How and why do we get so attached to a show, a character and a world that isn’t real?
“The reason science fiction in general works is it explores
psychological and societal themes, but in a fantasy world where you can
explore them in ways that’s more difficult in real life. So you explore
gender identities, ideas of aging, ideas of death, all in ways that
allow a different angle by not being tied by realism,” Paddy O’Donnell,
Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow, explains.
For children, they’re struggling for independence from the parent and
to explore, but as O’Donnell explains, “they’re worried about safety.
So what they need is a safe place in which they can explore those
issues.
“Doctor Who starts with a police box, which isn’t really a police
box. It’s coloured blue, which is the colour of calm and motherhood. So
it’s a kind of mother. It is the mother ship. It protects while
allowing exploration all of these dangerous universes. The Tardis
itself is a safe base in which to explore the world,” O’Donnell adds.
On the Doctor himself, O’Donnell notes the importance of his asexual characteristics.
“The Doctor is interesting because he manages to combine excitement
with security. The first thing about the Doctor is that he’s not going
to sexually attack you. One of the reasons he’s not going to exploit you
is because he’s not even really human – he’s a Time Lord and we don’t
know if Time Lords even have sex at all. That device is actually quite
important as it takes him out of the sexual competition game.
“The Doctor combines both masculinity and warmth – they’re attractive
but not in an aggressive masculine way. It used to be more of a father
figure, but more recently they’ve gone for a younger but slightly
vulnerable male. He doesn’t dress in a very sexy way. It’s not kind of
medallion and a hairy chest and all of that kind of stuff. He doesn’t
leer at you. His body language is non-sexual. All of them adopt certain
mannerisms that make him appear a trifle weird, just a little bit
robotic or other-worldly,” O’Donnell adds.
Both adults and children seek an attachment object, which the Doctor himself offers.
“The Doctor meets your basic needs. You project yourself into this
world and he meets your basic needs. Those basic needs are to provide
excitement while protecting you. The attachment object is the Doctor.
“The easiest way to activate an attachment need is to put someone
under threat. New horror movies frighten you but provide no attachment,
or they frighten you and give you an attachment object that you move
towards which then destroys you. Doctor Who stops at that point. It
always reassures that the attachment object is there. The attachment
objects aren’t just there to reassure you, but to allow you to continue
to explore,” O’Donnell explains.
Once you’ve set up this environment in which fear can be explored,
you need to introduce fear, which traditionally has been the Cybermen
and the Daleks. Doctor Who explores fears that are to do with children’s
own deep psychological needs.
“The childish fear is that you’re suddenly being brought up by
aliens. There is an emotional base in that for children, an angry adult
is a terrifying object – they become a monster. Being suddenly
confronted with something that was human and suddenly seems alien and
abhorrent is actually a very childish fear and the Daleks and Cybermen
are a representation of this fear. They get put in their place because
you can escape this fear.
“I suppose the need is to be reassured that the world is human, that
bad things in the end don’t happen. Of course one of the features of the
Time Lord is that he never dies, he might go away but he always comes
back. The attachment bond is never fractured,” says O’Donnell.
One of the advantages of attracting a range of viewers is that Doctor Who can offer different things to different viewers.
Adults can identify with the Doctor as somebody who is a super-human
child protector. “All parents think they have superhuman powers to
protect their children. In the fantasy we all believe that – our
children will suffer no serious fate because we can stop the world
getting to them. It’s a delusion that I think every mother and father
has.”
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