ADOLESCENCE - JUNGIAN ANALYSIS OF NETFLIX'S SERIE
- Solange Bertolotto Schneider
- Apr 15
- 11 min read
Updated: Apr 17
ADOLESCENCE - JUNGIAN ANALYSIS OF NETFLIX'S SERIE
Spoilers alert!
Adolescence is a 4-episode Netflix series [1] that, above all, is a warning to all families about the influence of the internet and hate speech propagated mainly by the “ manosphere” [2] , bringing to light terms such as “incels”, “red pills ”, in addition to warning about the meaning of several emojis used in this communication that includes bullying, hate speech, misogyny and rape advocacy.
The plot tells the story of a 13-year-old teenager, Jamie (Owen Cooper), accused of murdering a schoolmate, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday).
The reality check begins when we witness Jamie's arrest, whose house is broken into by the police in the early hours of the morning following the crime, and he is dragged out of bed while the house is ransacked in search of the murder weapon. The family is in shock, unable to believe what is happening, after all, Jamie is just a harmless-looking boy who pees with his pants when he is surprised by the arrest. It is hard to imagine being in the shoes of any member of that family, whose youngest member is accused of a heinous crime.
Throughout the first episode, Jamie repeats all the time that he did nothing wrong, instead of I am innocent, which I consider to be the first clue that he believed he was acting correctly, as this is common behavior in femicide crimes.
For a long time, femicide crimes were justified as crimes in legitimate defense of honor and that women are responsible for making men lose their minds. Even today, we see rape and femicide crimes go unpunished and the victim's life is scrutinized and defamed, in a decree that she was guilty of putting herself or allowing herself to be vulnerable, for not knowing how to protect herself, or even that she deserved to be raped or murdered. This speech repeated by Jamie like a mantra sets the tone for the next events.
The school environment is a jungle, aggression, bullying, extortion, and humiliation of all kinds occur, and even those that can be observed by teachers and school staff remain as they are. There seems to be a tiredness and conformity in accepting that teenagers are indeed uncontrollable and that there is nothing that can be done. The school seems like Milgram's uncontrolled experiment [3] , but in this school there is no prospect of the experiment being stopped.
Brazilian psychiatrist Jose Ângelo Gaiarsa, towards the end of his life, recognized that during adolescence, group influence can become more important than the education received during family life. Other developmental authors, such as Winnicott and Erickson, emphasize that during adolescence, a sense of belonging and acceptance by one's peers is fundamental for healthy psychological development. However, when the group is pathological, such as that formed by the students in this school, we would be exposing our children to attacks and violence of the most varied forms daily. Power relations, abuse and submission are constant among students, as is disrespect for teachers.
The discomfort of police officers Luke Baskombe (Ashley Walters) and Misha Frank (Faye Marsai), who oversee investigating the case, is glaring. Not even police authority is properly respected. Little by little, Luke Baskombe becomes familiar with the veiled messages and emojis typical of the Manosphere, and the network of bullying and abuse plots begins to be unraveled no longer as a boy thing, but as behaviors characteristic of organized gangs.
Early in the first episode, Baskombe's son, Adam, sends text messages asking not to go to school, claiming to be sick. Baskombe interprets Adam's complaint as manipulation to get him to skip school, but later we see two boys extorting money from Adam at snack time, under the watchful eye of one of the counselors, who tries, without much effort, to warn the bullies to stop bothering Adam. At the end of the day, Baskombe waits for Adam and invites him to go eat with him. Adam initially refuses, seeming not to believe that his father would have time for him, since his father's routine is limited to work and training at the gym, but Baskombe insists, because he realizes that he had no idea what his son was experiencing at school until then.
We think our children should be safe when they are at home or at school, but the home has become an open space where any criminal can access any of us as soon as we access the internet from our computers or cell phones. Regulation of digital crimes has been slow to adapt to the new reality, and digital crimes, hate speech, pornography and pedophilia have crossed borders with extreme ease.
Jamie declares his father as his legal guardian during the investigation and believes that his father will support and defend him. Eddie (Stephen Graham) believes that his son is innocent and is warned that it might be best for Jamie to appoint someone from social services to accompany him. The certainty of his son's innocence is shattered when Eddie watches the video of the crime and cannot even look at his own son. And Jamie is the one who must comfort his father, devastated by the murder scene he witnessed. Eddie barely
can look at his own son.
The anguish caused by the treatment given to Jamie throughout the capture process at his home and the coldness with which a seemingly harmless teenager justifies himself when knowing that the investigation had strong evidence about the authorship of the crime, including the persecution of the victim, with evidence that the crime had been planned.
During the interview with forensic psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty), we observe how Jamie is emotionally unstable, oscillating between a collaborative young man when he feels accepted and safe, and violent and threatening when he feels cornered.
It is difficult to question the methods and intentions of psychologist Ariston, but I find it strange that she serves hot chocolate with small marshmallows and a sandwich she made during an assessment interview with an individual accused of murder. She fails to meet basic safety criteria by offering a hot drink and leaving her belongings in the room while she leaves for a few minutes.
All of Jamie's actions during her imprisonment were supported by a support team, and she ended up putting herself in a vulnerable situation when faced with someone accused of femicide. We can consider that this would indicate a lack of experience in dealing with this type of case, as well as an assessment strategy in which she would have placed herself in an ambiguous position between a relationship of professional power and personal vulnerability, precisely to assess how Jamie would behave under these conditions.
Both Jamie and Briony have ambivalent behaviors, he oscillating between an attempt to cooperate, in the hope that she will fall for his game of seduction, as she also plays the game of seduction when she offers him the treats in the form of hot chocolate and half a sandwich that she would have made for herself. At this point, she loses her professional authority and already becomes a viable prey for Jamie's unstable behavior.
When she realizes that he behaved like a true predator towards Katie, she ends the interview by saying that this was the last one, not fulfilling the agreed number of interviews. Jamie reacts desperately, as he seemed to believe that his attempt at seduction towards Briony was working, and that the flirtation that he believed to be reciprocated (due to the seduction with the food offered), Jamie was dependent on her gaze as much as on his father's gaze. He needed approval for his behavior, and this made him easy prey for the conspiracies of the manosphere.
According to Jung, adolescence is characterized by the integration of the developmental characteristics of matriarchal and patriarchal dynamics. The relational archetypes of the anima and animus lead the individual to search for their own individual identity, to a curiosity regarding sex and romantic relationships, while at the same time there is an emotional separation from their parents. If this psychic development is characterized by the presence of negative parental complexes, the archetypes of the anima and animus become contaminated by the shadow of the matriarchal and patriarchal archetypes, leading to pathological relationships.
In this case, we must consider that the matriarchal and patriarchal archetypes do not only refer to Jamie's biological parents, but also to the entire sociocultural context that permeates these primordial archetypes, which are out of balance both in Jamie's family and in the school environment that is revealed in the series.
Adolescence is a critical phase of development, where unresolved childhood conflicts come to a head. It is also the phase in which most mental disorders manifest themselves, since the body change itself is a stressful factor, since the risks of not accepting one's body image can lead to severe complications. Sexual desire develops concomitantly with adaptation to social norms. When these are not clear, as demonstrated in the series in question, norms of behavior and adequacy can be replaced by those that are available to specific groups, such as those in the manosphere, incels, red pills or the like, whose rules of behavior do not respect current ethical issues.
The need to be accepted by your peers is characteristic of this phase of adolescence, and it becomes more important to be accepted by your peer group than by your own family members.
Adolescents may feel compelled to engage in extreme behavior in search of acceptance from their peer group. If this peer group presents the same problems as Jamie's school, the ethical parameters of interpersonal relationships, in which respect and appreciation of differences as a factor in enriching relationships, are lost.
The series shows the absence of the patriarchal archetype in its structuring function, whether in the paternal figure or in the authority figure in the classroom and conflict management at school.
Adolescence is also characterized by the questioning of prevailing social values and norms, in search of a relativization of extreme values. In the absence of consistent values and behaviors, as observed in the reality of the school environment, the every-man-for-himself mode is activated, the law of the fittest comes into effect, and, with this, illicit strategies of moral and social survival are activated, allowing psychopathic defenses to be established and standardized by the group.
Psychopathic defenses are characterized by a set of rational arguments, whose mistaken premises lead to equally mistaken conclusions. Such defenses have a narcissistic core, whose personal well-being and protection of one's own interests, without considering the well-being and interests of others and society in general. Victimhood, and consequently, the pseudo-rational justification of one's own delinquent behavior as a legitimate defense of individual rights, or one's own honor, compromise the understanding of the reality of the facts.
All of this can be observed during the interview with the psychologist. Jamie's arguments are full of psychopathic defenses, which can be easily observed in the oscillation between kindness and sympathy and outbursts of rage when he feels misunderstood or wronged.
The patriarchal archetype appears again in a mistaken way when the guard who receives Briony, instead of questioning her behavior directly, makes insinuations, comparing her methods with the forensic psychologist he had previously evaluated, triggering Briony's defenses, instead of putting her in the mode of questioning her own methods. Briony reacts to him as she reacts to Jamie on several occasions, she asserts her place of authority, but those who exercise their authority do not need to reaffirm it all the time, as she does.
He expresses himself in a disrespectful, somewhat mocking manner, even seeming to be amused by the care with which she prepares the hot chocolate in Jamie's favorite way, to which she reacts by kind of hiding the mini marshmallows from his view, perhaps in an unconscious act that she knew, somehow, that her behavior was not appropriate for the situation. Jamie was not a psychotherapy patient in a clinic with common behavioral problems, but rather a criminal being evaluated for legal purposes. at risk.
The guard, as an employee of the prison system, knows very well that certain non-protocol behaviors can put the staff at risk, but he does not have the right to speak in a position to confront a qualified professional, so he behaves like Jamie, trying to hide his resentment and aggressiveness and disrespect towards her, repeating the misogynistic behavior characteristic of the manosphere.
Jamie's emotional instability is like that of his father, Eddie. Eddie alternates between being a loving father and husband and between being a man who is unable to deal with his own anger and frustration and has difficulty regulating his own emotions. Eddie's ambivalent behavior has been absorbed by Jamie, who identifies with his father's qualities, denying the difficulties they both have in controlling their impulses. According to Jamie, his father's aggression is sporadic and therefore should not be seen as a big deal; he has learned that his father's inappropriate behaviors should be tolerated, or even ignored, just as he expects his own aggressive behaviors to be considered as
normal and acceptable to society.
We cannot forget that in the first scenes Jamie does not claim innocence, but rather that he did nothing wrong, because, in his view, what he did was not wrong, Katie had bullied him and deserved what she got.
When confronted with the fact that Katie was dead, Jamie loses control once again, as if death were a mere detail, what really mattered was how he felt, which would be enough to justify any and all of his actions, and she was there to understand all of this, accept it and help him be exonerated.
Jamie's mother, Manda Miller (Christine Tremarco) seems to try to play the role of regulating Eddie's emotions, but without success. The welcoming feminine ends up being held hostage by stereotypical masculine behavior, in which what a man does to protect himself, or to protect his family, is self-justifying.
Eddie's behavior would not have been enough to make Jamie become the cold-blooded killer he became, but the influence of women-hating groups may have exacerbated this influence of a transgenerational patriarchal complex, which goes beyond family boundaries, as it is present in the collective patriarchal complex.
Erich Neumann, in his book Fear of the Feminine, warns about the fundamental psychological issues related to hatred towards women, the roots of feminism and the counterattack generated in a society in which male and female roles are constantly changing.
Certain rights and privileges that men have held over women throughout history are at risk due to laws of equality and protection of women's rights in relation to men, but power relations have not yet been replaced by healthy and satisfying loving relationships for both sexes.
A healthy and structured family may not be enough to prevent the increase in feminicide, just as it has not been effective in preventing the massive death of young men, whether through crimes and murders, or through risky behaviors, considered normal within the spectrum of masculinity.
A discussion about gender roles is necessary in our society, if it considers that the roles attributed to the male sex have caused an overload of demands regarding professional, financial and success performance.
Just as women want to be loved, respected and accepted, even if they do not follow traditional feminine beauty and behavior standards, men also want to be loved, respected and accepted, even if they do not follow the standards of financial, professional and status success that throughout history have classified them as desirable men by women.
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[1] Oficial Trailer, the episodes are available at Netflix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh48KXaCSxM
[2]This BBC article provides a wealth of important information to help understand the background to the murder of a young woman.
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