Freud and Jack Bauer

Freud would say that in all people, including Jack Bauer, there is a level of innate bisexuality, meaning that all people are born with both male and female traits.  However, through psychosexual development, people become monosexual and assume more of the traits of one gender than the other.  Freud assigned traits to the different genders: males are active while females are passive; males have phalluses while women are castrated.  Freud would argue that a trait of males is the Oedipal complex in which men in which men desire for the destruction of one parent and are sexually attracted to the other.

In the case of Jack Bauer, I’m not positive that we see evidence of an Oedipal complex, but he is an example of Freud’s theories of sexuality and masculinity.  He is very active and certainly not passive.  When his daughter goes missing, he actively tries to find her and doesn’t passively wait by the phone like his wife (a female) does.  Jack Bauer is an example of male dominance; he’s in charge of other people and he does only what he wants to do, breaking the rules and defying authority to accomplish his goals.  He also seems to be motivated by sexual impulses, another tenet of Freudian theory.  Jack is desperate to find his daughter to improve the sexual relationship he has with his wife.  At work, he has a flirtatious relationship with one of his female coworkers.  He jeopardizes his job and uses his relationship with this woman for personal gain, demonstrating how he acts, once again, of sexual impulses.  Freud would argue that much of Jack Bauer’s masculinity is derived from the unconscious, including repressed memories from his past.  Having only watched the pilot and being unfamiliar with the remaining episodes of the series, I don’t know if Bauer’s past is discussed, but his masculine behavior would be largely derived from his past, according to Freud.