INTRODUCTION: MADNESS IN WHO WE ARE
TRAVIS LANGLEY
“I thought—well, I started to think—that maybe you were just, like, a madman with a box.”
—AMY POND1
“A possible link between madness and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions; it is also one of the most controversial.”
—psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison2
Think outside the box. No matter how deceptively large your box might be, no matter how many swimming pools and libraries and strikingly similar corridors it might hold, and no matter where it might take you or when, be ready to step outside and look around. This kind of thinking takes the Doctor away from Gallifrey3 and carries him from one adventure to another instead of merely observing history and the universe from a place of greater safety inside. Rather than stick with the tried-and-true, the Doctor tries something new. Copernicus, Galileo, Mozart, and countless others down through the millennia have been called “mad” for making novel claims, challenging established ideas, and trying something new. When the TARDIS (embodied in a woman) calls the Doctor the only Time Lord “mad enough”4 to run away from Gallifrey with her, is she calling him insane or is she talking about his unconventionality?
What is madness? Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz has repeatedly accused the mental health profession of perpetuating myths about mental illness by describing any aberrant, disconcerting, outrageous, or otherwise unconventional behavior as “illness” or “disease.”5 Diagnosticians evaluating whether clients’ behavior is bizarre or unhealthy must take into account what is considered normal for each client’s environment, social class, or culture.6 The Doctor’s supposed madness does not refer to regeneration-induced chaos in his memories and personality because that’s normal for Time Lords; he’s even thought to be “mad” by their standards.7 The qualities deemed inappropriate by their standards, however, may be heroic by ours. Scientific and artistic originality are not the only forms of unconventionality to get someone slapped with a label of madness. Standing up for what’s right can, too, and the Doctor’s fellow Time Lords are not known for doing what’s right for others.
By any standards, the Doctor is an unconventional hero. His thinking may be divergent, convergent, deductive, inductive, logical, and illogical—or at least unconstrained by anyone else’s rules of how to follow a logical train of thought. He engages in a lot of heuristic thinking, taking mental shortcuts because he often lacks the patience for more methodical, meticulous, algorithmic analysis.8 Taking shortcuts in decision making leads to more mistakes but, to be fair, his heuristics are based on foundations more solid than ours tend to be. He charges in with little or no plan,9 tries something, tries something else, and continually adapts to circumstances because he has the sheer ability and experience to make it all work out in the end (most of the time) and a personality that simply lacks patience.
What is the Doctor’s personality? Given how many different incarnations he has taken, can we even say he has “a” personality? Throughout this book, that question keeps coming up. Every book in this Popular Culture Psychology series covers a wide range of topics, whichever areas in psychology seem appropriate and interesting to nearly two dozen authors each time, and yet some specific subject emerges as the most prominent every time. Star Wars Psychology: Dark Side of the Mind stresses the importance of looking past the surface when considering the complexities of good and evil; The Walking Dead Psychology: Psych of the Living—trauma; Game of Thrones Psychology: The Mind Is Dark and Full of Terrors—motivation; Captain America vs. Iron Man: Freedom, Security, Psychology—heroism; Star Trek Psychology: The Mental Frontier—the growth of the human race. As it turns out, Doctor Who Psychology: A Madman with a Box looks repeatedly at the nature of personality, the Who in it all.
How can an unconventional hero with an unconventional personality (or personalities) help us look at human psychology, and can we really use our own psychology to look at him? The Doctor, of course, is not just any ancient, time-traveling alien. He is an ancient, time-traveling alien who finds himself fascinated with us. We can use our sense of psychology to look at this character and we can use this character to look at our psychology, because this character judges himself by looking at us. If there’s a bit of bedlam in us all, then letting it out can sometimes be creative, constructive, and good for us—a kind of madness or passion that is not a mental disease at all.
“There’s something you better understand about me, ’cause it’s important and one day your life may depend on it: I am definitely a madman with a box.”
—Eleventh Doctor10
“The madman is a waking dreamer.”
—philosopher Immanuel Kant11
Eshun, S., & Gurung, R. A. R. (2009). Culture and mental health: Sociocultural influences, theory, and practice. New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell.
Freud, S. (1900/1965). The interpretation of dreams. New York, NY: Avon.
Jamison, K. R. (1993). Touched with fire: Manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. New York, NY: Free Press.
Kant, I. (1764/2011). Essay on the maladies of the head. In P. Frierson & P. Guyer (Eds.), Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime and other writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ross, L., & Anderson, C. A. (1982). Shortcomings in the attribution process: On the origins and maintenance of erroneous social assessments. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 268-283). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sue, D. W., & Sue, D. (2016). Counseling the culturally diverse: Theory and practice (6th ed.). New York, NY: Wiley.
Szasz, T. (1960). The myth of mental illness. American Psychologist, 15(2), 113–118.
Szasz, T. (1973). Ideology and insanity: Essays on the psychiatric dehumanization of man. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Szasz, T. (2007). The medicalization of everyday life. New York, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Notes
1. Modern episode 5–1, “The Eleventh Hour” (April 3, 2010).
2. Jamison (1993), p. 50.
3. Classic serial 6–7, The War Games, pt. 10 (June 21, 1969); modern episode 9–11, “Heaven Sent” (November 28, 2015).
4. Modern episode 6–4, “The Doctor’s Wife” (May 14, 2011).
5. Szasz (1960, 1973, 2007).
6. Eshun & Gurung (2009); Sue & Sue (2016).
7. See, for example, anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor” (November 23, 2013); modern episode 9–12, “Hell Bent” (December 5, 2015).
8. Ross & Anderson (1982).
9. “Talk very fast, hope something good happens, take the credit. That’s generally how it happens.”—Eleventh Doctor in Christmas special, “The Time of the Doctor” (December 25, 2013).
10. Modern episode 5–1, “The Eleventh Hour” (April 3, 2010).
11. Kant (1764/2011), quoted by—and often misattributed to—Freud (1900/1965), pp. 121–122.
On the Air: Doctor Who Television History
Classic series debuted November 23, 1963. First classic serial: An Unearthly Child (originally the title of the first episode in the four-part serial, retroactively assigned as the title of the complete serial), introducing the First Doctor. Classic series ended December 6, 1989. Final classic serial: Survival, featuring the Seventh Doctor. Television movie (1996): Doctor Who, introducing the Eighth Doctor. Modern series debuted March 26, 2005. First modern episode: “Rose,” introducing the Ninth Doctor.