CHAPTER EIGHT
Dream Lords: Would the Doctor Run with Freud, Jung, Myers and Briggs?
TRAVIS LANGLEY
“Funny thing, the unconscious. Takes all sorts of shapes.”
—Tenth Doctor1
“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
—psychiatrist Carl Jung2
Before trait theorists began to define personality psychology in terms of specific characteristics and personality factors, early personality theory mainly came out of depth psychology (as the approaches that look deep into the unconscious to explain why we live as we do are collectively known). Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) approach remains the best known of these areas, with Carl Gustav Jung’s closely related analytical psychology achieving fame of its own. Their talk-based methods aimed reveal what’s in the unconscious mind, include hypnosis, free association, and interpretation of dreams. Freud considered dream analysis a royal road to understanding the unconscious.3 Other professionals would later develop psychological tests based on depth psychologists’ ideas, from projective tests (like Rorschach’s inkblot test4), whose developers assume people will project unconscious desires, needs, and values into ambiguous stimuli5 to personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,6 which sorts people into types based on how Jung viewed human nature.7
Controversy surrounds depth psychology. Its harshest critics call it all unscientific, unsupported, and unworthy of serious consideration.8 So wouldn’t a man of science like the Doctor, with his many centuries of experience and wisdom, reject it all outright? Maybe. Maybe not.
Freud
Many who refute Freud’s theories still recognize his creativity and genius, although some go as far as personality psychologist Hans Eysenck did in asserting that Freud was “a genius, not of science but of propaganda, not of rigorous proof but of persuasion, not of the design of experiments but of literary art.”9 While the Doctor values personal qualities like genius and creativity, he also eschews dogmatic assertion of poor science. Why, then, does the Doctor say that when he and Freud met, they “got on very well”?10
Unconscious
The foundation of Sigmund Freud’s theory and all depth psychology is the idea that the unconscious mind exerts powerful influence upon us.11 Although the term subconscious litters popular culture, Freud usually spoke of it as the unconscious, the vast portion of the mind outside consciousness. (Chapter Nineteen, “The Time Lord’s Brain: Regeneration, Determinism, and Free Will,” offers a few of the neurological explanations for mental activity often attributed to the unconscious mind.) Strax, the Sontaran nurse-warrior-butler, reports that his medical device lets him view Clara Oswald’s subconscious mind, revealing “deflected narcissism, traces of passive aggressive, and lots of muscular young men doing sport,”12 but keep in mind that Strax may be no better at describing mental phenomena than he is at identifying human organs or gender. Still, the Doctor shows himself to have a many-layered mind that fits key aspects of Freud’s theory of the unconscious.
One area where Freud’s views receive more favorable reception in psychology is that of the defense mechanisms, coping behaviors we use to protect ourselves from stress. These behaviors vary and may be healthy (e.g., altruism), unhealthy (e.g., withdrawing from others), immature (e.g., regression, reverting to behavior the person has outgrown), or pathological (e.g., denial, refusing to recognize an unnerving truth).13 Daughter Anna Freud catalogued the defense mechanisms he had described, named most of them, and identified even more.14 Sigmund Freud considered the most important defense mechanism to be repression,15 and yet it remains the most controversial with the least solid evidence to support it, according to many professionals.16
Tenth Doctor (to War Doctor): “All those years, burying you in my memory.”
Eleventh Doctor: “Pretending you didn’t exist. Keeping you a secret, even from myself.”17
The Doctor seems to have repressed memories, most notably when he makes himself forget about his incarnation as the War Doctor so thoroughly that the so-called Eleventh Doctor on several occasions thinks he can still regenerate.18 Only after they save Gallifrey instead of destroying it does the Eleventh Doctor come to terms with the War Doctor and know he has run out of regenerations.19 Whether this is truly repression (in which the conscious mind simply cannot summon a thought that’s locked away in the unconscious) or thought suppression (consciously blocking a thought that would be unpleasant or distracting20), either would fit into Freud’s view that we play tricks on ourselves in order to reduce potential anxiety.
Extended lifespan will also alter the brain’s potential memory capacity, making memories harder to retrieve. The longer a person lives, the more files there are in the memory cabinet. The Second Doctor can remember his family but only with effort: “I can when I want to, and that’s the point, really. I have to really want to, to bring them back in front of my eyes. The rest of the time they sleep in my mind, and I forget.”21 Whereas physiological psychologists might attribute this to the brain’s sheer memory capacity, Freud would more likely credit repression or suppression for the Doctor’s removal of these memories from easy conscious access.
Methods
Among his earliest methods for delving into the unconscious, Freud used hypnosis. Eventually he came to distrust it, though, suspecting that suggestible, hypnotized patients were sometimes reporting dreams and fantasies as if they had really happened.22 The Doctor uses hypnosis at times (e.g., to make his friend Dodo sleep and forget,23 to help Sarah Jane recover information,24 or to free various people from mind control25). He also shows that hypnosis can fail26 and knows it has limits: “You can hypnotize someone to walk like a chicken or sing like Elvis; you can’t hypnotize them to death. Survival instinct’s too strong.”27
Early depth psychologists often used dream analysis to seek clues as to what lurks in the unconscious. They disagreed on what specific dreams could mean and sometimes about how to study them, and yet they agreed that dreams hold great value and reveal much about the unconscious.28 The Doctor sees significance in dreams as well: “Dreams are important, Nyssa. Never underestimate them.”29
Science
“If Freud had been more of a scientist, he would have pressed no claims to be one. Dogmatism is anti-scientific; and there are reasons to distrust a ‘truth’ that forms a sect,”30 psychologist Henry Murray wrote. Despite Freud’s influence on him, Murray saw a need for empirical study. He also argued that psychology needed to develop a better understanding of human nature by studying the experiences of normal, everyday people instead of the clinical patients Freud and other therapists often emphasized. The Doctor values science and helps others appreciate it, even the savage Leela, who says she used to believe in magic, “but the Doctor has taught me about science. It is better to believe in science.”31
The Doctor, though, looks at all of our science from a point of view millennia more advanced than our own. To some contemporary psychologists, evidence suggests that Freudian theory is wrong far more often than it is right; however, history shows that much of science has been wrong more often than it’s been right. The hope is to accumulate ideas that work, weed others out, review, revise, review, revise again, and keep going even though new paradigms may turn it all on its head. To one scientist who cites Einstein, Newton, and other great minds, the Doctor says simply, “You’ve got a lot to unlearn.”32 He does not treat the scientist like a fool for being wrong, only for clinging to that which is wrong and failing to keep pursuing scientific truth. “A scientist’s job is to ask questions,” the Fourth Doctor says,33 and Freudians ask questions aplenty.
Dogma
Existential psychologist Rollo May criticized the psychodynamic ideas spread by both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as being too rigid and unable to adapt to different situations.34 Accusations that Freud and Jung began to force facts to fit their theories instead of adapting theories to fit the facts raise questions as to whether either one’s views meet the scientific standard of falsifiability, meaning testability.35 The Fourth Doctor observed, “You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views—which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”36 Even Jung criticized Freud for being too inflexible, calling him dogmatic for rigidly defending his views on how sexuality and the unconscious shape actions and personalities.37 And yet, the Eighth Doctor later says to someone who does not believe he is a time traveler, “At least Sigmund Freud would have taken me seriously.”38
Even if Freud’s views eventually became dogmatic, psychoanalytic theory did not spring into being as doctrine. Perhaps, then, the Sigmund Freud with whom the Doctor “got on very well” is a younger Freud, exploring the unconscious and piecing together new ideas before he grew set in his ways.
Jung
Many criticisms of Freud apply to others in depth psychology as well, including Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, so we won’t rehash those here. Jung, who by degrees bitterly broke away from Freud intellectually, made his own lasting contributions to psychiatry and psychology. Notable among them were the concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and extraversion/introversion.
The Shadow
Chapter Six, “Weeping Angels, Archetypes, and the Male Gaze” describes archetypes, themes, and patterns that Jung believed we are unconsciously prepared for by heredity, not experience. Among them is one he called the Shadow, a representation of one’s own hidden qualities, the dark and unrevealed side of each person’s nature.39 To grow as an individual (a process he called individuation), Jung believed the person should learn to understand the Persona (the outward mask, public face) and other archetypes to descend into the depths of the unconscious and confront the Shadow. Heroic fiction abounds with heroes facing their own dark sides or fighting enemies who are somehow mirror images of themselves. The Doctor confronts his own Shadow a bit literally when he faces the Valeyard, a mysterious Time Lord who has somehow been created as a manifestation of every dark thought or impulse the Doctor has ever had.40 The Doctor later faces his Shadow again in the form of the Dream Lord, the part of the Doctor that taunts, ridicules, and hates himself the most.41
The Collective Unconscious
Beyond the conscious and unconscious mind that Freud popularized, Jung added an additional level to his model of mind: the collective unconscious, portions of the unconscious that all people inherit and share as members of the same species. Archetypes and instincts occupy the unconscious mind, as he saw it.42 The Sixth Doctor has to face his Shadow in the Time Lord’s sci-fi form of collective unconscious called the Matrix of Time, a computerized reservoir storing the knowledge and personalities of past Time Lords and even living Time Lords’ previous incarnations. Just as Jung felt that the collective unconscious, as a deep pool of the past, could predict humanity’s future path, so too can the Time Lords’ Matrix predict future events.
Extraversion/Introversion
Carl Jung introduced the concepts of extraversion and introversion. Chapter Seven, “New Face, New Man: A Personality Perspective,” describes these as Jung originally conceived them in terms of which situations a person draws energy from. Are you energized by being with others (extraverted) or do they make you feel drained (introverted)?43 Factor File One, “The Two Factors—Extraversion and Neuroticism,” and Chapter Nine, “Who Makes a Good Companion?” look at these terms as psychologists more commonly mean them today: personality factors, groups of traits that tend to go together.44 The Doctor feels alone in many ways, perhaps because he is unlike everyone else, including his fellow Time Lords, and yet he repeatedly welcomes new companions. In most incarnations, he seeks the company of others while still showing that, as Jung expected of each person, he has both extraverted and introverted qualities within himself.
Myers and Briggs
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is both popular and controversial. Its creators’ assertions that ESFPs are like this or INTJs are like that may be assertions with poor, if any, support from methodical empirical research. Dichotomizing people as Es or Is (extraverts or introverts) oversimplifies analysis and makes it harder to recognize the complexities of human behavior. Jung said that no one is purely extraverted or introverted. Each person shows a mix of both extraverted and introverted traits, possibly mingled to the point that ambivert (both extravert and introvert) can a more accurate description.45 But people who identify themselves by strings of Myers-Briggs letters leave ambiversion out. Seeing all of its problems, would the Doctor, like so many of our world’s professionals, reject Myers-Briggs outright? Perhaps, but he might very well scoff at all earthly personality tests and the confidence people place in them. An ancient extraterrestrial might consider one personality test’s creators as no better or worse than he would consider anybody else who created a test of something as difficult to define as personality, and might praise any who at least try. Should a crayon-wielding child be discouraged for drawing a person less realistically than a peer does? The one with more creative vision might reveal things the more realistic one might miss. There may be more art than science to how we view people in the first place.
Modern Astrology
WIND GOODFRIEND
In spite of its corporate popularity, many psychologists find the Myers-Briggs to be the equivalent of modern astrology. The official survey’s website46 provides descriptions of each personality type—for example, ENTJs pursue improvement and achievement while ESTPs are realistic but adaptable. The difficulty is that this type of vague description can apply to anyone. If your horoscope says, “Your day will be full of opportunity, but watch out for challenges,” doesn’t this apply to everyone?
Critics have raised many concerns, including these:47
• The test forces people into binary categories, ignoring subtle differences that should be measured on a continuum instead.
• People’s answers to the questions may change from day to day; we all feel sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative, sometimes optimistic, sometimes pessimistic.
• Almost no research studies have successfully linked one’s theoretical “type” to any real outcomes or behaviors.
Why, then, is the test so popular? One reason may simply be that it’s easy. Unfortunately, another answer may be the Barnum effect: When people are given vague descriptions of themselves that could apply to anyone, the descriptions are rated as highly accurate by the individuals themselves.48 The effect’s name comes from a remark about the customers for P. T. Barnum’s famous sideshows of “aliens” or “mermaids,” when a competitor supposedly said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Many psychologists would agree, and may even say that companies that rely solely on the Myers-Briggs are helping to prove this statement true.
Perhaps the Doctor, when told about the usage of Myers-Briggs, would be skeptical. He might even describe it as “a big ball of wibbly wobbly, psychy-wikey … stuff.”49
Up from the Depths
Science is flawed—that is a fact. Whether the views of Freud and Jung are more flawed than the views of others remains the subject of ongoing debate, as does the value of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which grew out of Jungian ideas. We do not always know why we do the things we do—that is a fact. To many, psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious mind feel like the right way to explain these things. Clearly, the Doctor’s personal experiences reveal to him that the unconscious mind has power, such as when he wonders why he unconsciously chose to regenerate with a specific, frowny face50 and later decides it was to send himself a message.51
A person thousands of years more advanced than we are might look at our science the way we look at witch doctors casting spells and ancient physicians draining sick people of blood to try to make them better. The Doctor looks at us all the same way: “We were just wondering if there were any other scientists…. You know, witch-wiggler, wangateur. Fortune teller?”52 Through trial and error, the ancients learned. Superstition could impede progress, but it could also play an important role in bringing progress closer. We’re all primitive from an immortal’s point of view.
For all the nonsense that fills our dreams, some of the greatest stories and even some amazing scientific achievements come out of them from time to time. That doesn’t mean we need to confuse sense with nonsense. It means we need to evaluate and reevaluate the things we call sense and learn sometimes from the nonsense. As the First Doctor put it, “Yes, superstition is a strange thing, my dear, but sometimes it tells the truth.”53
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Notes
1. Modern episode 4–3, “Planet of the Ood” (April 29, 2008).
2. In Adler & Jaffé (1973), p. 33.
3. Freud (1900/1965), p. 608.
4. Rorschach (1921).
5. A. Freud (1936).
6. Myers & Myers (1980).
7. Jung (1921/1976).
8. e.g., Kramer (2006); McGowan (1994); North (2014); Popper (1963); Stromberg & Caswell (2015); Webster (1995); Woodworth (1917).
9. Eysenck (1985), p. 208.
10. Doctor Who (1996 TV movie).
11. S. Freud (1940).
12. Modern episode 8–1, “Deep Breath” (August 23, 2014).
13. Vaillant (1977).
14. A. Freud (1936).
15. S. Freud (1915/1963).
16. American Psychological Association (1998); Hayne et al. (2006); McNally (2005).
17. Anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor” (November 23, 2013).
18. Most notably in modern episode 6–8, “Let’s Kill Hitler” (August 27, 2011).
19. Christmas special, “The Time of the Doctor” (December 25, 2013); for more elaborate analysis, see Langley (2013).
20. Wegner (1989).
21. Classic serial 5–1, The Tomb of the Cybermen, pt. 3 (September 16, 1967).
22. S. Freud (1915/1963; 1917/1963).
23. Classic serial 3–9, The War Machines (June 25—July 16, 1966).
24. Classic serial 14–2, The Hand of Fear (October 2–23, 1976).
25. Classic serial 8–1, Terror of the Autons (January 2–23, 1971).
26. Classic serial 22–6, Revelation of the Daleks (March 23–30, 1985).
27. Christmas special, “The Christmas Invasion” (December 25, 2005).
28. Adler (1927/1963); Freud (1900/1965); Horney (1939); Jung (1963).
29. Classic serial 20–2, Snakedance, pt. 1 (January 18, 2013).
30. Murray (1940), p. 138.
31. Classic serial 1–15, The Horror of Fang Rock, pt. 4 (September 24, 1977).
32. Classic serial, Shada, unfinished due to a technicians’ strike (scheduled for January–February, 1980); eventually produced as Eighth Doctor audio play (December 10, 2005).
33. Classic serial 17–2, City of Death, pt. 2 (October 6, 1979).
34. May (1983).
35. Langley (2015).
36. Classic serial 14–4, The Face of Evil, pt. 4 (January 22, 1977).
37. Jung (1907/1909).
38. Doctor Who (1996 TV movie).
39. Jung (1966).
40. Classic serial 23–4, The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe (November 29–December 6, 1986); Bernstein (2015).
41. Modern episode 5–7, “Amy’s Choice” (May 15, 2010); Frankel (2016).
42. Jung (1917).
43. Jung (1921/1976).
44. Eysenck (1985); McCrae & Costa (1987).
45. Cohen & Schmidt (1979).
46. Myers & Briggs Foundation (n.d.).
47. Eveleth (2013).
48. Dickson & Kelly (1985); Krauss Whitbourne (2010).
49. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.”—Tenth Doctor in modern episode 3–10, “Blink” (June 9, 2007).
50. Modern episode 8–1, “Deep Breath” (August 23, 2014).
51. Modern episode 9–5, “The Girl Who Died” (October 17, 2015).
52. Classic serial 18–4, State of Decay, pt. 1 (November 22, 1980).
53. Classic serial 4–1, The Smugglers, pt. 4 (October 1, 1966).