The Unbearable Weight of Truth: Carrie in Homeland

ABSTRACT

The pursuit of hidden truth and the subtle lies we tell ourselves, the barriers or iron curtains erected that impede a deeper connection to ourselves, others, and the ineffable world of spirit, are themes addressed in this article through the character Carrie Mathieson (Claire Danes), a CIA operative in the Showtime series Homeland. Carrie, who suffers from a bipolar disorder, has the gift of uncanny knowing. She is a “shamanic-like” figure who is able to allow for the disintegration of ego boundaries in the service of a higher aim. The author explores the price of maintaining a protective cloak of “normality” and contends that Carrie’s sacred wound takes her behind her defensive structure, opening her to deep truths and transformative love, while also cracking open her psyche into what the physicist David Bohm describes as the Implicate Order—a fundamental order of reality where space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationship between elements. Also drawing on a personal experience of living in the Eastern Block and a series of dreams of going behind the Iron Curtain, the author explores the disruption to the old personality that occurs when moving beyond barriers or defenses. She asks, “Does living on the ‘frontier of your identity’ mean disassembling the personality as we know it?”

Key Words:

• barriers
• Bion
• bipolar disorder
• Bohm
• Bromberg
• Homeland,
• Carrie Mathieson
• Cassandra
• dissociation
• dreams
• extensive self
• genius
• Iron Curtain
• Kalsched
• labyrinth
• luminous blackness
• minotaur
• “O”
• Prometheus
• quantum mechanics
• The Red Book,
• shamanic
• terrorism
• The Lives of Others,
• trauma
• truth
• wounded healer

Note

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

1. The series, loosely based on the acclaimed Israeli version, Hatufim or Prisoners of War, was developed for American Television by Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa and tracks the intrigues of Carrie, her fellow CIA operatives, and the terrorists who are their prey.

^2. In Greek mythology, Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, was a woman of great beauty who was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo. Yet when she refused his advances, he placed a curse on her, ensuring that her predictions and those of her descendents would not be believed.

^3. In the myth, King Minos was offered sovereignty over the seas by the god Poseidon in exchange for the sacrifice of a beautiful white bull. But the king did not want to part with this animal, and so he offered a lesser creature in its place. As punishment for this shameful transgression, Aphrodite afflicted his wife, Pasiphae, with a consuming passion for the white bull. Upon her request, Daedalus built Pasiphae a wooden cow that she hid within. It was through this wooden cow that the bull copulated with her and thus the Minotaur was conceived. The hero Theseus with the help of Ariadne, the king’s daughter, and her skein of thread enters the labyrinth. Thus he tracks down the Minotaur and slays the beast. The labyrinth is eventually destroyed by Poseidon’s earthquake, burying the king along with the corpse of the Minotaur, while freeing the king’s imprisoned slaves.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susan Williams

SUSAN WILLIAMS, MFT, is an adult, adolescent, and child Jungian analyst in private practice in Berkeley, California. She trained and practiced in London before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is on the teaching faculty of the adult and child analytic training programs at the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She has lectured and taught in the United States and abroad on infant mental health, creativity, aliveness and deadness, and autism and autistic states of mind and has published papers on topics such as healing landscapes, awakening to intersubjectivity, and working with children and adults with autistic spectrum disorders. In addition to consulting to school programs in Marin County Office of Education for children with autistic spectrum disorders, she has assessed infants and toddlers at risk for autism or other developmental disabilities.