Transformation of Personality

The Superego under the Impact of Confrontation with Death

Freud (1923) defined the superego not only as heir to the oedipus complex, but also as the expression of the id’s most powerful impulses and libidinal vicissitudes. Normally the superego suppresses cannibalistic, murderous, and incestuous impulses. Under favorable conditions, the superego has an organizing function, promoting ego development and reality testing (Freud 1923, 1924; Jacobson 1964; Stein 1966; Bergmann 1982). Traumatic circumstances have a dramatic impact on the superego, and if this psychic structure is damaged, it is unable to prevent these impulses’ being experienced or acted on.

I will now examine the formation of Walter’s and Laevsky’s superegos, and their respective transformations under the threat of death, which was the principal cause of their metamorphosis. Let us first analyze the premorbid personalities of these men and their superego functioning before their confrontations with death. With respect to the capacity to work and the ability to love, Laevsky and Walter appear to be quite different: Laevsky does not work because he is lazy and lacks the incentive to function as a mature and independent individual. His dependency on his mother, who provides him money to live on, as well as on his creditors, shows his inability to individuate and grow. He feels trapped in his miserable self, from which he also tries to escape (Kogan 2007a). Unable to love, to be emotionally committed, he becomes bored with Nadya after a short infatuation and feels suffocated by their togetherness. Before his transformation, Laevsky experiences life as empty and meaningless.

Walter, by contrast, loves his wife and son, and strives tirelessly to support his family. His past success in his field has not prevented him from working as a low-salaried teacher, or even from taking a menial job in a car wash to supplement his earnings. Walter is also completely loyal to his former student and current partner in crime, Jesse Pinkman. He protects Jesse and saves his life, risking his own in the process. Reviewers have suggested that Walter’s love for Jesse stems from his egotistical wish to replace his crippled son with a healthy child. In my view, however, Jesse is no less crippled than Walter Jr. Totally rejected by his parents, Jesse has been pushed into the world of drugs, becoming a junkie and a psychological cripple.

Walter loves Jesse, I believe, because this former student who had failed his chemistry class becomes his own teacher in the underworld. In this role-reversal it is Walter, the brilliant scientist, who shows little aptitude for dealing with the problems encountered by drug dealers on the street; now it is Jesse’s turn to teach him the laws of survival. It is possible also that by protecting Jesse, Walter is helping the lost and abandoned aspect of his younger self.

All this suggests that Laevsky has a weak superego and that Walter’s is much stronger. If so, how then could the threat of death have had such a strong impact on Walter’s superego, causing its deformation and turning him into a criminal? And if Laevsky’s is so weak, how does his near-death experience lead to maturity? I believe that the answer to these questions lies in the childhood experience of the two protagonists, which we can infer from the few historical facts we are given regarding their early years.

In Walter’s case, we may well speculate whether there was any evidence of delinquent or violent tendencies earlier in his life, and whether they had ever found expression before the cancer diagnosis. Did he take or perhaps deal in drugs as an adolescent? And did he choose a profession in chemistry because of an interest in poisonous, addictive, and explosive substances? ²

The television series does not present the audience with answers to these questions. I wish to raise the hypothesis that one of the main reasons for Walter’s inability to confront deterioration and death is his traumatic experience, at the age of four, of his father’s illness and death, at the very height of the boy’s oedipal phase. Walter remembers his father as a man horribly crippled by illness. He attempts to avoid a repetition of the same fate, preferring to die a violent death as a “soldier killed in action” in the criminal world. He believes his own violent death will be less traumatic for his son than a slow deterioration as his body succumbs to illness. Witness the following speech to Walter Jr.:

[My father] had Huntington’s disease. It destroys portions of the brain, affects muscle control, and leads to dementia. It’s just a nasty disease. It’s genetic. Terrified my mother that I might have it, so they ran tests on me when I was a kid, but I came up clean. My father fell very ill when I was four, five. Spent a lot of time in the hospital. My, heh, my mother would tell me so many stories about my father. I mean, she would talk about him all the time. . . . I only have one real actual memory of my father. It must have been right before he died. My mother would take me to the hospital to visit him. And I remember the smell in there. The chemicals. It was as if they used every single cleaning product they could find in a fifty-mile radius, like they didn’t want you smelling the sick people. There was this stench of Lysol and bleach, you could just feel it coating your lungs. Anyway, there lying on the bed is my father. And he’s all . . . he’s all twisted up. . . . And he’s looking right at me, but I can’t even be sure he knows who I am. And your grandmother is talking, trying to be cheerful as she does, but the only thing I could remember is him breathing. There was this . . . this rattling sound, like if you were shaking an empty spray paint can. Like there was nothing in him. Anyway, that is the only real memory that I have of my father. . . . I don’t want that to be the memory you have of me when I’m gone [Breaking Bad, Salud (Season 4, Episode 10)].

In my view, Walter’s inability to mourn his father’s loss has had a great impact on the formation of his superego. Walter as a boy was unable to elaborate his complex, ambivalent feelings regarding his father’s illness and death in order to achieve a satisfactory resolution of his oedipus complex. He may have felt guilty for hating his father in his pitiful condition, and being unable to identify with a strong father left him with a weak, fragile superego. His present condition, the terrifying prospect of humiliation and eventual death, has revivified Walter’s experience of his father’s illness, which only now becomes traumatic (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967). ³ Walter’s murderous childhood fantasies with regard to his father overwhelm him now with the realization of his potential destructiveness. Unconsciously convinced that he was the cause of his father’s death, Walter becomes a murderer in reality. The confrontation with death, which revivifies his old trauma, damages his superego to the point that it is no longer capable of controlling his murderous impulses. Thus, under the threat of being killed, by enemies and allies alike, Walter’s inability to relate to others—his marked loss of empathy (Grubrich-Simitis 1981) and subsequent incapacity to cathect his victims—becomes manifest (Bergmann 1982). Looking only to his own survival, he identifies with the aggressor.

Moreover, the damage to the organizing function of Walter’s superego may have caused a split ego: Walter’s behavior is destructuralized into a pattern of overt normal behavior (at school, with his family) and secret criminal behavior, despite the fact that before his confrontation with death asocial tendencies were never observed in his professional or personal life. His split ego enables Walter to manipulate an otherwise intolerable reality by simultaneously accepting and denying it.

Let me now turn to Laevsky’s superego and the transformation it undergoes as a result of his near-death experience. In my view, Laevsky has suffered from a split superego, ⁴ represented by the two protagonists of this novella: the weak and castrated Laevsky (before the duel) and the harsh and punitive Von Koren. The powerful conflict between polarized aspects of the superego is expressed in the feud between these characters.

Laevsky’s weak superego is reflected in the way he lives his life. He borrows money he knows he will never return, makes promises he will never fulfill, lies to himself and to all his friends, and constantly seeks fulfillment of his own needs, being incapable of considering those of others. The harsh, punitive aspect of his superego is expressed by his low self-esteem (Zetzel 1968) and consequent depression (Waldhorn 1960). Sharing his feelings with Samoylenko, his only friend, Laevsky says, “I am an empty, insignificant, fallen man! The air that I breathe is made up of wine, of love, in a word my life up to now has been the purchasing of over-priced nothingness, merriment and cowardice. Up to now I have deceived other people and myself, I have suffered as a result of this, and my sufferings have been cheap and vulgar. . . . I hold myself in contempt and hate myself ” (p.73).

Laevsky is a depressed person who feels existentially castrated and worthless. A childish man, he is still financially dependent on his mother. It seems he has never resolved his oedipal attraction to his mother, and has never given up his desire to destroy his father, as reflected in his denial of destructive wishes toward Nadya’s husband, a substitute father figure. When informed of his death, he says, “As for the husband, it’s possible that I may have been, in a circumstantial sense, one of the reasons for his death, but again, am I to blame for having fallen in love with his wife and the wife with me?” (p. 22). Two earlier love affairs we know of also had an oedipal character. As a young student he lived with a lady who served as a parental figure; later on he lived with a prostitute (a woman who belongs to other men).

Laevsky is stuck in his pathological mourning. He is aware of his empty, depraved life but prefers to regard himself as the victim of civilization, or as Hamlet, a tragic figure, rather as than a simple scoundrel. Von Koren hates Laevsky and despises his depraved lifestyle. He considers Laevsky not only worthless, but also as having a dangerous impact on others. He believes that Laevsky’s vices—gambling, alcohol, promiscuity—are contagious. In Von Koren’s view, Laevsky is a “narcissistic, low and wretched animal,” an actor and cunning hypocrite, a “cholera microbe” (p. 26), or a “macaque” (p. 32) that threatens civilization. He goes so far as to express the view that for the benefit of mankind, those with personality flaws like Laevsky’s should be extinguished: “when the Laevksy reproduces, civilization will collapse and mankind will completely deteriorate” (p. 36).

Laevsky, for his part, brings serious accusations against Von Koren. He considers him “a rigid despot who relates to people as puppies . . . slaves, cannon fodder, beasts of burden; some he’d annihilate, others he’d put to the screws of discipline. . . . he’d station eunuchs to guard our chastity and morality, ordering anyone that falls outside the narrow circle of our conservative morals to be shot, and all this in the name of improving the human race” (p. 73).

Both Laevsky and Von Koren need a benevolent container into which they can pour all the hatred and contempt they feel toward each other. This container is their mutual friend, Samoylenko, a doctor. Samoylenko loves both his friends, and attempts to temper their aggressive attacks on each other. He especially tries to defend Laevsky against the brutal Von Koren, saying that Laevsky is an intelligent and sensitive man, indeed “an honorable man.” Samoylenko takes the stance that the individual, despite all his flaws, is much more important than the abstract ideal of civilization. To Von Koren’s murderous demand that Laevsky be drowned or hanged for the benefit of society, he answers, “If it is people who are doing the drowning and the hanging, then to hell with your civilization, to hell with mankind!” (p. 37).

In my view, Laevsky’s love for Samoylenko, the educated, humane, and hardworking doctor, reflects his strong longing for a father. Laevsky perceives Samoylenko as his savior, and when in deep distress runs to him for support. For Laevsky, Samoylenko is his ego ideal. Elaboration of his near-death experience, consequent on the duel, helps Laevsky realize the finality of life, an important factor that can lead to growth and maturation. Laevsky’s maturation includes a process of identification with Samoylenko, a substitute father, as a result of which his superego eventually becomes stronger and more integrated.

The Inability to Mourn and the Use of Manic Defenses

Mourning is the conglomerate of favorable processes that develop in the face of loss. ⁵ It is necessary because it permits us to relinquish attachments and attitudes that have lost their realistic usefulness, thus facilitating growth and development. Freud (1912–1913) defined the outcome of mourning as follows: “The task of mourning is to detach the survivor’s memories and hopes from the dead” (p. 65). Anna Freud (1960) later refined this definition: “mourning, taken in the analytical sense, is the individual’s effort to accept a fact in the external world (the loss of the cathected object), and to effect corresponding changes in the inner world (withdrawal from the lost object)” (p. 58). Bowlby (1960) saw mourning as the psychological process set in motion by loss of the loved object and suggested that it commonly leads to relinquishment of the object.

Having examined the mourning process for nearly two decades, Pollock (1978) concluded that it is not linked absolutely to object loss.5 Instead, it is “a universal adaptational series of intrapsychic operations occurring in sequential successive stages involved in the reestablishment of a new level of internal and related external equilibrium” (p. 262). These operations occur at different stages of change throughout a person’s development and can be interpreted as responses to threats to one’s integrity and self-identity, forcing the individual to suffer deeply painful affects. Like Pollock, Grinberg (1978) maintains that mourning is not linked exclusively to object loss, but to growth as well, and to the passage from one stage of life to another. This process involves the loss of certain attitudes, ways of life, and relationships that, though replaced by other, more developed ones, nonetheless evoke pain and mourning.

One of Walter’s prominent character traits when confronted with deterioration and death is his inability to mourn, to be emotionally in contact with the narcissistic hurt and impotence accompanying his terminal illness. Unable to accept the finality of life, he becomes fixated in an absence of conscious grieving (Bowlby 1980)—that is, a state of pathological mourning. Similarly, Laevsky is unable to mourn his lost childhood and mature, to feel responsibility and guilt, always longing to be fed by those around him.

Walter’s awareness of mourning is impeded by his depressive anxiety, pain, and “persecutory guilt” (Grinberg 1964). ⁶ He attempts to counteract these feelings, which could flood his ego, by reverting to “manic defenses” (Freud 1917; Klein 1935; Winnicott 1935; Ogden 1986; Burch 1989; Grinberg 1992; Akhtar 2001; Kogan 2007b). His principal manic defenses are denial and omnipotence. He denies the destructive purpose of his “scientific activities,” and also the pleasure he feels in this omnipotent position.

As a result of his success in the drug world, Walter’s perception of himself changes. Whereas in the past he considered himself a failure in the professional and financial realms, he now regards himself as an indispensable scientist in a large enterprise, an affluent man, and a successful lord in a challenging world. As I have noted, in his new life in the underworld, Walter adopts an alias to conceal his identity. Changing his name to Heisenberg, he becomes a different person. The “commercial” name he has chosen for himself, Werner Heisenberg, reflects Walter’s omnipotent and megalomaniacal fantasies. These fantasies are perhaps the result of the gap between his diminished professional and financial circumstances and his remarkable past success as a researcher in proton radiography. It is only in the confrontation with death that these fantasies become compelling, forcing Walter to achieve a distorted narcissistic triumph, unconstrained by his superego.

Although in the criminal world Walter’s life is constantly threatened, he is no longer a helpless victim of cancer but a powerful, omnipotent man never shrinking from danger. Walter focuses on escaping death, and in doing so discovers his resilience—his courage, scientific creativity, and brilliant cognitive capacities.

I believe that Walter’s courage stems from his unconscious wish to come close to death in order to overcome it (Kogan 1995, 2007b). His is not a passive survival, but rather a constant struggle with impending death, against which he must mobilize life forces and remain active. Walter’s feeling of humiliation when his son tries to raise money on the internet for his medical treatments clearly reflects this: “No, no, it cannot be blind luck or some imaginary relative who saves us. No, I earned that money. Me! And now my son created his own website—SaveWalterWhite.com. Soliciting anonymous donations. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel?” (Breaking Bad, Phoenix [Season 2, Episode 12]).

Walter uses manic defenses to avoid the depression accompanying the decay of his diseased body, the vulnerability caused by his wife’s betrayal, and the humiliation of losing his teaching job. The libidinal arousal accompanying his “flirtation” with death transforms his dejected feelings into feelings of excitement. The manic defenses—his omnipotence as an invincible drug lord, the denial of his illness—are antidotes to the pain and mourning that often accompany emotional awareness of one’s pitiful situation.

Unexpectedly for Walter, this mobilization of life forces helps him get his illness under control. When, at the doctor’s office, he discovers that his cancer has not spread and his tumor has actually shrunk by 80 percent, Walter suddenly must deal with the fact that death is no longer imminent. It has moved to some point in the future, and he must now live with his criminal behavior. But having a future is extremely difficult for him, because his antisocial way of life, the result of his deformed superego, has centered on the here and now rather than on anything to come.

Like Walter, Laevsky comes close to death and overcomes it. But Laevsky’s encounter has a totally different impact on his personality. Laevsky’s survival awakens his ability to work and love, and revivifies his dead, castrated self. The shock of a bullet grazing his neck enables him to shake off his depression and mobilize his dormant life forces. Whereas Walter mobilizes his forces in the service of destruction and omnipotence, Laevsky gathers his to rebuild himself and his relationships with those who love him.

In contrast to Walter, who uses manic defenses to confront death, Laevsky uses them to confront life. But like Walter, he wishes to avoid the pain and mourning that accompany emotional awareness of his difficult situation. His manic defenses—gambling, drinking, debauchery—have long helped him counter his depression. They have also served to deny his feelings of self-hate and despair when confronted with his inability to deal with life in a mature way. Unlike Walter, Laevsky has focused on an escape from life; only after his near-death experience does he discover his ability to give and receive love, his ability to work, and his cognitive capacities.

The struggles of both of these men against mourning contain an adaptive aspect (Akhtar 2001; Kogan 2007b) that keeps them from drowning in the despair that often accompanies emotional pain and narcissistic hurt. Their struggles help them survive both physically and psychically. They do, however, pay a high price for their survival: it leaves them with morally castrated selves. But whereas Walter mobilizes manic defenses in his encounter with death, this same encounter enables Laevsky to mourn his lost childhood and achieve individuation and growth.

The Fear of Death

Because Walter’s metamorphosis occurs during his confrontation with death, I believe that his decision to manufacture and distribute drugs on a broad scale has been largely determined by his fear of death and his defenses against it. I have reviewed the topic of the fear of death at length elsewhere (Kogan 2010). Here I will briefly summarize the literature.

Freud (1914) postulates that the narcissistic wound caused by our mortality is at the core of the inevitable tendency to avoid facing death. I find this view relevant to Walter, who avoids facing death because his narcissism does not allow the decay accompanying the terminability of life. In Erikson’s terms, Walter’s fear of death has damaged the integrity of his ego (1959, p. 98), thus causing the split between his overt normal behavior in school and with his family, and his secret criminal behavior.

Freud was aware that fear of the inevitable end surely exists, though it is mostly denied. In his writings, he searches for the origins of this phenomenon: In The Ego and the Id (1923, p. 58) and in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926, p. 130), Freud claims that one source of the fear of death (Todesangst) is the fear of castration, which he regards as analogous.

In my view, Walter experiences the helplessness caused by his illness as a castration. To defend against it, he uses manic defenses that involve taking chances, risking danger, and doing things he has thought himself incapable of.

As I have said, Laevsky is more afraid of life than of death. He is like a naughty child, self-centered and inconsiderate of others’ needs. Until his near-death experience, he is unable to realize the finiteness of life. Viewed through a Kohutian lens, Walter is unable to achieve a progressive self-definition by accepting his limitations in his confrontation with death. Narcissistically wounded by his illness, he is unable to achieve wisdom, a “cosmic narcissism” that transcends individual narcissism and results in a calm acceptance of mortality (Kohut 1966, pp. 265–266). Paradoxically, the poisonous drug he makes for others becomes an antidote to his own fear of death. From the same perspective, Laevsky too is narcissistically wounded and unable to accept his limitations. His self-destructiveness stems from an inability to find meaning in life.

Walter’s pursuit of risky situations is accompanied by sexual arousal, as depicted in several episodes of the series. Thus, for Walter, coming close to death in order to overcome it has a libidinal component (Kogan 1995). In Laevsky’s case as well, the encounter with death makes him gather his libidinal forces and counter the death forces inside himself, but in a different way. The encounter helps him realize the meaning of life, enabling him to love, mourn his losses, move on, and develop.

Ambivalence to and Acceptance of Change

Walter’s moral dilemma begins the moment his prospect of living improves. It is only now that he begins to hear the voice of his normative superego ordering him to stop his criminal activities. To Gus Fring’s very tempting offer of three million dollars for three months of work, he answers: “I’m making a change in my life . . . and I’m at something of a crossroads and it’s brought me to a realization: I’m not a criminal. No offense to any people who are, but . . . this is not me” (Breaking Bad, No Mas [Season 3, Episode 1]).

However, Walter’s moral dilemma indicates that he cannot completely deny the impact of his actions on the world around him—he is hurting the people who use his drugs, as well as the people he cares about. This voice is reinforced by that of Jesse Pinkman, who using foul language imparts to him a deep philosophical truth: “Some straight like you, giant stick up his ass, age what? Sixty? He’s just gonna break bad?” (Breaking Bad, Pilot [Season 1, Episode 1]). Jesse means that Walter cannot start breaking the law after living a life in which laws have always been obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. In another episode, Jesse elaborates: “You may know a lot about chemistry, man, but you don’t know jack about slangin’ dope” (Breaking Bad, Crazy Handful of Nothin’ [Season 1, Episode 6]). Jesse claims that Walter’s “nature” will stop him from being bad, and that Walter will fail in the attempt to complete his conversion from a normative person to a crime lord.

I would question Jesse’s statement, however. Is it true that a person cannot “decide” to change from a normative, law-abiding person to a criminal because of a firewall (the superego) within the personality that makes it impossible? Does the superego remain constant under all circumstances, or might a confrontation with death bring about its deformation, relative to its previous strength?

Many of the reviews of Breaking Bad deal with the issue of Walter’s transformation mainly from the philosophical and theological point of view. For example, Chuck Klosterman (2012) states that the central question of Breaking Bad is “What makes a man ‘bad’—his actions, his motives, or his conscious decision to be a bad person?” Klosterman concludes that in the world of Breaking Bad, goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, like anything else.

Ross Douthat (2012) maintains that Breaking Bad is a “morality play” that focuses on “moral agency” and the problem of evil, damnation, and free will. Walter, in Douthat’s view, is a man who “deliberately abandons the light for the darkness.” His transformation involves his fundamental core, and is the result of his own free will. At some point, Walter decides to become bad.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, I would maintain that since Walter’s metamorphosis occurs during his confrontation with death, his transformation is not simply the result of a conscious decision. In contrast to Klosterman and Douthat, my view is that his antisocial behavior is due primarily to the deformation of his superego under the threat of death, his pathological mourning, and his use of manic defenses.

Walter’s rationale for “breaking bad” is to pay for his medical treatment and ensure his family’s future. Only in the final episode is he able to give up this pretense and face the bitter truth. Talking to Skyler, he says: “I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And . . . I was . . . really . . . I was alive” (Breaking Bad, Felina [Season 5, Episode 13]).

Like Walter, Laevsky’s attitude to change is also ambivalent. He believes his awareness of his flaws will help him change: “I am happy that I clearly see my shortcomings and own up to them. It will help me be reborn and be a different man” (p. 74). Despite this hope for rebirth, however, he makes no effort to change his ways until his close encounter with death.