Grey's Anatomy and Critical Theory: Psychoanalytic Edition

Today we talk about the paper that I feel is my weakest link in the pop culture/critical theory area. I don't think my analysis quite hits the ideas I wanted to on the head. But I told you that I was going to post my critical theory papers, and I don't want to lie. I thought about reframing the paper before I posted this blog, but then I remembered that I have 85 million things to do before graduation and I already got an A in the class I wrote this for, so basically, here goes nothing:

Grey’s Anatomy’s protagonist Dr. Meredith Grey has gone through plenty of difficult situations throughout the show’s fourteen seasons. Her father left her as a child with a mother who cared more about surgery than family, her little sister died in a plane crash, and a car accident left her neurosurgeon husband Dr. Derek Shepherd brain dead. Her life has been filled with enough to drive any sane person crazy without taking into account all of her own near-death experiences; in one of Grey’s most notable encounters with death, she is accidentally pushed into the cold water of Elliot Bay when triaging victims of a ferryboat crash. In “Some Kind of Miracle,” the seventeenth episode of the third season of Grey’s Anatomy, Sigmund Freud’s concepts of latent and manifest content can be analyzed through condensation after Grey drowns.

“Some Kind of Miracle” switches back and fourth between two main scenes: surgeons attempting to revive Grey in Seattle Grace Hospital and Grey’s dream-like afterlife. In the afterlife state Grey knows that she drowned, but several of her pervious patients show up in an attempt to convince her to continue living. This state shows both levels of content in Freud’s dreams—latent and manifest. According to Freud, latent content is from one’s unconscious and contains the dream’s “real meaning” (Storey 98). A few episodes prior, Meredith is taking a bath and submerges herself under the water for a long period of time before Shepherd pulls her out of the bathtub. While other doctors are trying to revive Grey, Shepherd tells Dr. Addison Montgomery, “I knew what was going on and I wasn’t there for her. She was pulling away from me and I just...” (Rhimes). Montgomery responds, “You think that she went into the water on purpose?” and Shepherd’s answer is a simple: “she knows how to swim; she’s a good swimmer” (Rhimes). This is the first mention of the dream’s latent content: Grey is suicidal.

Through dream analysis, the viewer can see that there are two different examples of manifest content in Grey’s dream that contribute to this theory. The first is a group of people she from pervious episodes whose deaths have impacted her in various ways. This group of people is the perfect example of Freud’s third definition of condensation: “latent elements which have something in common are condensed into ‘composite structures’” (Storey 98). The first person in the group is Dylan Young, a bomb squad technician that Grey watched die after handing him an unexploded bazooka that she took out of a patient’s chest; the second person in her dream is Denny Duquette, a heart transplant patient who was engaged to her friend, Dr. Isobel Stevens, before he died; the third is Liz Fallon, her mom’s old scrub nurse who died fighting liver cancer; and finally, Bonnie Crasnoff, one of early Grey’s Antomony’s most compelling patients. Freud writes, “the process is like constructing a new and transitory concept which has this common element as its nucleus” (Freud 247). Each member of the structure is somehow connected to Grey, the nucleus; therefore, despite never having met each other, they work as a composite structure to convince Grey to continue fighting for her life—they work together to fight Grey’s latent desire of death.

Without this composite structure, which Freud deems “of great importance to the dream-work,” Grey would have been wandering around her afterlife aimlessly (Freud 247). The group constantly keeps her focused on what led to her drowning, while she is easily distracted. Duquette asks Grey, “What happened?” (Rhimes). “I drowned, that’s it,” Grey responds (Rhimes). A frustrated Crasnoff then tells Grey, “I can’t do this if you’re gonna keep saying you drowned. Do you have any idea how much that hurts?” (Rhimes). Without making their objective obvious, Duquette, Crasnoff, Young, and Fallon each use different angles to try to convince Grey to keep fighting for her life. According to Freud, “the ‘creative’ imagination, indeed, is quite incapable of inventing anything; it can only combine components that are strange to one another” (Freud 247). Each component of the dream’s composite structure is different from the other members; each member of the group must use their unique relationship with Grey to work together. Duquette reminds Grey of the people she loves when he talks about his fiancé: “sometimes we’ll be in the same place at exactly the same time and I can almost hear her voice. It’s like I’m touching her, but that’s all you get. That’s it, moments with the people you love” (Rhimes). Crasnoff tries to remind Grey how lucky she is to be with Shepherd when she says, “I was getting married in four months and then I was dying, and here you are all happy and perky to be dead” (Rhimes). Young talks to Grey about accomplishments, and reminds her how much she wants to be a surgeon, while Fallon urges Grey not to live in the shadow of her mother. Each individual in the composite structure could not have used—or, in Freud’s terms, invented—each element of the manifest content in order to reveal dream’s latent content.

The other piece of manifest content in Grey’s dream that contributes to the viewer’s understanding of the latent content is the interaction Grey has with her mom, Ellis. Many of Grey’s struggles stem from her mother; they were never close, and after becoming momentarily lucid after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s before the show’s beginning, Ellis calls Meredith ordinary—despite learning many of her successes. In “Some Kind of Miracle,” Shepherd is in Ellis’ hospital room and says, “You broke her. You called her ordinary. You taught her time and time again that nothing she does ever is good enough. Every good thing that Meredith is happened despite you, and she may not survive this. That's on you” (Rhimes). Later on in the episode, Grey sees Ellis in the afterlife dream. “You shouldn’t be here,” Ellis says (Rhimes). Grey responds, “Neither should you,” and then her mother tells Grey to keep fighting and says that she is “anything but ordinary” (Rhimes). After Grey is revived and wakes up, she doesn’t realize the real impact of what she went through. There’s no big conclusion to the episode during which she goes on and on about how happy she is to be alive. She doesn’t have some big revelation about being depressed and tell everyone that she quite swimming on purpose. She does, however, remember the people she saw in the dream. When Grey wakes up, Shepherd looks at her with tears in his eyes. Before he gets the chance to tell her, Grey says, “my mother is dead, isn’t she?” (Rhimes). Grey remembered seeing her mother walking in the opposite direction she was—towards death. She simply remembered the dream’s narrative rather than its real meaning.

Many episodes later Grey finally deals with everything that happened to her that day in Elliot Bay. She admits to Shepherd that she quit swimming and she tells Stevens about her interaction with Duquette—both of which don’t go smoothly. Grey eventually has to deal with all of the things that have happened to her, and the way that they make her feel. Maybe if she had known about Freud’s concept of condensation and composite structures, she could have used the manifest content of her dream to interpret the latent content to save herself even more trouble.

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. “The Dream-Work.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Fourth ed., Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2009, pp. 246-253.

Rhimes, Shonda, and Marti Noxon. “Some Kind of Miracle.” Grey’s Anatomy, season 3, episode 17, ABC, 22 Feb. 2007.

Storey, John. “Freudian Psychoanalysis.” Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: an Introduction. Seventh ed., New York, NY: Routledge, 2015, pp. 95-105.

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