Dead to Me Season 2: Guilt is the Culprit

 

If you, like me, have been feeling that Dead to Me Season 2 is a guilty pleasure, rest assured that it is also a primer in guilt.  The first few episodes seem to be filler – getting us back into the swing of things, reminding us of who the characters are, and cementing the relationship between Jen (Christina Applegate who is also the executive producer of the show) and Judy (Linda Cardellini) and Jen’s two boys and establishing this modern family unit as the central group.  Added to this is the surprise appearance of the murdered Steve Woods’ near identical twin Ben (both played by James Marsden).   This last entrance helps clarify that we are watching a Soap Opera – especially as Ben is the “good” twin and Steve was the “evil” twin.  That this is a Soap Opera is underlined by the number of main characters who sleep together and the way that seemingly minor characters either become main characters or show up to or three segments later to underscore an important plot element.

 

In my comments on the first season, I noted the absence of back stories.  These finally start to come thick and fast in the end of the second season, and the underlying psychoanalytic logic of the series starts to emerge.  Remember that Judy met Jen, whose husband she had murdered with her car, in a grief group.  Judy lied about her grief, claiming that her husband had died of a heart attach when, in fact her fiancée, the “evil” twin Steve, had dumped her after insisting that she not go to the police about the accident.  Judy feels terrible guilt about what she has done to Judy, but her guilty relationship brings more grief to Jen than redemption, at least at first, as Steve’s dogged pursuit of Judy leads him to confront Jen and she reactively kills him at the end of the first season – a crime that also goes unreported and provides the drive for the second season that Jen's husband's death provided for the first season.

 

It should come as no surprise then (though I have to admit that I didn’t see this coming) that there are layers of guilt for Jen and Judy that precede the current imbroglio they create for themselves.  Both harbor tremendous guilt that stems from their relationships with their mothers – and one way of thinking about this guilt is that it is unresolved grief. 

 

Judy’s grief and guilt is, not surprisingly given how much difficulty she has in getting her life on track, much deeper and more difficult than Jen’s.  It parallels Jen’s in that both feel guilt over the anger they feel towards a parent who disappointed them before they, each in their own way, lost that parent.  Both secretly blame their parent for failing them, while simultaneously being doggedly loyal to them, and, to a certain extent, less in Judy’s case, idealizing them.

 

The conflict they feel about their guilt – the sense that they must keep their anger hidden (at least intermittently unconscious and/or out of their “public” narrative) binds them tightly to their parents as Freud described in his 1917 book, Mourning and Melancholia.  In a very dense sentence he says, “Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalence [in melancholia] loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it.”

 

What Freud is saying is that mourning or grieving is a process where we give up our ties to the objects (people who now live in our minds), but that melancholia, depression, or “pathology” involves hanging onto the object by “as it were” killing it – which only loosens but doesn’t sever the tie to the object.  We stay stuck to the object, banging away at it while also hanging onto it - not letting it go.  

 

The dilemma is that we can’t live without connection – both to people in our current world – Jen and Judy cling to each other (often against Jen’s better judgement) even though they have done terrible things to each other because they need a friend in a very cruel and unforgiving world.  But they are clinging rather than simply connecting in part because they, ironically, haven’t let go of the objects that still haunt them.  They haven’t in the words of the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald, allowed ghosts to become ancestors.  It is the guilt that they feel that is forever blunting their ability to see the world, including the people in the world who would do them harm, in unrealistic ways.  They keep hoping that this time the other will actually be the one that they can count on, and blind themselves to the ways in which they are not.

 

So, Judy relies on Ben who tells her not to come clean – but she feels badly about Jen and so connects with her.  Only in the context of that relationship can she see the problems with Ben’s exerting harmful control over her.  Jen cannot come clean about her murder of Ben to the authorities because she fears that she will, in being arrested and incarcerated, abandon her children (who have already lost their father) as her mother abandoned her.  She avoids identifying with her mother.  She doesn’t come clean to Judy because she feels guilty about having harmed someone that Judy loved, no matter how ambivalently.  Again, she doesn’t want to be seen by Judy the way that she views her mother.  She feels tied to her mother and feels that others will react to her as she has reacted to her mother.

 

Surprisingly, it is Judy, in this second season, that comes to terms with her guilt.  She recognizes that her feelings towards her mother are not something to be ashamed of, but reasonable reactions to her.  She is able to see her as she really is.   This is surprising because Judy is the one who is always seeing the good in people – even the evil twin – perhaps because she has had to wall herself off from her mother to keep herself from her mother’s evilness – this has left her with a wall within herself that protects her from seeing the bad in others.  Perhaps it is because she has come to see that Jen – despite being a good and well intentioned person – is also bad.  Not just a little bad, but murdering bad, and is still good, that she can see the ways in which her mother’s badness is not, in fact, balanced by good.

 

This would (whether it is the intent of the writers or not) parallel the psychoanalytic therapeutic process where the patient’s realization of the analyst’s flaws – the deidealization of the analyst – facilitates a more balanced views of others – just because they have good qualities does not make the perfect, but also, paradoxically, this realization also helps analysand's mourn relationships with people who have been less than perfect – it helps them realize that those who have been harmful are not necessarily evil – or, in Judy’s case, to finally see that those whose primary intent to harm are not essentially good – at least not currently and in relationship to her – but that doesn’t mean that she is bad.  She can still be good and recognize that they are bad.

 

So, at the heart of this soap opera is a very deep and compelling truth.  How will this play out in season three?  Will Jen get hit with this kind of realization as well?  Or will she end up in the slammer?  In addition to articulating psychological truth, the writers of this saga are interested in more seasons, so stay tuned, there is certainly more guilt laden binge watching to come!

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