CHAPTER ONE
Who’s Who: Interview with Four Doctors and a River on the Core of Personality
TRAVIS LANGLEY AND AARON SAGERS
“Doctor who? What’s he talking about?”
—First Doctor1
“Things do not change; we change.”
—author Henry David Thoreau2
Stability versus change, one of the classic debates in the psychology of human development, concerns the permanence of “who” we are.3 Do basic personality traits formed early in life persist through an entire lifetime, or are they all flexible? The person you are at age thirty may be very different from who you were at thirteen, and yet you still seem likely to have more in common with who you were back then than with some other individual then or now. The Doctor changes more extremely and more abruptly than most of us might, but as the Eleventh Doctor points out to Clara Oswald right before he becomes the Twelfth, we all change.4 His changes reflect ours. The debate is not over whether change occurs at all; instead it is more about whether a person has core traits that will remain deeply ingrained despite all other fluctuations over time.
What Is the Who of You?
Gordon Allport, known as the founder of personality psychology,5 described individuals in terms of personality traits, specific predispositions to react in consistent ways.6 He observed that some traits tend to go together (trait clusters, a.k.a. personality factors, covered in this book’s Factor Files).7 He concluded that traits can be what he called cardinal, central, or secondary, depending on how pervasive (infiltrating most aspects of life) and persistent they might be.8
Cardinal Traits
A cardinal trait is pervasive and powerful. Most people do not have this kind of ruling passion that guides everything. Even a particularly friendly person, for whom friendliness is a defining characteristic, probably does not worry daily about finding the friendliest way to brush teeth or eat ice cream. Allport offered sadism as an example of a cardinal trait. Nearly everything the Dominators9 and Angel Bob10 do seems aimed at hurting others, so in their cases, the cruelty seems cardinal. Fiction often depicts villains as having cardinal traits such as sadism or lust for power, but even they tend to pale in comparison to the single-minded Daleks, driven as they usually are by sheer, murderous hate.11 When a single trait is all-consuming, the individual with that trait may have a personality disorder because it may interfere with functioning in key areas of life.12
Even if most people do not have one trait that affects almost all behavior, each person has a handful of characteristics that each affect a lot of behavior—that person’s central traits.
In the 2014 documentary The Ultimate Time Lord, psychologist Mike Aitken told actor Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor) that even though the Doctor has a dozen “well-established personalities,” he also shows characteristics that carry over from one regeneration to another: steadiness under pressure, risk-taking, extraversion (covered in Factor File One: “The Two Factors—Extraversion and Neuroticism”), agreeableness (covered in Factor File Three: “The Five Factors—Adventures in the OCEAN”), and possession of an ego that “emerges when a leader is really required” even when he is a more reserved version of himself. According to that assessment, these consistent qualities would be the most central traits.
Secondary Traits
Less stable than central traits are the many characteristics that each affect only a little bit of each person’s life—the secondary traits. Even if someone’s love of chocolate is very stable, it would be unusual for that preference to affect much of what that person does. The Doctor’s love of Jelly Babies candy—first shown by the Second Doctor13 and most associated with the Fourth14—does not show up in every Doctor and does not shape his major decisions. It is a quirk, not characterization. These secondary traits are not at the crux of the stability versus change debate. That has more to do with cardinal and central traits, the ones that answer the first question of who we each truly are.
Who on Who
Journalist Aaron Sagers has interviewed many Doctor Who writers and performers.15 Among his achievements, he broke the news that Tom Baker would appear in the Doctor Who fiftieth anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor,” thanks to a revelation from the actor who played the Fourth Doctor himself.16 At various fan conventions, Sagers has moderated question-and-answer sessions for different Doctor Who stars. To help us get to the hearts of “who,” he asked five of them about Time Lord identity issues, starting with how they get inside the head of someone so unlike any real human beings.
David Tennant (Tenth Doctor): I think the process is the same, whatever it is. Every character is a different set of circumstances. Some of them may be based on historical fact or some of them may just come from a script or some might come from your imagination or other people’s imagination. With anything, you start with a script and see what else is out there, and hopefully it coalesces into something that makes a recognizable human being/alien time traveler.
Matt Smith (Eleventh Doctor): Weirdly, with the Doctor, you have got a real person to go on because of fifty years of people doing it and fifty years of stories and fifty years of events. There’s a lot of material there.
Sagers: What are the core personality traits of the Doctor? What are the key traits that are shared across regenerations?
Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor): I always thought I wanted to bring a certain naïve recklessness back to the Doctor, a certain vulnerability. I grew up watching Doctor Who. My Doctor was Patrick Troughton, and I think he had that. I think it disappeared slightly with Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. It was something I liked in Patrick Troughton’s character, and I wanted to bring that back.
Sylvester McCoy (Seventh Doctor): Funny enough, Patrick Troughton was the first Doctor I saw, but then I lost touch with it because I became an actor. There were no VCRs or ways to record it and keep up with it, and it was never repeated. My distant memory when I arrived in the TARDIS was of Patrick Troughton. Then, I suppose Peter and I are exactly the same!
Matt Smith (Eleventh Doctor): I think we’re all slightly mental, really. That is what’s nice about it when you look across the board. He’s always kind of mad. That was, I think for me anyway, one of the great virtues of playing him. With most other characters—if you’re thinking of him as an alphabet—if you’re playing a character and something happens to him, you have to go through A, B, C, D, and then you have to go through F and eventually you get to Z. You go through this whole story. Whereas with the Doctor, can leap from A without explaining any other letter. The great thing about playing him is he’s always generally the most intelligent person in the room. He’s always the cleverest. He knows the most, which allows him to be the silliest.
Alex Kingston (River Song/Melody Pond): I wouldn’t call the Doctor a madman.
Tennant: What I always used to love about the Doctor when I played him were the moments where he’d stop and go, “This is brilliant.” There was a sort of joy he felt in facing the little unexplored corners of existence—like the fact that he could stop and celebrate the extraordinariness of a werewolf before it bit his head off. Those moments where he would catch himself and be overcome by the marvelous stuff—there was something in that. I guess what appealed to the Doctor in his companions was a sort of passion similar to that.
Smith: And courage, as well. [The companions] were all quite courageous and defiant. And he needs the antithesis, the balance. He needs someone to tell him, “No, stay away from the werewolf.”
Kingston: And also, he loves humankind. He doesn’t know exactly why he has this affinity with human beings, but he does. He wants to save them, and that’s very powerful.
Smith: A central character that is essentially the kind of superhero of the piece, that fixes the world with a toaster and a ball of string. That’s how he saves the day: through being mad. That’s sort of brilliant.
Kingston: He does it with his smarts, not his guns.
Smith: He is a pacifist, really.
Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor)
First appearance: Classic serial 17–7, Logopolis, pt. 4 (March 21, 1981).
Sylvester McCoy (Seventh Doctor)
First appearance: Classic serial 24–1, Time and the Rani, pt. 1 (September 7, 1987).
David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
First appearance: Modern episode 1–13, “The Parting of the Ways” (June 18, 2005).
Matt Smith (Eleventh Doctor)
First appearance: New Year’s special, “The End of Time” pt. 2 (January 1, 2010).
Alex Kingston (River Song/Melody Pond)
First appearance: Modern episode 4–8, “Silence in the Library” (May 31, 2008).
Final appearances might be indeterminable. Time Lords never really go away.
The Doctor Defined?
Who does the better job of pegging a character’s essence—actors who played the part or professionals looking on as both psychologists and fans? The more experts actor Peter Davison spoke with during his attempt to pinpoint who Who really is, the more complicated the answer became.17 All of these answers are about central personality traits, but they’re all complicated by the issue of stability versus change. The Doctor changes more dramatically than we do, but we change, too. As several of this book’s chapters explain, drastic personality change can occur due to changes to our brains18 with no regeneration required. Even without traumatic brain injuries, though, we grow and learn throughout our lives. In this book, we’ll explore these issues of who we are from a variety of perspectives. We’ll even contradict each other at times because some of our most human qualities are the most abstract and the most difficult to pin down—none of which means we should not try. The abilities to imagine abstraction and complexity and also to ask who we really are may be the most human qualities of all.
As a couple of our Doctors shared, imagination and sheer humanness lie at the hearts of why Doctor Who endures.
Davison: It’s the endless possibilities, I suppose. I think it appeals to the creative mind, which is why so many people who grew up watching it grew up to work on the show. Showrunners Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat—huge Doctor Who fans. David Tennant—huge Doctor Who nerd. It is almost self-perpetuating now. It fires the imagination.
McCoy: They say there are only five stories under the sun, and that mankind’s genius is to take these five stories and rewrite them. The story of someone coming from outside Earth, down to Earth, taking on human form, and trying to help in the best way possible, being heroic but at the same time being small and human—that is a very, very attractive story. It has been told over centuries and centuries, going way back.
“But identity … is the foundation of all rights and obligations, and of all accountableness….”
—philosopher Thomas Reid19
References
Allport, G. W. (1937). Personality: A psychological interpretation. New York, NY: Holt.
Allport, G. W., & Odbert, H. S. (1936). Trait-names: A psycho-lexical study. Psychological Monographs, 47(1), i–171.
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-5). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
Carducci, B. J. (2009). The psychology of personality: Viewpoints, research, and applications (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Wiley.
Grafman, J., Schwab, K., Warden, D., Pridgen, A., Brown, H. R., & Salazar, A. M. (1996). Frontal lobe injuries, violence and aggression: A report of the Vietnam head injury study. Neurology, 46(5), 1231–1238.
Reid, T. (1785). Essays on the intellectual powers of man. London, UK: John Bell and G. G. J. & J. Robinson.
Sagers, A. (2012, October 4). ‘He doesn’t like endings,’ but ultimately Whovians don’t mind. CNN: http://geekout.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/04/he-doesnt-like-endings-but-ultimately-whovians-dont-mind/.
Sagers, A. (2013, November 19). Exclusive: Tom Baker to appear in ‘Doctor Who’ 50th anniversary special. Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-sagers/exclusive-tom-baker-to-ap_b_4295773.html.
Sagers, A. (2014, August 14). Doctor Who in NYC: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman, Steven Moffat talking Time Lord. Blastr: http://www.blastr.com/2014-8-14/doctor-who-nyc-peter-capaldi-jenna-coleman-steven-moffat-talking-time-lord.
Sagers, A. (2015a, October 9). Exclusive: Doctor Who writer Toby Whithouse on sonic sunglasses and the bootstrap paradox. Blastr: http://www.blastr.com/2015-10-9/exclusive-doctor-who-writer-toby-whithouse-sonic-sunglasses-and-bootstrap-paradox.
Sagers, A. (2015b, November 12). Doctor Who’s Mark Gatis teases ‘Sleep No More,’ his most terrifying episode yet. Blastr: http://www.blastr.com/2015-11-12/doctor-whos-mark-gatiss-teases-sleep-no-more-his-most-terrifying-episode-yet.
Thoreau, H. D. (1854). Walden; or, life in the woods. Boston, MA: Ticknor & Fields.
Watson, D. (2004). Stability versus change, dependability versus error: Issues in the assessment of personality over time. Journal of Research in Personality, 38(4), 319–350.
Whitbourne, S. K. (2001). Stability and change in adult personality: Contributions of process-oriented perspectives. Psychology Inquiry, 12(2), 101–103.
Young, L., Camprodon, J. A., Hauser, M., Pascual-Leone, A., & Saxe, R. (2010). Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(15), 6753–6758.
Notes
1. Classic serial 1–1. An Unearthly Child, pt. 1, “An Unearthly Child” (November 23, 1963).
2. Thoreau (1854), p. 244.
3. Watson (2004); Whitbourne (2001).
4. Christmas special, “The Time of the Doctor” (December 25, 2013).
5. e.g., Carducci (2009).
6. Allport (1937).
7. Allport & Odbert (1936).
8. Allport (1937).
9. Classic serial 6–1, The Dominators (August 10–September 7, 1968).
10. Modern episodes 5–4, “The Time of Angels” (April 24, 2010); 5–5, “Flesh and Stone” (May 1, 2010).
11. e.g., classic serial 12–4, Genesis of the Daleks (March 8–April 12, 1975).
12. American Psychiatric Association (2013).
13. Beginning in classic serial 6–1, The Dominators (August 10–September 7, 1968).
14. Beginning in classic serial 12–1, Robot (December 28, 1974–January 18, 1975).
15. e.g., Sagers (2012a, 2012b, 2014, 2015a, 2015b).
16. Sagers (2013).
17. The Ultimate Time Lord (2014 documentary).
18. e.g., Grafman et al. (1996); Young et al. (2010).
19. Reid (1785), p. 113.