Mental Defenses in Inception

            In English this week we’ve been discussing Freudian psychology. In particular, we’ve looked at the parts of the mind and the ways people cope with problems. During this unit, I’ve noticed that many of the characters in the works we’ve looked at so far have used some of the defense mechanisms that we’ve looked at. Inception in particular included several characters using defense mechanisms to avoid their real problems. For instance, after coming back from limbo, Mol experiences denial when she denies that reality is real because she believes she is still in a dream. She eventually kills herself, resulting in Cobb feeling immense guilt. Cobb deals with this guilt by trying to repress his memories with Mol so he won’t have to do this anymore. He does this in a rather unorthodox way- trying to create a prison in a dream for all of the memories he shared with Mol. This doesn’t really work, as Mol still appears in his dreams and sabotages his missions. Cobb eventually gets over this through acceptance; he accepts that Mol’s mind was heavily damaged by her travels with him through the various dream levels, and as a result she was not the same when they returned to reality. Cobb did the best he could, but in the end she could not differentiate between dreams and reality, and as a result she took her own life. He accepts this, which frees his mind and rids his dreams from her presence.

            Robert Fischer in Inception also has some mental troubles that he uses defense mechanisms to hide. He has deep issues from his childhood and his father’s lack of a presence, and his lonely childhood remains a weak spot in his mind from when he was young. As they go into his mind, his subconscious tries to fight them, symbolic of how Fischer’s subconscious tried to bury his memories surrounding his father and his business. Fischer employed repression, like Cobb, to forget the troubled memories that he shared with his father. The scene where Cobb and Fischer are together in the bathroom and Cobb is trying to get Fischer to remember one dream level above is symbolic of how Cobb is trying to get Fischer to remember his childhood memories involving his father. At the end, Fischer comes to terms with his father’s poor parenting, and turns to mercy; feeling bad for his father’s inability to feel for other people.