Doctor Who and the Unconscious

            With Freud’s theory of the Unconscious, I am now going discuss to the symbolic application of the Unconscious through the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. Before we begin, I’m going to give a brief recap and definition of Freud’s theory of the Unconscious. The majority of one’s personality is composed of the Unconscious; it is the reservoir of unwanted thoughts, memories, and desires. The Id, the primitive, self-gratifying aspect of one’s personality, is the source of these undesirable thoughts and behaviors. They are managed by the Superego, the moral center, and also partially responsible for the Unconscious as it dictates the Id on what is socially and morally acceptable and represses the needs of the Id into the Unconscious. The Ego is the mediator between the two personalities as it works to balance the needs of the Id and the demands of the Superego.

            Now how does this correlate with Doctor Who? For the point of this discussion, I’m going to focus on Series five of the new series. During Matt Smith’s era, the (Eleventh) Doctor and his Companions Amy Pond and Rory Williams come together to form a Freudian trio as their roles are defined by one of the three personalities.

            Part of the Doctor’s character as an alien Time Lord is his ability to regenerate into a new body and personality whenever he is close to death. His last incarnation, the Tenth Doctor, was extremely cerebral and morally righteous (Superego). The Eleventh Doctor, while no doubt heroic and noble when the situation calls for it, is normally portrayed as whimsical and having a childlike enthusiasm in behavior and pursuit; he behaves like he has ADD (Id).  
He first meets Amy Pond when she was seven years old and he had just regenerated. His first impression to the little girl (as well as the audience) is asking for an apple, the scene that followed is a lengthy montage of little Amy trying to figure which foods would satisfy the post-regenerative Doctor after an apple, bacon, baked beans, and bread and butter failed to gratify.

            The Eleventh Doctor is also depicted as extremely impulsive. His thought processes run five hundred miles a minute and it usually functions like a grab bag. Whatever thought pops into his head, he will act on it. 


For example, in Series five episode two “The Beast Below” provided the dilemma of either lobotomizing a star whale, the last of its kind, in order to allow a spaceship colony of the U.K. to thrive, or letting the colony fall in order to save the whale; the Doctor chose the first option only to be intervened by Amy which I’ll get to later. Other quirks include the Doctor seemingly having ADD, going to and picking up objects that catches his interest like hats and fezzes, and displays an intense lack of patience. Shows no qualms about kissing members of either sex, and is generally unpredictable.

                                                      Rory, however, represents the Superego of the trio. Rory is a nurse, Amy’s husband and childhood friend. When they both meet is unclear, however, it’s possible Amy met Rory shortly after her first encounter with Doctor at age seven and to the audience, he is the second major character to be introduced in Series five. 

Rory fits as the Superego because he’s the one who frequently calls out the Doctor for his recklessness and moments of moral weakness. He often acts as the straight and practical man to his wife and the Doctor’s antic while also acting as the moral center for everyone around him as he fears for their safety. As he said in Series Six episode eleven “The God Complex”: “Whenever the Doctor gets chummy with someone, I feel the urge to contact their next of kin.”

            Amy, of course, acts as the Ego of the trio and also represents the self and the Unconscious. Amy, by her role as the Doctor’s companion, serves as the mediator to meet his needs while heeding the demands of her husband, or some other moral voice. Going back to “The Beast Below”, the Doctor is about to lobotomize the star whale until Amy realizes something new about the whale’s nature. Over the course of the episode, the characters presumed the whale to be a vicious beast and that humanity had ‘caught’ the whale in order to escape a dying Earth. In reality, the whale came to help of its own accord and Amy realized that the best solution was to simply release the whale of its shackles and let it pilot the space colony freely. Amy saved the day by assessing the situation and was able to meet the Doctor’s needs without going to extremes.

            Amy’s role as the Ego is defined through her relationships with Rory and the Doctor. Amy met the Doctor when she was seven years old, symbolically representing how the Id personality is dominant at childhood. Once the Doctor disappeared from her life at that point, adults she shared her story to believed she’s only making it up; the Doctor is only her imaginary friend. Because of this, adults (i.e. society) try to discourage and repress Amy’s memories of the “Raggedy Doctor” by sending her to therapy and meeting four psychiatrists (to which she regressed to even more primitive behavior when she reveals that she bit psychiatrists who told her the Doctor isn’t real). 
                This represents how society represses an individual’s thoughts and behaviors it finds undesirable or reprehensible. When the Doctor disappeared, Amy meets Rory, the Superego, like how a child develops one between ages five and ten, after the phallic stage.

            At various points throughout Amy’s tenure, her behavior tends to fluctuate depending on whose company she’s with. Her relationship to the Doctor varies between a father/daughter and a brother/sister like one. When she’s alone with him and the two are left to their own devices, she regresses to a childlike state in which she acts immaturely and prone to impulsive behavior. For example, she worked as a kissagram when she was a teenager, she ran away with the Doctor on night before her wedding, but and even better one is when she tried to seduce the Doctor (which also creates implications of an Electra complex). “The God Complex” reveals Amy’s dependence to the Doctor as her personal symbol of faith, a mythical hero who has come to save a scared little girl. With the presence of Rory, Amy acts a bit more maturely and taking on more adult responsibilities. In fact, part of Amy’s arc is her growth and development of becoming less of the flighty, scared little girl dependent on the Doctor she was to a compassionate, independent, and devoted wife. 

This change is marked and cemented in Series seven when Amy overcomes her dependence to the Doctor and makes the decision to follow Rory and live out their lives in the past, and thus, exit from the show.

            However, going back to the story in Series five. The main threat of Series five revolved around cracks appearing in the skin of the universe: “two parts of space and time that should never have touched,” the Doctor said. Some cracks are benign, for example, an alien used one as a means of travel; a short cut to get from one planet to our planet. Some are much more malign, in which if a person got too close to one, they would be absorbed in the crack and disappear from the face of the universe, going on as if he/she never existed. Time would rearrange itself as if the person never lived, close friends and relatives would forget; the person would be completely Ret Gone from history. Time itself is becoming increasingly unstable thanks to the cracks. This is where Amy symbolically serves as the Unconscious.

            Unwanted thoughts, desires, and memories are never forgotten, just dormant in the Unconscious mind. Throughout the series, Amy reveals that she has memories and ideas of what things were rather than what they are, in the form of Freudian slips. For starters, in her first appearance she was able to call a pond a duck pond despite its lack of ducks; she was able to recall her parents despite living in an empty house; and she remembered the soldiers protecting her before they too were absorbed by the cracks. At first it was chalked up to Amy’s experiences time traveling giving her a causality proof memory, however, Rory too was absorbed and disappeared from her memory. Nevertheless, Amy’s memories of Rory weren’t destroyed; they just became dormant. For example, in Series five episode ten “Vincent and the Doctor”, in which the Doctor and Amy were helping Vincent van Gogh, Vincent was able to sense Amy’s grief over losing Rory and that grief manifested in her crying despite her not knowing why, another Freudian slip.

            It was established in Amy’s first appearance that she grew up with a crack in her bedroom and that was what contributed to her causality proof memory. The penultimate episode of Series five involved a trap made up of Amy’s childhood memories, such as Roman soldiers, Pandora’s box (her favorite story), and a Centurion soldier with Rory’s likeness and soul; all the information provided by the cracks of time via her Unconscious.

In order to close the cracks of time and restore the universe, the Doctor must sacrifice himself. He’s slowly being erased from history, however, to his surprise he finds his history going in reverse, Amy can’t see him but he can still interact with her, talk to her. This allows the Doctor to see a potential backdoor in his sacrifice. In Series five episode five “Flesh and Stone”, Amy is possessed by the episode’s monster and to prevent it from killing her, she must close her eyes. In this episode the Doctor lost his signature jacket, but in one scene he suddenly reappears with a new one. In a bit of clever foreshadowing, the Doctor with a jacket is the future Doctor, the one that’s disappearing, and he appears before Amy to remind her: “remember what I told you when you were seven…you have to remember.”
The meaning of this exchange was unclear until the end when the Doctor is slowly disappearing. The Doctor’s last stop was Amy’s childhood, the moment he disappeared. He finds little girl asleep in the garden, awaiting for his return, and tucks her back into bed but not without sharing one last bedtime story before he confronts his fate. A fairy tale about a mad man and his brand new, ancient, blue phone box. The Doctor is taking a huge gamble, but hopefully it will pay off.

In the last episode, the climax of Series five, once again Amy and her causality proof memory and Unconscious saves the day. The universe is reset, Rory is normal again and he and Amy are about to be married. However, during the reception, Amy sees several signifiers that signify the Doctor but like Rory, she’s crying and she doesn’t know why. But then she remembers. She remembers the fairy tale he told her in her sleep, her Unconscious, and like the cracks creating a scenario using bits from her childhood to trap the Doctor, that information was enough for reality to resurrect him.

There are several other shows, movies, and books where a Freudian trio could be applied, but I doubt any of them could perfectly apply the idea of the Unconscious in which a Freudian trio is not only used, but also childhood, memories, ideas, and wishes make up the plot as well as Doctor Who.