to our attention) is his neurological disorder, tardive dyskinesia, which makes it difficult to speak at times while also causing involuntary movements. He’s extremely charming and has a beautiful family. He is ambitious and loves a challenge, often taking on cases of those whom we might intuitively suspect to be guilty. He has a brilliant track record in the courtroom (except against Alicia). His legal strategies are intricate, well disguised, and ruthless.
Dynamics: We do not know much about Canning’s personal life except for when Alicia visits his home and meets his beautiful wife and children. He has a kind of kindred spirit in the insurance lawyer woman, who always uses her baby to disrupt negotiations, in an effort to take down Lockhart Gardner. He seems to have a relationship of mutual respect with Alicia, but also seems to negotiate in good faith only to go back on his word. As with Peter, it’s not clear whether Louis wants relationships to further his own ends, or if he wants to develop something more lasting. It is clear, however, that whenever he does begin to establish trust with someone, he makes that person regret it.
Drives: There is a psychoanalytic theory about narcissism, which goes against popular wisdom. We often think of the narcissist as someone in love with himself. Someone who does whatever it takes to reach their own goals despite whomever they have to upset. Conversely, psychoanalytic theory talks about narcissism as self-hate. The true narcissist, not the sociopath, works so hard to protect others that he ultimately destroys himself, for if the other were ever to become deeply involved with him, that person would ultimately be disappointed (in the narcissist at least, as the narcissist hates himself).
Psychosomatics
There is another related branch of medicine: psychosomatics. This branch, which has recently gained status in German medical schools, presents the view that one’s mind, or psychic structure, has the capacity to create physical symptoms. We have all felt back pain or headaches, when we worry about finishing an assignment or making the sales quota, right? At a more extreme level, psychosomatics holds that cancer and other very serious medical and neurological disorders can be caused by various kinds of mental stress. We simply don’t know enough about the mind-brain-body relationship to make any definitive claims about what is purely physical and what is purely mental, in fact most philosophers don’t even recognize a difference between mental and physical.
Canning’s neurological disorder may be the result of the kind of self-attack we see in schizophrenia, in other words, turning aggression against the self. Were he to let this self-attack completely take over, he might become schizophrenic. Instead, he is able to function successfully, relegating his self-attacks to the brain’s motor cortex (I presume). He has even found a way to use that disruption in motor control to further the more socially adaptive ends of winning settlements. His drives fuse favoring the death-drive, but discharge at a very high level.
Evil Is Everywhere
Evil is everywhere and comes in many forms. The Good Wife explores evil from a more and realistic pragmatic point of view, and this is one reason why the show is so fascinating. Evil can be well disguised on the show, no doubt, and in many cases we viewers (and often the characters in the series) are persuaded to empathize with the evildoers or those who attempt to commit immoral acts. It’s our death drive, however, that accounts for much of the evil we perpetrate in this world.