That's not so Thanatos, Daddy

“Hobo Daddy,” tonight’s episode of Dr. Phil focused entirely on the story of Kayla, and her Father Jerry, who left when she was a young child to live life as a homeless hobo, floating up and down the Mississippi River. We also learned how Jerry had treated his son, and Kayla’s older brother, like a friend, partying and drinking with him when he was only 14 or 15. Later, when Jerry had begun his itinerant life, Micah became embroiled in drug problems, committing suicide and effectively abandoning his own family. Kayla and her mother both blamed Jerry for Micah’s problems. With such a confused, envious daughter and a wild, norm-defying father, the Oedipus complex might be a good place to start. On the other hand, we might also want to consider theories like Lacan’s jouissance or Name of the Father, in light of Jerry’s perpetual, rambling journey and Kayla’s apparent dependence on a paternal image to allow signification and prevent psychosis. It is implied that the show is meant to be told from the Kayla’s perspective (already an incestuous, taboo turn for a traditionally objective science) and yet, quite often, Jerry comes across as the hero. He thinks of himself as “a modern day Huck Finn,” appears as the protagonist in a documentary about his life as a hobo, and appears on the show as a genuinely naïve, well-meaning, foreigner. One way to theorize across the teleological and ontological river that seems to be dividing the father and daughter, without unduly privileging one over the other—as Dr. Phil had great trouble doing, first chastising Jerry and sympathizing with Kayla, then adopting the opposite view—would be to consider the relationship as that between Eros and Thanatos. First developed as a psychoanalytic concept by Freud, the idea is that human nature is in constant conflict between the drive for life and the drive for death, Eros and Thanatos respectively. Eros, the drive for life involves repetitive, compulsory (and, perhaps counter-intuitively, often discontented) compulsions for life, sex, art, and wholeness. Thanatos, conversely, is characterized by the drive to repeat unpleasant events from one’s past, to cause destruction, to revert to an earlier state, and to seek death. In seeking death, however, the drive is really seeking an end to chaos and diverse sensations in favor of finality and the cessation of inordinate pain. For the most part, Jerry seemed to personify Eros, living the Romantic life on the river, drinking, constantly reminding people to live their life, emotionally lucid, and giving birth not only to Kayla and Micah, but also a film. Kayla seems more obsessed with the drive toward death. She constantly relives not only Micah’s death, but all the unhappy moments of her life. It appeared to be a compulsory need for destruction which caused her to angrily shout out things like “I’m fine—this is about Micah!” “I could never abandon [my own] kids!” and “you’re not my father!” From the death drive’s point of view, Kayla is fine, unable to abandon her kids, and fatherless. Not because she’s a better person, but because she’s the dead one. If not reliving her past memories as the ghost of her three-year-old self, she’s projecting herself onto the dead brother. This binary is in no way frozen, or complete, however, but this seems to be an important issue, if not the implicit subterranean cause, of the entire model. There is, of course, a perspective where Jerry is the one seeking death (via alcohol, drugs, and danger) while Kayla seeks life. It is this struggle which causes the conflict between the two instincts, and between the two main guests on tonight’s show. It also helps to explain why the usually rigid and confident Dr. Phil had trouble picking sides. Ultimately, this is relationship between life and death drive is also an important concern or contributing factor in topics as various as Jung’s (significantly different) conception of the motherly archetype of Eros or Lacan’s idea of jouissance. Similarly, this concept might be revealing when applied to the reasoning and reasoners behind the energetic hero-worshiping of (read as: “long live”) Dr. Phil and those who wish he’d just shut up, or die.