Freud, Hume and Psychopath psychology in Showtime's Dexter

While you may very well question the decision to make a serial killer the protagonist of a new series and you may balk at the slightly silly notion of a serial killer who hunts other serial killers, Dexter is undeniably a series that is worth looking into.  Well acted, intelligently written, tense and benefiting from a setting (Miami) that makes it look completely different to all those other filmed in Toronto genre series and films, Dexter’s sheer quality undeniably took me by surprise.  Which is a rare and wonderful thing.

I was originally intending this piece as a review of the second season but in truth, all I have to say about the second series is that it’s great and you should definitely invest the time in watching it when you get a chance.

That’s pretty much all the review that this piece is going to contain.  Instead I’m going to write about the way that Dexter is constructed as a character and how this related to psychological theory and trends in American TV writing.

Dexter, is essentially a character study of a psychopath.  Given that the likes of Robert Hare have written books about how psychopaths think, it would be easy for a character study of a psychopath to fall into either a dry case study or a more lurid examination of the serial killer’s methods and beliefs in the tradition of Robert Harris’ Hannibal Lector books.  What is interesting with Dexter is that original creator Jeff Lindsay and the writers who have developed the TV version have resisted both urges, instead choosing to blend the psychology of the psychopath with that of a normal person so as to create a character who is part other and part familiar.  I think that this is fascinating both from a dramatic point of view and from a technical point of view.

Let me lay out more clearly what I mean.  When we meet Dexter at the beginning of the first series, he has perfect knowledge of who he is.  Informally diagnosed as a psychopath as child by his cop father, Dexter and his father Harry worked together to train Dexter to channel his dark urges into the socially constructive direction of only murdering murderers and psychopaths.  The psychologist Erik Erikson (father of the term “Identity Crisis”) argued that the development of a child should be seen as a process of forging an identity by gradually widening the social radius a person operates in (from immediate family outwards).  What is interesting about Dexter is that he never suffered an identity crisis growing up.  From a very young age his father has a clear idea of who he is and relentlessly trains Dexter not only to accept this identity but also to hide it, control it and project a different one.  The result is that Dexter knows exactly who he is.  He is a killer.  Dexter’s life is all about doing what it is he wants to do while keeping his real self safely hidden from the rest of the world.

However, as the first series progresses, a number of events occur that start to muddy the water for Dexter and force him to call into question his conception of self. Firstly, we have his relationship with Rita and her Children.  Initially, the relationship is a front and a mirror in which Dexter can check his outward appearances but once Dexter starts having sex with Rita, he starts to value the relationship in its own right.  Secondly, we have Dexter’s encounters with various fellow psychopaths, including a therapist, who have conflicting ideas of who they are.  In the case of the therapist, Dexter undeniably benefits from his therapy sessions despite the fact that psychopaths tend to not only not respond to therapy, it actually makes them worse because for a psychopath “talking about your feelings” is just picking up new ways to lie about the feelings they don’t have in a more convincing and articulate manner.  The third problem Dexter faces is that he encounters his long-lost older brother who is also a psychopath and a serial killer but he operates without Harry’s Code and therefore offers Dexter not only a possible companion with whom he can be completely honest but a whole other identity, namely that of a serial killer who does not try to live a normal life.  Throughout the first series, Dexter undergoes an identity crisis as he undergoes a loss of faith in Harry’s Code partly because some of the old truths drummed into him by Harry don’t seem to quite fit his experience, partly because Dexter encounters another serial killer who operates without the code and partly because he comes to question his father’s absolute morality to impose a code upon him.

There are two interesting but closely associated facts about the first series’ portrayal of Dexter.

• Harry’s Code as Religion

• Freud vs. Hume for the soul of Dexter

Harry’s Code as Religion

Harry’s Code not only tells Dexter what to do, it actually defines him as a person and in doing so it functions less like a set of rules and more like a religious creed.  From a symbolic point of view, Harry is very clearly God the Father and Dexter is the sinning son of Adam who would spin off into self-destructive spirals of appetite satisfying were it not for God to impose a moral order on things.  Such a remark is obvious though, I make it only in passing.  What is more interesting is when you weigh Dexter’s troubles with the code against actual studies of the process through which religious people lose their faith.  Psychologists argue that the apostate goes through four stages :

First Doubts
Seeking and Weighing role Alternatives
A Turning Point
Establishing an ex-role identity

One of Robert Hare’s more memorable phrases in writing about psychopaths (an idea picked up by Peter Watts’ Blindsight) is that they are intraspecies predators.  This means that though they are part of the same species as the rest of us, psychopaths actively prey upon us using their willingness to use people to get their way without guilt or remorse, something only possible thanks to their skill at mimicking normal human behaviour, namely the smiles, laughs, touches and pleasing language known as phatic discourse that lubricates interactions between humans and is designed not so much to convey information as to display the fact that we pose no threat.

If you bring these two ideas together you see that Dexter is someone who has an identity but also a coping strategy.  By this I mean not only the artificial persona he projects for the world but also the rituals he engages in.  Religious rites serve a number of purposes such as atonement and dedication but one social purpose they serve is reaffirming an individual’s membership of a certain group and their acceptance of those values.  In other words, while Catholics may believe in the “magical” processes that occur when they take communion, communion also serves as a means for a person to assert their identity as a Catholic.  The rites performed by serial killers such as Dexter perform a similar function.  From the choice of victim to the means of abduction to the method of murder, serial killers assert their identity each time they commit a murder.  So just as a Catholic asserts that they are a Catholic when they take communion, so Dexter asserts his identity when he commits a murder.  For Dexter murder is communion; a way not only of saying what he is (a careful, intelligent killer) but also what he is not (a killer of the innocent, someone who acts upon his whims).  This is why it is possible to construct a psychological profile of a killer from the methods of their murders.

When Dexter encounters his brother, he encounters someone with an entirely different coping strategy.  He has positioned himself as more of an outsider from society than Dexter meaning that he has more freedom and his rituals exert a completely different identity, despite his shared history with Dexter.  When Dexter encounters his brother he does not only meet someone with the same mother or someone with whom he could be himself, he encounters a whole other way of being that he could just as easily adopt as he has adopted Harry’s Code and the rituals associated with it.

Freud vs. Hume for the soul of Dexter

One of the most interesting pattern in America TV writing over the last ten years has been the prevalence, particularly within HBO and HBO-style series, of psychoanalytic terms and concepts as narratives in the drama.  At the most obvious level, one can see this in series such as The Sopranos where (initially more than later) the main protagonist would make visits to a therapist and these visits would be used to highlight the character’s emotional state.  Indeed, Six Feet Under sees one of its characters studying to become a therapist as a result of her brother’s history of mental illness.  However, aside from the more obvious inclusion of therapy and therapists as plot devices and characters, psychoanalysis has also come to suffuse American TV in more subtle manners.  For example, one of the most basic concepts in psychoanalysis is the idea of displacement.  The Freudian concept of the self is essentially hydraulic, for Freud the human psyche is a closed system under pressure and when something traumatic occurs it causes a blockage in this system that causes the subject to act erratically (in a hysterical fashion as Freud might have put it).  However, humans being humans, we are prone to not dealing with our traumas and we repress them.  Unfortunately, this does not repair the blockage, it only dislodges it resulting in it wandering around our self until it suddenly causes us to massively over-react to what should be a perfectly normal, safe stimulus.  By venting our emotional energy over this new stimulus, we are displacing it from the real source of our problems.  Displacement is a purely Freudian concept and yet it is one of the basic building blocks of American TV writing, along with the later realisation that certain actions were displaced.  This pops up not only in series with obviously psychoanalytic elements such as The Sopranos and Six Feet Under but also series such as Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, The Shield, The Wire and so on and so forth.

As I remarked in a previous post, it is interesting that Freudian concepts have been so influential upon contemporary American drama, especially when compared to European drama that certainly has not yet adopted Freud’s psychoanalysis as the lingua franca of the emotions.  This could be for any number of reasons such as the fact that Therapy is less Taboo in the US than Europe, Americans are more emotionally open than Europeans, because American TV writers are better paid than European ones and therefore in a better position to pay for therapy, because American screenwriting is centred around Hollywood, California.  Alternately it could be for more practical reasons such as the fact that American writers tend to work in teams more frequently meaning that not only will they then focus more upon talking conflict resolution (allowing more writers input) but also because it means that they are more likely to need to articulate their thoughts about characters clearly in order to pitch ideas meaning that US writers need Theory as part of the writing process to an extent that more solitary European (or indeed American fiction) writers will not.  Of course it could be for all of these reasons or for none of them, but it is an interesting observation nonetheless.

An interesting facet to psychoanalysis is the fact that it is essentially predicated upon a the accusation of false-consciousness.  For a Freudian, “who you really are” is not the person you claim to be but rather some other entity hidden under layers of repressed memories, locked away emotions and other forms of neurosis.  This is an aspect that it not only has in common with radical Islamism, but also Marxism with its claims that come the revolution a class consciousness will emerge, so no matter how right wing the proletariat appear to be now, come the revolution all of that will change.  This theoretical construct is particularly useful as a means of resisting scientific verification, indeed, it was the main reason why Popper considered psychoanalysis to be a pseudo-science.  for a psychoanalyst, it does not matter who you think you are, the real you can only be uncovered through a process of digging and sifting (only possibly with the aid of a psychotherapist naturally).  False consciousness is one of the primary means of conflict generation on American TV.  Unwilling to discuss politics (the original Dexter novels feature the Miami Dade police force, the TV version changes this to the Miami Metro police department, presumably because of the part played by Miami Dade in recent American political history) or religion (Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip features a major plot-line about a relationship between a devout Christian and a non-believer but never once does the word ‘atheist’ get used), American TV drama struggles to find a reason for disagreement that does not feature ideology, hence the rise of claims of false consciousness whereby characters can be in conflict without really meaning to be.  Such conflicts are also attractive because they can be resolved thanks to a break-through, unlike conflict stemming from ideological differences, which are not so easily resolved.

As a psychopath, Dexter is an interesting literary construct.  His reactions to emotional stimuli and, indeed, most of his internal mental state should be something profoundly alien to most normal people.  The series’ best articulation of psychopath psychology comes when Dexter confronts Lila about her own psychopathology, accusing her of being “emotionally colour-blind” and “knowing the dictionary definition of emotion” while never feeling anything more than the most primitive of impulses and drives.  Normally, this would be sufficient to make Dexter profoundly Other.  He lacks our emotional palette and therefore would not think or act like a normal person.  By all rights, he should be profoundly alien to us, and yet he is the protagonist in a series of books and a TV series.  Indeed, the original books are even written in the first person, further diminishing the distance between the character and the reader.  Clearly, such a character would not normally be able to sustain a work of drama as it would be impossible for audiences to understand him, let alone sympathise with him and writers would be unable to write about him convincingly as they lack empathy with his mind-set.  Predictably, the writers cheat by pulling together a popular understanding of psychopathology with normal psychology and in particular the hydraulic model favoured by American TV writers.

As a technique in genre writing, this approach is as old as the hills.  Indeed, science fiction mostly operates under such constraints when writing about aliens and even fantasy writers do when writing about elves and dwarves.  In theory, an alien or an elf should be totally other to a human.  Neuro-physiologically different to us humans, such creatures should be utterly alien to us, their needs, drives and tastes completely incomprehensible at a folk-psychological level. While some authors have decided to exploit such an idea (the AI in Neuromancer or the Weaver in Perdido Street Station), the truth of the matter is that if they were strictly honest, all non-human creatures should be as Other as Lovecraft’s outer gods, their drives and ambitions as incomprehensible to us as ours would be to them.  The most frequent solution, therefore is to cheat.  Indeed, when it comes to aliens and elves, most writers either choose to write about a culture with different values (such as the militaristic, passionate and clearly Viking-derived Klingons in Star Trek) or about humans with a particularly pronounced character trait (the emotionless Vulcans from Star Trek).  The same technique is used by the writers of Dexter.

The result is something of a kludge as Dexter shifts between various psychological models.  One minute he is completely overpowered by his subconscious, the next his subconscious no longer matters, then his identity is something that he chooses and then he’s switching in and out of being bound by Harry’s Code as elements of different schools of pop-psychology and elements of religious faith combine and battle with each other for dominance.

The truth of the matter is that, like the characters of Battlestar Galactica, Dexter has no firm bottom to his character.  The writers have dug around in his subconscious and put him through so many crises of identity that the root of his character has become completely fluid and subject entirely to the whims of the writers.  If we are to include “intentionality” as important in the critical process then let me speculate; Dexter’s character design is slightly ropey and does not stand up to close scrutiny.  The writers flick back and forth between different theoretical modes, never completely getting on an even keel, hence Dexter’s frequent use of scenes where Dexter proclaims how happy and contented he is.  However, I don’t think intentions are worth much when it comes to understanding a text so I’ll move on to what I think about Dexter based on the series itself.

What distinguishes Dexter from Battlestar Galactica and many other American TV series is that the quest for self-discovery is not an important component of the series.  Indeed, despite Dexter being a character study of its primary protagonist, the series is not about finding out who the real Dexter is, but rather showing how Dexter can steer his path through a minefield of unfortunate events while still maintaining a clear handle upon who he is.  Is Dexter a different character at the beginning of the first series than he was at the end of the second?  undeniably, but this later Dexter is no more true or enlightened or even necessarily happier than the person he was at the beginning of the first series.  He is just different.  This is something of a departure from most US TV series that see the therapy-derived process of Trauma-Denial-Acceptance as a modern-day analogue of religious salvation.  When Dexter evolves, he does not do so within an aesthetic frame-work that evaluates one change as healthy while another is unhealthy.  He is simply a continuously evolving entity.  He is not discovering more and more about who he really is but continuously re-forging his own identity.  This is the essence of the Humean conception of the self and it is increasingly rare on American TV that has become dominated in recent years by the Freudian paradigm.

Dexter’s characterisation is a mess, but I think that he is a much stronger character as a result of it.

Comments

[Jörn]

the truth of the matter is that if they were strictly honest, all non-human creatures should be as Other as Lovecraft’s outer gods, their drives and ambitions as incomprehensible to us as ours would be to them

I've heard that being said regarding aliens from time to time, and I don't find that position very reasonable at all. Sure, finding out that after initial incomprehensibility (like all so often in Star Trek) the aliens share our notions of love, hate, family values and so on, that under their aliens skins they are, deep down, just like us, is pure nonsense. But to assume that you can't pin down what makes aliens tick, that their minds (or whatever they have as a equivalent to engage reality, if they actually do so) are forever unknowable, like the creature in Lem's Solaris, is equally a cheat. My intuition says me, that the middle way is more realistic, far more alien than the garden variety found in most science fiction, but not lost to understanding, after time and research. After all, we have one thing in common, the same physical reality (if we 're talking about beings from some other universe with a complete different set of physics, maybe they can be incomprehensible, if we can never figure the basics of this universe out, but that's a bit of a stretch).

His reactions to emotional stimuli and, indeed, most of his internal mental state should be something profoundly alien to most normal people.

Maybe everyone goes at times in their lives through short, but similar phases of emotional detachment like Dexter. You've worked to many hours without sleep, you feel like a robot and not a human anymore. Maybe these fleeting moments may allow most people to tune into someone like Dexter (I'm completely grasping here, nothing serious).

BTW, great article. Reading it, I feel the urge to know more about philosophy, but I must admit it's a daunting field. Where to begin? Do you know any good books that give a good overview of the major subfields, that would allow one to get a good grip on it on a basic level to see what to read next?

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Hi Jorn :-)

First bit : I think that in the long run you're right. Ted Chiang has a story about working out the language and therefore the mindset of an alien species. It would be different but possible so I think it would be possible to create a character with an alien psychology and have that psychology be comprehensible without it being stereotypical or reduced to a particular kind of human personality.

However, in the context of a series such as Dexter, that wouldn't really be possible.

Second Bit : Possibly. I wrote a post a while back about how I thought I was dead inside when it came to relating emotionally to art (which is over-stating things as I did get quite emotionally involved in the pieces my GF sang at a concert last night) but even if one did lack emotion at times, one would still know what emotion felt like. A Psychopath wouldn't, he's only feel urges. That makes for quite a different psychology I think.

Third Bit : Bertrand Russell's history of western philosophy is widely respected as a good place to start if one wants to learn about philosophy. Personally though, I think that there's nothing like letting one's interests guide one so something like Ted Honderich's Oxford Companion to Philosophy but in truth there are loads of popular books about philosophy.

[Daniel Jackson]

I really enjoyed your analysis of Dexter. This is the kind of discussion about characters and television series that I've always been looking for but have never found until now. I am just wowed by the fact that you tied Dexter's character development to Hume and Freud. I suppose the connection should be obvious at least to Freud. The show is a character study and the protagonist is a psychopath. This begs for a psychological approach. Still my whole store of philosophical knowledge a la Hume, Kant, etc for whatever reason seems to have erstwhile remained completely compartmentalized from such character analysis. In fact, I think it is interesting to wonder to what extent Dexter is an embodiment of Kant's search for a categorical imperative. Some of the writing does indeed portray Dexter as having typical human desires and empathy so as not to be the prototypical psychopath. Despite this, he does often seem as this emotionless automaton groping in the dark for a principle to guide his action in the face of infinite choice and a rational awareness of certain insatiable impulses.

I'm in agreement with you at least if I understand you correctly. If the writing of Dexter or anything else for that matter were to be completely true to the reality of psychopathic psychology this would be something near impossible for the prototypical normal human to relate or empathize. As a result, it would probably make for a boring show. That's somewhat ironic for me since I think I would enjoy the show that much more if the characterization were more true life. I suppose because it would be more like learning in a hopefully dramatically interesting context.

I do sometimes find myself laughing on the inside at the characterization when it appears that Dexter genuinely cares about Rita or the children. The voice over, that I guess is supposed to give us insight into Dexter's true thoughts and nature, comes across to me as the ultimate false-consciousness. It's function in the show prima facie seems to be as truth sayer, but more and more it seems to me as verbal meaninglessness nothing more than secondary afterthoughts and rationalizations. So I agree when you say, "he's not really discovering who he really is" because that would imply there was some truth about himself to found at the bottom of all that verbiage. The basic truths of Dexter, his impulses, and the code which he uses to satisfy them, are much the same since day one. What is his "continuously re-forging identity" seems to me to be nothing more than a meandering perspective of self influenced by the vicissitudes of his daily life.

While Dexter experiments with emotional connection and visibility with Lila or his brother even that seems faked since nothing fundamental about his behavior ever changes. There's no real transformational process for him. I never really thought about it this way, but intellectually speaking that makes him an incredibly boring character to me. He often describes himself as "empty," but that's not really the case. At bottom, he's not empty. There just isn't a whole lot there: his impulse like a starving wild dog and the code. Despite appearances, those things are it and unaffected.

Anyway, I don't have any really coherent thoughts on the matter so I'm kinda rambling here. I'll be sure to poke around your blog here.

Thanks

[Jonathan M]

Hi Daniel --

I'm delighted to hear that you enjoyed the piece. It was certainly a nice conceptual breakthrough for me when I wrote it. In fact, I have a book review in the pipes that draws on some of the same conclusions about the viability of different psychological models for psychological purposes.

It is actually possible to write about straight psychopaths. Massimo Carlotto's The Goodbye Kiss charts to rise of a former terrorist turned restauranteur and he is not only an engaging character, he's also a total psychopath without any hint of remorse, though in a way the point of the book is to reinforce that psychopaths are different to us, even when we think they might have some kind of human emotion, it's just a scam.

I don't think you could write a TV series on that model, so Dexter's writers flit about, refusing to be pinned down to one psychological model, thereby allowing them to make us empathise with Dexter without ever understanding him.

You're absolutely correct about the voice-over being a form of false consciousness but then I'd argue that that's all the self ever is... it's a narrative we construct for ourselves from largely unrelated biological drives and neurological quirks.

In some ways, Dexter's fluid nature is a more honest piece of characterisation than any other on TV.

[Mirrorball]

Dear Jonathan M,

Praising is harder than criticizing, so I'm going to write about the parts of your post I disagree with -- I'm taking the easiest path -- but I loved reading your post and I agree with almost everything you wrote.

In short I disagree with your conclusion. You wrote that the writers cheated to make Dexter more comprehensible, but Dexter's characterisation is also a mess. The obvious conclusion to me is that the writers failed. They chose to make Dexter less realistic so that he would be comprehensible, but they failed at making him comprehensible -- Dexter is a mess. My own conclusion is that the writers are as clueless about who Dexter is as Dexter himself, even at the most basic level. They just want Dexter to be sympathetic -- now he has feelings for Rita and her children, which made countless women sigh over the romance, so obviously they succeeded. I guess I have a heart of stone, because I couldn't care less about Rita. I just wanted to find that Dexter makes sense, or even better, to see him as a mysterious, fascinating, inhuman being. I want that otherness the writers threw away by cheating. I want to sympathize with and understand Deb, Angel, LaGuerta, Doakes etc -- they are normal like me. Making these secondary characters likeable should be a piece of cake, it's natural, but they are the show's weakest aspect. With Dexter, I want to feel that the writers know exactly what they are doing, and they are keeping me in the dark on purpose, but what they did instead was trying to make me like Dexter, sympathize with him.

Dexter's fluid nature isn't really fluid, it's inconsistent. Besides I think the writers are suggesting Dexter is becoming a better person. It's undeniable he discovered his feelings for Deb and Rita and isn't love the most sublime thing?

[Jonathan M]

Hi Mirrorball :-)

As a general principle of characterisation, I agree with you. I've written about the last couple of series of Battlestar Galactica and found them both painful to watch because it's clear that none of the characters have any bottom to them and what happns from episode to episode is based more upon what is convenient for the writers than what is true to the characters.

However, in the case of Dexter, I think that feeling of otherness and lack of bottom actually works as his psychology is different to ours and so there's no reason why there should be a real Dexter in there somewhere... there are just whims and fancy and biological drives that may push him towards loving Rita but then next series he might attack her. Dexter's a cypher and I think the effect works rather well.

But I don't think this effect is intentional. I think it's a product of poor writing BUT I think it's a positive one. I think the series would suffer if Dexter was written in a more traditionally coherent manner.

[Mirrorball]

The problem with Dexter is that he's losing that feeling of otherness. I think the writers are trying to portray him as a normal guy, who's been out of touch with his emotions, and has a need to kill. But normal people don't need to kill, and therein lies the problem. I don't think Dexter is a cypher, I think he's contradictory. It doesn't make sense that he chops people up into pieces and at the same time he has feelings for a single mother who is strugling to raise her two kids. It just doesn't feel verisimilar. And I'm pretty sure Dexter is never going to attack Rita, unfortunately.

[Jonathan M]

I certainly agree with you that there's a downward artistic trend as they try and suggest that psychopaths are nice guys deep down. The series is dropping into the standard Freudian model that makes up so much of American TV where nobody's a jerk, they're just affected by issues they need to get over.

In fact, evidently the series of books that the series is increasingly loosely based on hasn't been able to keep it up and has dropped into a model whereby Dexter is a normal guy who is possessed by some kind of magical force.

[Kym]

Is Dexter a psychopath though? Harry Morgan made a loosely based diagnosis based on his experience and knowledge but that doesn't make it so. Dexter shown as a young child seems normal enough,even Brian his brother didn't seem abnormal pre slaughter. Does that kind of experience to the very young mean 'psychopathy' or does it mean a kind of trauma that would shut down normal responses and impose a kind of 'traumatic psychopathy' something like MPD? I can only go on what the show is protraying and frankly the character isn't what I would have thought of as a psychopath. He seems rather too introspective but then that may be a necessity of television.