We Have To Go Back: Lost and the Unconscious

Lost is one of the best portraits of the unconscious I've ever seen on screen. I don't think the writers set out to make it one. Somewhere in six seasons of smoke monsters and hatches, they built a cast of characters with remarkably distinct personality structures. There is the obsessional who can't stop fixing, the hysteric who runs from being known, and the believer who needs the world to have chosen him. There is the con man who became the man who ruined his family, and the leader who rules by pretending to know.

The whole series is about letting go. The characters crash into an Island that keeps returning what they buried, and they have to find their way through that inner jungle before it will let them out.

What I love most is how the show ends for each of them. Their problems never get neatly solved, and nobody is suddenly cured. Instead, in their final moments, each of them makes a choice. Charlie writes a message on his hand. Sayid picks up the bomb. Jack puts the stone back. Ben stays outside the church because he isn't ready. Their histories are still there. What changes is that they finally act on their own desire, instead of repeating the old pattern.

This mini book opens with the Island as a picture of the unconscious, and then the myth of two brothers and the mother who raised them. It goes on to break down eleven characters, each one showing a different way the mind defends itself. It ends with a note on treatment: what it means, in Lost and in analysis, for something to finally be finished.

I wrote it so that anyone can read it, whether or not they know the show. If you've watched Lost, though, it comes alive in a different way, because you'll recognise every scene.