Supernatural, By Sigmund Freud

When my friend first prompted me to watch the show Supernatural, I assumed that it was just going to be another mind-numbing television show. I could not have been more wrong. I had no idea that beneath the action and plots were the shadows of various philosophies. The pilot episode opens up with a young man named Sam Winchester studying at Stanford University. He seems to be no more than a law student with a girlfriend, but everything changes when Sam’s older brother, Dean, comes asking for Sam’s help. Dean and Sam spent their entire childhood with their father, traveling around the country hunting monsters. When Sam and his father disagreed about Sam’s future, Sam left Dean and their father and went to Stanford. After several years without

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Freud developed his “depth psychology,” or psychoanalysis. As a way of treating mental disorders, Freud formed a type of therapy out of his psychoanalysis, which he called “the archaeology of the soul.” Psychologists who practice this form of psychotherapy dig through a patient’s repressed memories and bring them to light. According to Freud, all of our memories are stored somewhere in our subconscious. In order to help their patients, psychologists must force the patients the face these memories: “The analyst can perhaps discover an unhappy experience that the patient has tried to suppress for many years […] gnawing away at the patient’s resources. By bringing a ‘traumatic experience’ into the conscious mind […] he or she can help the patient ‘be done with it’” (Gaarder 427). Freud believes that the best way to treat a mental disorder caused by trauma in the subconscious is to face it. In the episode “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Sam is locked within himself and forced to face the part of his soul that had served as Lucifer’s vessel, and the part that had endured the

Gordon’s generalizing that all monsters deserve to die demonstrates the ideas of Rule Utilitarianism when he uses his past experiences as a guide that will produce the best possible outcome. In addition, when Sam must confront the parts of himself that were contained behind the wall in his mind, Freud’s concept of repressed memories is displayed by his needing to face the memories he has repressed in order to recover. Finally, when Dean refuses to take the life of a little girl when acting as Death, he learns from the consequences of his action that everything happens for a reason, and that the laws of nature are inescapable. When spending an entire Saturday watching Supernatural, one might miss many of the underlying deep and philosophical concepts laced throughout the plot of each episode. The philosophies of Freud, the Utilitarians, and the Stoics are only a few of the concepts that shadow the plots of the show. If this holds true, then it must be wondered what philosophical concepts can be applied to other seemingly mind-numbing television