Peter David | Quaeritur

Note: the following essay includes spoilers for each of the works under discussion.

In his essay “Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation” (The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 38, Autumn 2009, pp. 38-59), the philosopher Ken Gemes discusses the difference between the psychological concepts sublimation and repression. “Sublimations,” he writes, “involve integration and unification, while pathological symptoms [i.e., from repression] involve splitting off or disintegration.” Pete Docter’s Inside Out is an excellent illustration of these concepts as defined by Gemes. In the film, we see not only the dangers that repression (or the splitting off) of a specific emotion can present within an individual but also what happens when the goal of sublimation is reached: when all of a person’s emotions are integrated into a unified self and are working together toward the same goals. Though perhaps one of the best films yet to tackle these ideas within a narrative framework, Inside Out is not the first piece of art to do so. The Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within,” for example, examines quite literally what happens when the self is psychically split into two parts. And two works that take these ideas a step further by exploring what happens when repressed traumas cause the self to splinter and disintegrate are issue 377 of Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk and the Australian horror film The Babadook. Let us examine each of these works in turn.

As hinted above, Inside Out is a narrative film which also happens to present a philosophy of mind that is both cogent and coherent. It envisions people as each governed by a group of five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. These emotions take turns driving a person and coloring the person’s memories, which are then stored away to be recalled when needed (or eventually relegated to the subconscious). Some of these memories become the core memories, which power a person’s islands of personality. With this basic structure of the mind on display, the film offers a philosophically mature look at the self as a multifaceted and mutable concept. For the core memories and islands of personality are not permanent fixtures; they can be altered by other emotions or replaced as a person’s life experiences and interests change. And that is exactly what happens throughout the course of the film.

Our focus is on an eleven-year-old girl named Riley. In Riley’s mind, Joy is the dominant emotion. She gets nervous when the other emotions are in control of Riley for too long, and she thinks that the majority of Riley’s memories should be colored by her. Joy is particularly uncomfortable around Sadness. In one scene, Joy even tries to remove the influence of Sadness by drawing a chalk circle around her and telling her she must remain within it. She wants to deny that sadness is a part of Riley, a part of life. This is a typical model of repression. Gemes writes in his essay:

Repression is what happens when a drive is denied its immediate aim and is then split off from other drives in the sense that its aims are not integrated with the aims of other drives and it must battle, often unsuccessfully, for any opportunity to achieve expression.

This is the position that Sadness finds herself in at the start of the film; Joy rarely allows her an opportunity for expression.

Later in the film, after Riley’s life is turned upside down by a move from Minnesota to San Francisco, Joy and Sadness are both accidentally transported from the headquarters of Riley’s mind and must work together to find their way back. It is on this journey that Joy begins to see how Sadness can be valuable. For example, while comforting Riley’s long forgotten imaginary friend Bing Bong, Sadness demonstrates how she can connect with the pain of others through empathy. Also, she is the only one who can help Riley express the feelings of hopelessness and despair that are bound to crop up on occasion. At the end of the film, when Riley is literally running away from the things that are challenging her, Sadness is the emotion that helps her turn around to confront her parents with all that she is feeling.

This demonstration of the psychological importance of expressing sadness is consistent with the way in which we see the other emotions not as negative aspects of Riley’s personality, but as equally vital to her sense of self. Fear, for instance, keeps Riley safe. Anger helps her be an aggressive hockey player. And Disgust helps her with aesthetic choices and with navigating nuanced appearance-based social circles. Riley lives with parents who want her to be happy all the time. We, too, live in a culture that paints emotions such as sadness, fear, and anger in a negative light. Inside Out proves that all emotions, even joy, can have their downsides, but that does not make them negative, bad, or shameful things to be excised or repressed. They can be harnessed, sublimated, and used toward positive ends. Ideally, these emotions/drives will work together, creating (as they do at the end of the film) memories colored by input from each of them.

In the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within” (Richard Matheson’s sole writing credit on the show), Captain Kirk finds himself in a situation that addresses the same issue of sublimation as Inside Out. At the beginning of the episode, after a planetary expedition, Captain Kirk beams aboard the Enterprise. However, there is a transporter malfunction. The Captain is seemingly OK, just a little lightheaded. But then, when the transporter room is unattended, another Captain Kirk beams aboard the ship. This version of the Captain appears maniacal and unhinged. While the first version of the Captain feels weak and returns to his quarters to rest, the second version immediately seeks brandy from sick bay and attempts to sexually assault Yeoman Rand. There is an obvious temptation to view the first version of Kirk as good and the second version as evil, but as the episode progresses, we see that it is not that simple. The following exchange between Spock and Dr. McCoy explains why:

SPOCK: We have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man. His negative side, which you call hostility, lust, violence, and his positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love, tenderness.

MCCOY: It’s the Captain’s guts you’re analyzing. Are you aware of that, Spock?

SPOCK: Yes, and what is it that makes one man an exceptional leader? We see indications that it’s his negative side which makes him strong, that his evil side, if you will, properly controlled and disciplined, is vital to his strength. Your negative side removed from you, the power of command begins to elude you.

Indeed, the first version of Kirk is weak, tired, unmotivated, and ineffectual as a leader. At his own admission, decisions are becoming more and more difficult to make. The second version of Kirk, while certainly impulsive, lustful, and aggressive, is also quite fearful and pathetic. In other words, neither version of Kirk is ideal on its own. As the first version of Kirk says when he first confronts his double: “Don’t you understand? I’m part of you. You need me. I need you.” Just as Joy realizes that Riley needs Sadness in Inside Out, we begin to see that Captain Kirk needs both sides of himself, even the part that seems on the surface solely negative and evil. The lesson of both the Pixar film and the Star Trek episode is the opposite of the famous Christian idea of removing those parts of us that cause us to sin (“So if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away”). We cannot simply cut away those parts of us that we find unsavory, negative, or evil. Rather, as Spock says, and as Joy learns in regard to sharing Riley with Sadness and the other emotions, our dark sides and personal demons, “properly controlled and disciplined,” are essential to creating a whole and healthy psyche.

This exchange between Kirk and McCoy captures this message perfectly:

KIRK: I have to take him back inside myself. I can’t survive without him. I don’t want him back. He’s like an animal, a thoughtless, brutal animal, and yet it’s me. Me.

MCCOY: Jim, you’re no different than anyone else. We all have our darker side. We need it! It’s half of what we are. It’s not really ugly, it’s human.

At the end of the episode, with the transporter fixed, Kirk is able to integrate both sides of himself into a single entity again.

In issue 377 of Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk (written by Peter David and penciled by Dale Keown), Bruce Banner is psychically divided in a similar manner to that of Captain Kirk in “The Enemy Within.” As the issue begins, we see Banner’s therapist, the gamma-powered Doc Samson, sitting with Banner and two separate Hulks: the so-called grey Hulk and the green, savage Hulk (who amusingly refers to the grey hulk as “Fake Hulk”). Using post-hypnotic suggestion, Samson has gathered these three parts of Banner together in Banner’s mind for one purpose. Samson tells the two Hulks: “You’re going to have to come to terms with each other because you’re all tearing this man apart.” It seems, just as Kirk could not exist as only one side of himself, and just as Riley could not exist without all of her emotions working together, Banner is also going to be unable to exist as a whole, healthy person if he remains splintered in three parts, each trying to gain control by destroying the other two. But what is keeping these three parts separated?

As the issue progresses, we learn that there is a monster lurking in Banner’s subconscious, one that even the two Hulks cannot defeat on their own. This monster, we find out, is Banner’s abusive father, Brian. We see the monster attack and kill Banner’s mother, with Banner watching as a child, unable to save her. And then, in a scene that will feel particularly resonant in relation to Inside Out, we see Banner realize that his younger self never really came to terms with what happened on an emotional level—because he was taught that emotions were bad:

BANNER: Cry, show some emotion.

YOUNG BANNER: Emotion’s bad. It hurts people.

BANNER: Not all emotion. Cry, blast it. Cry big racking sobs.

After Banner finishes pleading with his younger self, the green Hulk is released. We see now what the Hulks represent to Banner: the unleashed emotional and passionate parts of himself that he has always denied proper expression. It took a gamma bomb to unleash them, and even then, Banner tried for years to “cure” himself of them, to cut them out of himself. The reason his psyche is so splintered is because he had repressed his sadness at the time of his mother’s death. Samson’s goal in this particular therapy session is to get the pieces working together, not against each other any longer. He tells Betty Ross: “If we integrate the personalities, as I hope to, what we will get is a whole Bruce Banner, for the first time in years.”

Later, in another scene in Banner’s subconscious, we see that he carried his denial of emotional expression through even his college years. Here, we see Banner with a young woman who wants nothing more than to make love to him, but Banner responds: “I just have work to do, that’s all. This is college, not a playpen.” In this instance, it was the grey Hulk whom Banner was repressing. To return to the Gemes essay once again, he writes:

Aggressive drives, which are not viewed as acceptable, typically because acting on them would exact a painful retribution, are repressed to the point that one does not even acknowledge that one has such drives.

Due to his traumatic past and the strong repression of all of his emotions and passions, this is the situation in which Banner has found himself and which ultimately proved fertile ground from which to birth his Hulk personae.

Finally, toward the end of the issue, Banner confronts the monster in his subconscious: “You got so mad and I saw what emotions did and I…I was so…af…afraid…of buh-being like you.” With this admission, the monster begins to shrink and take the shape of a man—Brian Banner—before finally disintegrating. Now, Banner’s mother appears in his place and tells the two Hulks: “He needs you now. No more fighting.” They are hesitant, just as the dark half of Kirk was hesitant to be put back together again. But in the end, they concede. When Banner comes out of his post-hypnotic state, he is unlike he ever was before: finally, with all parts integrated into one, with Banner no longer repressing his emotions and passions, Banner has become a new merged Hulk—a super being with the strengths of all three parts, including Banner’s intellect, working together.

In the film The Babadook (written and directed by Jennifer Kent), we are faced with a protagonist, much like Bruce Banner, who has repressed a past trauma to the point that it is tearing her apart. Amelia (Essie Davis) is the widowed mother of a six-year-old boy, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). We eventually learn that Amelia’s husband, Oskar, was killed in a car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth to Samuel. And we soon discover that Amelia has never truly come to terms with this trauma and has repressed it (indeed, she even keeps all of Oskar’s possessions locked in her basement). Samuel sees that there is something going on with his mother, something changing within her, which is why he spends time developing weapons to use against the “monster” that he keeps thinking is going to get them.

This tense home life is complicated by the fact that Samuel’s birthday is coming up, a day that Amelia looks at more as the day her husband died than the day her son was born. Samuel has never even been allowed to celebrate his birthday on the actual day. Amelia does not do well around this time of the year, as a neighbor points out. And as her sister reminds her: “As soon as anyone mentions Oskar, you can’t cope.” But Amelia tries to hide it. When a co-worker asks her how she is doing, she says she is fine. He replies: “You don’t have to be fine, you know.”

We have already looked at the importance of allowing yourself to grieve in both Inside Out and The Incredible Hulk, but Amelia’s repression seems to be too deep. And just as Banner’s repressed feelings eventually forced themselves out as the two Hulks, Amelia’s repressed grief finds its own outlet for expression: a children’s book called The Babadook that Samuel asks her to read to him.

In the book, the titular Babadook is a dark figure with long fingers, a long coat, and a creepy hat who knocks on the door to a house demanding to be let in. Samuel is rightfully frightened by the chilling imagery, which seems to hit too close to home for him. Amelia is also disturbed and tries to get rid of the book, first by hiding it, then by ripping it apart, then by burning it—but it keeps coming back.

Finally, while looking at it again, she reads the line: “You start to change when I get in, the Babadook growing right under your skin.” And the Babadook does get in and change her. She starts lashing out at Samuel and threatening him. When Samuel tries calling their neighbor for help, Amelia cuts the phone line. She even snaps their dog’s neck. At this point, the Babadook is in complete control. But Samuel is prepared: he fights the Babadook with the weapons and traps he has prepared and helps his mother expunge the monster. But when it finally seems to be gone, Samuel recalls another line from the book: “You can’t get rid of the Babadook.”

Amelia has a final showdown with the monster in which she faces it in the same way in which Banner faced his monster in his subconscious: recognizing it for what it is. Ultimately, she makes peace with it, allowing it to remain alive in her basement where she can visit it and feed it. Of this ending, Jennifer Kent has stated in an interview:

We had many people fight the ending. I had to really defend that ending. To be perfectly honest, if I had to have killed that thing I wouldn’t have made the film. You can’t kill the monster, you can only integrate it. Even with Amelia, she can’t ever forget that her husband was killed in a car crash, that will never go away. So yeah, it’s the most crucial thing, to keep that thing alive on some level.

Like the other works we have discussed, the goal for Amelia in the film has been to face her repressed trauma and grief and sublimate it, to make it an integral part of herself. She can actually learn a thing or two about this from Samuel. At one point in the film, he learns about his neighbor’s Parkinson’s disease when he inquires why her hands shake. His mother is upset that he would have pried about this, but the neighbor says, “He wanted to know, so we talked about it.” And at the end of the film, when Amelia is meeting with government employees about Samuel’s schooling, and Samuel tells them about his birthday being the same day his dad died, she says: “Sam’s just like his dad, always speaks his mind.” The lesson for Amelia, then, is to talk about things and speak what’s on her mind, not to repress her feelings and pretend that everything is fine when it is not.

In her essay “Hannibal: Bedelia’s Dream and the True Face of Lecter,” Priscilla Page uses a quote from Joseph Campbell that is equally relevant to our discussion of sublimation and repression:

In the Greek, the demon is that unconscious impulse that is the dynamic of your life and which comes to you in vision and in dream, but in the Christian interpretation, it is a devil—all that a devil is is a repressed demon: one who has not been recognized, one that has not been given its dues, who has not been allowed to play into your life and so becomes a violent threat.

We have seen in The Incredible Hulk and in The Babadook how repressed demons can indeed become violent threats if not recognized and integrated via sublimation, and we have seen in Inside Out and “The Enemy Within” how seemingly dark, negative aspects of a person’s mind, if successfully sublimated, become positive and essential. But more importantly, I think these works can teach us to recognize these sorts of things going on in our minds and the minds of others. With any luck, they will help us sublimate our own monsters and demons into energies that we can harness and put toward positive and healthy ends. Because, as we have seen, we can’t kill the monsters; in fact, we may actually need them.