An Interpretation of Severance
form over content
Warning: Spoilers.
I get if you don’t want to pay for Apple TV, but it’s worth a free trial, just to watch the show.
Anyway, this essay will be irritating if in you’re the process of watching the show, and pretty much meaningless if you haven’t.
That said, I’ll try to recap the show as best I can.
Severance is a dystopian sci-fi TV series about a group of people who undergo a medical procedure that splits their consciousness such that one “self” only works, and the other only enjoys leisure time. The “real” person retains their memories, but the “severed” self doesn’t remember anything about the outside world.
So, when the protagonist takes the elevator down to the basement of “Lumon,” the mysterious corporation that he works at—from his perspective, he is in an elevator going down, and then in the blink of an eye, it’s eight hours later, and he’s going up.
From the “severed” self’s point of view, there is no outside world.
As some people have noted, this is a great extrapolation of the alienation inherent in capitalism. See this Marxist analysis.
However, from another point of view, we could say that severance is about the unconscious.
Although the brutalist depiction of “Kier,” the founder of Lumon, is similar to some of those which in soviet countries commemorate Karl Marx, the frieze looks more like Sigmund Freud.
The concept of “severance” itself is similar to the Freudian idea of repression, an act which produces or sustains a "lower" space where an agency which is similar to, but nevertheless distinct from, our conventional self operates with a kind of mutual lack of awareness mediated or enforced by a censorious, oppressive force (the agency of censorship/repression in Freudian theory, and Lumon itself in the show). The innies' attempt to reach the outside world and freedom is similar to the psychoanalytic notions of neurotic symptoms as the product of unconscious agencies achieving partial satisfaction hampered by repression—which, we should also notice as well, is something of a dead-metaphor, using a political term (in effect, naming what literally happens in the show) to refer to a process in the individual psyche.1
And yet the Lumon basement is neither individual nor wholly collective, i.e.: like the unconscious itself, it has both elements of individuality (each severed self remains an individual) and collectivity (they are all working on the same project, in the same “space”2). Which again is similar to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious—groups, not only individuals, can share certain truths which they collectively refuse to acknowledge (see Freud's Moses and Monotheism and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Jung's collective unconscious, and Lacan's notion of the symbolic register as intersubjective).
The elevator between the basement and the outside world, which cannot allow information to pass through it, corresponds exactly to the barrier of repression. The agency of censorship in Freud's model of the psyche does not normally allow any repressed information to pass from the unconscious to the conscious mind.
Basically, the whole dynamic between the unconscious and the conscious mind, as in the show, is the struggle which the innies undertake (Hellie in particular), the herculean struggle of how to say something without actually saying it—ultimately, however, the only force which can bring repressed content to light is the conscious ego, which is why the conscious/outie version of Mark must smuggle a key in, and must take an interest in his severed self in order to liberate it.
This represents how, in psychoanalysis, conscious choices can reverse the excessive repressions undertaken that hamper the subject’s functioning.
Yet Mark himself is first prompted in this interest by Petey, a de-severed subject who seems to correspond to the psychoanalytic category of the psychotic. Freud wrote that the psychotic personality is "open to the sky", i.e: the line dividing the conscious from the unconscious / the outie self from the innie self is more permeable.
Thus the de-severed Petey thus appears confused and "insane," while simultaneously bearing profound truth. See also Petey’s map, which is both confused / inspired in a somewhat "mad" way, yet also critically useful to the other subjects. Note that it says "mind" at the top (corresponding to the conscious mind, the only mind which knows itself as such), and the little editorial comment: "We're here because we're not all there." = "We, the severed subjects/unconscious agencies, are only repressed because there are elements of the conscious mind which it does not wish to accept.”
Note also that the art of Irving's outie, which depicts the Lumon basement, corresponds to the psychoanalytic notion that art, along with dreams, is one of the primary mediums by which unconscious truth is able to manifest itself in waking life.
Returning to Hellie, we could say that she represents the psychoanalytic category of the hysteric, in that she disrupts her body to represent unconscious truth (threatening to cut off her fingers and ultimately attempting suicide), while Mark, on the other hand, corresponds to "obsessional neurosis," in that he is unable to stop thinking about his departed wife, and thus has to resort to severance to stop thinking about her. Although of course, this itself only leads him closer to her (it turns out that she is the corporate wellness coordinator in the Lumon basement). Repression reifies (in body or mind) what is repressed in the unconscious, even as it banishes it from waking life.
In a certain light, hysterics are “too bodily.” They suffer from reminiscences, memories, in their body, because they’ve failed to put them into words.
Obsessionals, by contrast, are imprisoned by representation and meaning. Certain words and thoughts inhabit them, thus “obsess” them (the clinical word originally derived from a milder form of demonic possession). In this light, “Mark” is an apt name, as the noun “mark” is both itself a mark (autonymous) and a synonym for the signifier.
Lastly, the Lumon mascot, Sevy, is described as a little dildo with a digestive tract. (Sevy actually appears briefly in the show itself, but the description is from a promotional ebook, which I take to be canon). Lumon itself is homonymous with lumen, which is a measure of a degree of light, but also means "a cavity in a tubular organ or object," such as the intestines, or a syringe. Thus, Sevy is both "childlike" (drawn in a neotenous cartoon style), somewhat phallic (explicitly so, in the above letter, and by association to “lumen”), and scatological.
Together, these associations connect Sevvy to Freud’s three stages of psychic development: oral, anal, and phallic, as well as to the primary unconscious objects to which they correspond.
What does all this imply for the show’s conclusion? As the unconscious comes to light, as resistances dissolve, a person can temporarily get worse: “negative therapeutic reaction” ensues because the patient’s semi-stable compromise is starting to come unglued.3
In Lacanian terms, once you know better, it’s harder to get jouissance (bad satisfaction, equivalent roughly to our vulgar “getting off”) from your symptom, your own poor-functioning.
The end goal of psychoanalysis, however, is not perfect self-knowledge, nor is it complete abandonment to unconscious processes. Rather, it is “integration,” the restoration of the capacity to love and work, or for Lacan, the generation of “know-how” regarding the subject’s symptom: knowing how to work with and make something out of the characteristic ways that one slips up or falls into a rut.
Meta:
What’s the point of this interpretation?
Essentially, that these (psychoanalytic) ideas still have relevance and deserve study. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to come alive in a work of art.
And each system of thought, in fact, can provide a clue as to how this can come to be:
From the Marxist point of view4: this is capital’s sublime sleight of hand: you can see a vivid picture of your own condition—completely alienated—provided that it comes to you by means of the thing that caused it in the first place (big tech).
From the psychoanalytic perspective: this show itself is a symptom, Freud’s return of the repressed, with the repressed being “repression” itself, taken as a metonymy for all the truth in psychoanalytic ideas that we have rejected (in favor of scientism or intersectionality)—a body of truth which, sooner or later, we must collectively “deal with.”
What, then? Should we found new schools? How good could it have been, if people have collectively forgotten it?
Though culture grows over time, the dead and ruined world behind us is like an opulent mansion which, though having burned to the ground, still conceals many precious treasures in the vast fields of its rubble.
Now, a prediction:
Art is the bellwether of change. It seems, then, that self-knowledge will advance, along these lines:
The relation of human beings to their own alienated labor and the relation of each individual to what they don’t see in themselves.
But this is vacuous, almost a tautology: “Things will improve except to the degree that they don’t.”
Still, I think we can define, to some extent, what’s coming along the pike.5 My money is on a convergence of all these systems, such as Zizek has largely achieved in his project to unite Lacanian ideas with pop culture, Marxism, and general continental thought.
As we push on, however, I think we will have to return to metaphysics. This strange, confused, perverse, gothic science of men knowing the truth without knowing how or what they know will wither away, replaced by a radiant light of the truth known as it is.
God only knows what will come after that.
“Censor” is a similar political term made spiritual: it originally referring to a civic office of ancient Rome, a person responsible for maintaining the census and overseeing public morality.
Freud observes somewhere that neurotic fantasies take place as if on “another scene,” as if the same person was doing something “somewhere else.” All throughout his work there is the basic assumption that such unconscious fantasies can be shared (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Moses and Monotheism, Totem and Taboo, etc.)
Though in fact, a person only seeks analysis in the first place because something has changed such that their neurotic satisfaction is no longer satisfying.
I linked earlier to someone else’s Marxist analysis of Severance. Here it is again.
Perhaps this corresponds to Aquinas’ idea of “natural prophecy.” The point here is not to divine the future more than is just, but to give an indication of the most important future fields of study.