Dr. Alex E. Blazer
Department of English
Georgia College & State University
Milledgeville, GA 31061
Innies, Outies, and the Unconscious: Severance's Deconstructed Psyche
Like most science fiction, the television show Severance (2022-present) begins with a thought experiment: what if we could perform the drudgery of work without experiencing it? While Dollhouse (2009-2010) took this conceit to unsettling, if not perverse, ends that challenged conscious autonomy, Severance applies it to the quotidian setting of a corporate office space.
The show's first season examines how contemporary capitalism splits the self between labor and leisure time through everyday would-be laborers becoming owners who sell their inner selves without the expenditure of (remembered) experience. However, the show's second season develops into a complex meditation on not only the nature of the self but the vicissitudes of the psyche's existence vis-a-vis both self-consciousness and the world. The second season asks,
what if we could isolate our psychological personality from our experience in and of the world? At first glance, the show suggests a straightforward innocence versus experience theory of self. The severed "innie" is a partial person abstracted from the burdens of the "outtie"'s accumulated lived existence in the world. Additional examination reveals a second model, a series of irrational, agonistic splits between id and ego, consciousness and unconscious. Sometimes, innies are unconscious desire unmolested by traumatic encounter and experience, and outties are the ego armor necessary for traversing the regular and regulated symbolic world. Literalizing the metaphor of the split psyche into distinct characters and distinguishable selves, the show, in its first two seasons, ultimately argues the existential position to take responsibility for and mediate all parts of oneself, the innocent and the experienced, the conscious and the unconscious alike, without self-denial and without self-objectification.
This abstract summarizes my presentation, "Innies, Outies, and the Unconscious: Severance's Deconstructed Psyche." Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association. Tropicana Casino & Resort, Atlantic City, NJ. 6-9 Nov. 2024.