A psychoanalytic perspective — Dany’s Mad Queen turn is totally justified
I hated the writers of GoT for making Dany do things she has been threatening to do all these years. I belonged to the naive group that believed Dany won’t go the Mad King way. I always knew she wasn’t a woman of democratic-liberal values but I felt she was the benign dictator we deserved. Her full madness has left many of the fans distraught and dejected because we do tend to from time to time back benign dictators thinking they would turn out to be different, they would destroy and replace the old elite but would be beneficial for the starving masses.
We liked the writing as long as the Dragon-wielding badass queen was killing slave-keepers. No one questioned then if justice had to be always served in a spectacular way, for which D&D are being criticized now — for reducing the show into an expensive spectacle. We never suspected if she unconsciously got a kick just out of burning people when we proclaimed her “my queen”. We never asked what place do fire spewing dragons have in a just society. The pro-Dany campaign humanised the dragons. It’s almost like humanising nuclear power in the hands of crazy dictators. As long as the makers made her kill the hateful other, we were quite happy to see the roasting fest. But as the carnage hit home, all hell broke loose.
Anyway, let’s leave politics and see what’s going on in Dany’s subjective world from the psychoanalytic perspective. She has suppressed her desire to blow up cities earlier, and she indeed ended slavery in the slave cities. Then what justifies her complete surrender to her impulses when she is so close to her goal? One needs to understand the slave cities that she liberated were not part of her identity, she didn’t belong to these people. They merely satisfied her need to be seen as a liberator, worshipped, elevated in her stature. They were objects outside of her subjective self. So, she was able to take rational decisions regarding them. But the moment she looks at the red keep the subject-object dynamic changes. The red keep is a part of her identity and her inner world attaches a certain meaning to it. It’s the place her forefathers built, its her home. But it doesn’t feel like home. No one trusts or loves her in Westeros, and worse didn’t have faith in her ability to become an efficient ruler. What she is taken over by is called cognitive dissonance. This is perhaps the most likely psychic conversation happening in Dany’s mind — “this is where I belong, this is my entire being. But wait, why do the people don’t love me and trust me.” To overcome the destruction of her self and this existential crisis, she does what most rulers do — separate the land from the people that inhabit it. This enables her to unleash violence on them.
We also blame the writers for not efficiently building up Dany’s descent into madness. But that’s exactly the point. Your shadow can show up any time any where. In Jungian analysis shadow is the part of the psyche thatremains unconscious and is not owned by the individual. It’s usually some “bad” attribute like sexuality or aggression. We have been given enough glimpse of her shadow part in previous seasons. A build-up is not needed for the shadow to take over the ego consciousness. Only a trigger is needed. Jon Snow’s betrayal and the sight of the Red keep were legit triggers.
Other Jungian archetypes also come into play. Dany has lived in constant denial of her violent side from the first season while overplaying her overprotective ‘mother’ image. Despite not being one, her image was that of “mother” even if of dragons. Unlike Cersei who hyped her masculine attributes, Dany embraces her feminine side by being the nurturer of her baby dragons and the chain-breaker. But she forgets to come to terms with what Jung calls animus. In Jungian analysis animus is the masculine side of a woman. She began with the certainty “I am not my father”. And fans fall for this assumption because she came packaged as a beautiful woman with motherly qualities. In fact, a popular feminist argument is that Dany’s character has been undermined just to make a man sit on the throne. Dany’s popularity and growth as a character defies that argument. We would be foolish to consider tyranny to be a solely a masculine attribute.
Dany could have the queen we imagined her to be if her primary assumption had been “I may just become my father, but I will choose not to”. This was the nugget of advice that Dumbledore gave Harry — our choices shape who we are, and not the thoughts that cloud our mind and create internal conflicts. Which is why education and formal training are so important — something completely missing in Dany’s journey. Without Dumbeldore and his training in Hogwards, Harry could also have become Voldemort. Closer GoT, we have Arya to demonstrate the importance of a mentor in your life. The teachings passed on to her by Ned Stark, her step brother Jon Snow, Syrio, and Jaqen H’ghar grounds her and helps her retain her humanity despite being one of the most skilled assassins in Westeros.
The hatred against D&D following the airing of Episode 5 is unprecedented. The denial among Dany’s livid fans has reached a frenzied and delusional level — three lakh people have signed a petition for the last season to be remade. Even though, D&D have given us for all these years some of the most spectacular moments on television, the directors are more hated than any of the real bad people in the world. But again this follows the usual script. That’s how followers of dictators rationalize the acts of their leader by projecting the evil of their leader on some external factor.
Even as the fans struggle to come to terms with the madness of their queen and the zero possibility of any redemption henceforth, the show will end the way the directors want it to. It’s their story, after all . What the outrage over the penultimate episode has revealed is that we might hate being roasted but we certainly don’t mind living under the threat of fear of being roasted if the one wielding the fire is charismatic and talks about delivering justice from a different kind of tyranny that we have grown bored of.
