🔍 BEHIND THE MASK 🔎 Crazy Jane Edition

General Discussion
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Welcome to this week’s discussion of BEHIND THE MASK, in which we welcome our resident armchair psychologists to ponder and muse, our literary detectives to theorize and question.

We invite you all to pull back and explore the many, many masks of CRAZY JANE.

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This past week, we were introduced to a few more of Crazy Jane’s personalities, and boy did they not disappoint.

Let’s discuss the “who’s”, the “why’s”, the “what were they thinking’s”?

Let’s pull up a chair and dig a little deeper.

Crazy Jane is definitely a live one. In between knocking us off our rockers with her filthier than filth mouth and performing her bleeding-heart soliloquies in front of a canvas, this Doom Patrol member also seems to be on the hunt for something.

DID YOU KNOW? Crazy Jane is patterned after the lead character in William Butler Yeats’s eclectic series of ““Crazy Jane”” poems, which is an exploration of our many selves.

Let’s dig deeper into the psychological state that governs Crazy Jane, through the lens of “Identity”.

:mag_right: Do you think Jane has any real desire to reconcile her various personalities?

:mag_right: Why do you think Jane feels safe with Robotman?

:mag_right: Is Jane Morris the “real” personality, and is Kay Challis lost forever?

:mag_right: Jane’s multiple personalities are the result of childhood trauma. Do you believe this consequence to be realistic? What are some healthy ways we can address trauma in our own lives?

Share all your thoughts, theories, and additional questions below! :point_down:

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I think Jane feels comfortable with Cliff because he is caring towards her. She might think of him as the proper father figure she didn’t originally have, since he dad abused her and caused her 64 different personalities.

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I second that, also I feel Jane sees Robotman almost as broken as she is.

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I can totally see that. Jane gets the father she’s always wanted and Robot an gets his daughter back. And they both feel comfortable enough creating this vulnerability-based dynamic due to them seeing one another as damaged and in need.

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I believe Jane’s multiple personalities to be a real issue for some people due to Childhood drama for the simple fact just seeing how she acts in Doom Patrol I can really relate not going into details let’s just leave it at that

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I agree, @SilverWolf84. Trauma at a young age can be especially unpredictable in its effects, let alone repeated childhood trauma.

You can never really expect how the psyche will react. Just like our bodies have a natural instinct to protect itself via the visceral response of “fight or flight” as do our minds.

While some may stay and “fight” - in the form of walls being built and the development of “trust issues” , in efforts to preserve the heart and mind from future trauma - others might “flee”.

Crazy Jane, in this instance, would be an example of the mind fleeing - the mind’s attempt to escape the trauma being experienced or the aftereffects of trauma that may be too hard to deal with.

(Depending on how you look at it, maybe you could classify this also as “fighting”, but in terms of the preservation of identity, I would say it’s “fleeing”.)

…

Lordy. I knew I should’ve just hit enter. I lost 5 paragraphs just now.

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But what I THINK I was trying to say is:

What’s particularly interesting to me is the idea of the “dominant” personality and the “real/original” personality.

I’m pretty sure most would agree that Jane Morris is the dominant personality. And we saw in today’s episode (ep. 3) that Jane seems to be quite accepting of her current state.
She is well aware of her various selves being a part of herself but treats and “respects” them as their own entities. She feels no need to control them - let alone reconcile them back into one.

We even see this in episode 3 where age is given the opportunity to be made whole again and she declines.

I guess perspective is everything. I have been wondering if Jane was secretly searching to be whole again, but maybe she isn’t at all.

She might feel under pressure by the perspective of others who surely feel that she should be more in “control” of her selves. But we also saw what she angrily scrawled on the window of the jet, towards the end of episode 3 - as if to angrily respond to something that had pointedly happened.

What I wonder is whether or not she is still aware of Kay Challis - her “real/original” self.

If Kay is even still there?

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Crazy Jane can be taken as a metaphor for the completely normal experience of a human life. We all have things about our selves that come out and don’t feel like our one “identity” (I say things to my daughter that feels like my dad talking through me, not who I like to think I am). Who we were in the past often is presented to us in the present (the education you received can determine or not determine your career self), which is not who we think we are (which is not who we actually are), and is often not who we want to be. Jane’s acceptance of the different personalities arising is analogous to the self acceptance we can practice in our daily lives. Sure, we can regret, but so many things work together in this deterministic world to ensure that we say and do the things we do, and some argue that when you look closely enough at that, you won’t find anything resembling free will. We are who we are in the moment, informed by all these things outside of our control. The more we spend in the present, the less trauma and other factors can control us. Jane clearly accepts this. Her other personalities are maybe a different story, but they clearly come and go, just like the things we like think aren’t us. But the funny thing is we are all of the things we don’t want to be, that we want to be, and that we are; but we are also not them. Crazy Jane is all of the personalities, and one at the same time. This got a little convoluted at the end, but it is accurate to my thought. I wish I had more time right now to unpack it more. Cheers!

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Another way to interpret what I am saying is…what @LadyWonder said.

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@Bozea
Yes! I wish you had more time to unpack those thoughts, as well. You did echo LW a bit, but there are a number of very intriguing thoughts here that very juicy additions to the conversation!

I too wish I had more time to unpack my thoughts on your thoughts, but the most interesting bit is your elaboration on the idea of Crazy Jane being a representation of what it is to be human and how we are pretty much somewhere on the scale of denial and acceptance of who we are.

We talk all the time about our different “sides”, but it’s easy to muffle or suppress these different aspects when they are just that - aspects.

But how do things pan out when certain aspects are too strong to simply be muffled? When sides of ourselves are so strong that they seem to have a mind of their own?

In what ways may I, too, be a “Crazy Jane”?

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What if the beginning of DID in this cause is both…some parts of her wanting to fight back/react and some that do not my best example being Baby Doll she wants to remain in the innocence but all the others we have seen so far are like screw that.

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I want to know why when “Katy” is out Jane lights up in flame, and I wonder the one personality where the words actually come out of her mouth, I wonder if the words she speaks are the words she wants to use to hurt others mentally and physically or to manipulate others.

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sorry for my last post it sounds so bad lol. sorry for my bad grammar.

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Also I don’t know how I feel about people in the show caring so much about the “Original” she buried herself for a reason. Is she dead because they can die? I don’t know. I know for me I know I am not the original and I honestly don’t care where the **** she is. I got my own freaking ****. All I know is I am the dominant. That used to not be the case but she rarely comes out anymore either. There was a time I wanted to force them to be whole…it doesn’t work. I gave up.

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To physically hurt others. I don’t see the others and she is not minipulative . :frowning:

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@timelady365.32923
Everyone is different. And it isn’t so much a matter of feeling that Jane “should” become one person again as it is a discussion of whether she will/won’t and whether or not she even wants to.

This nature of conversation is interesting to some, which is why we have this thread.

I’m not sure that I completely understand everything you are presenting in your post, but if you are interested in the conversation presented, you are welcome to continue on. If you are not interested in participating in the current discussion, that is entirely okay as well.

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I don’t understand what you are saying. I am sharing my thoughts and opinions on the conversation and for now it seems trying to force them to be one is not what she wants. But was it always like that? Was there a time like me felt like that’s what society wanted? That that is what would not get attention drawn to it? So people think she is ‘normal’? To get people to like her?

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@dckid13 Because Jane had DID when she was exposed to the gene bomb that gave her superpowers, each of her individual personalities ended up getting their own superpowers.
Katy is a pyrokinetic whose form I guess is a big fire lady! Haha

And that’s a really interesting question about Silver Tongue… If I’m not mistaken, this personality was created specifically for the Doom Patrol tv series, so I don’t know too much about her.
But she is definitely one of the more interesting personalities! I love that her words actually cut - that they are actually weapons.

It takes the phrase “words hurt” to a whole 'nother level! :smile:

Your question kinda makes me wanna go rewatch that scene again to see exactly which words were the ones that became the weapons and whether or not they may have been chosen purposefully… :thinking:

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Oh the are. "(In German), ‘Goodbye Nazi ****’ I believe. I cannot remember the words she used when fighting the German boys. And when she first came out in E2. "What do you know about the Underground? And it turned into a sword. Those are the ones I remember she chooses them like I have in the past when I purposely want to hurt someone… except with her it is physical.

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@timelady365.32923
I think when anything is not the “norm” people tend to think it should be - or in the least, that it “wants” to be. It is a natural feeling to want to belong, and the quickest way to belonging is to be like everyone else.

But that isn’t to say that this is the only way to belong.
And for those who understand this, the desire to be normal in order to belong isn’t necessarily at play.

Crazy Jane clearly does not feel the need to be normal. She seems very accepting of herself. She seems very accepting of her “many selves”.

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