In Which We Attempt To Psychoanalyze Booth

Season 1, Episode 13

The Woman in the Garden

Although there are a couple other things that could be discussed with this episode, I'm going to stick with one incredibly awesome moment.

Booth: I never said anything about FBI.  She’s my partner, ese, and if anything happens to her, I will find you and I will kill you. I won’t think twice. Come here look at my eyes. (he cocks his gun and puts it in Ortez’s mouth) Look at my face, if anything happens to her, I will kill you.  This is between you and me. What nobody sees, nobody knows. You’ve got nothing to prove. You understand? You understand?

This, right here, is an absolute gem. A gem for which I have three different anaylses for, one describing the implications of the action on their relationship, the last two examining how he came to this action using different moral reasoning and psychological philosophies.

So.

Damn, this is big for them.

Well, not so much for them. Bones never has any idea he did this. But it shows us a hell of a lot about how Booth feels about her.

This is the first time we really, really see him go into major protective mode with her. And it's fucking scary. How scary it is, how angry he is, shows us 1) just how much he has to lose if he loses her, and 2) just how deep his feelings for her are. Don't get me wrong, I'm not implying he's in love with her or anything yet, not this early, no way. We don't know exactly what these feelings are. But his reaction shows us that, already, they are deep.

Now, how exactly did he come to this action?

The first explanation uses Freud's id, ego, and super ego. It is said that in a healthy individual, the ego is the controlling force, since it balances the needs of the id and the super ego while taking into account the outside world. In this case, control of Booth's actions has slipped from the ego to the id, resulting in this outburst. The id acts on the pleasure principle – instant gratification, basically. The thought of Bones being killed put his id into hyper-drive because that thought was simply too awful for him to deal with, and he did what he believed would settle the matter most quickly and completely, reliving his anxiousness and fear, and therefore giving him pleasure. His super ego, of course, being his conscience, the cultural implications of what is right and wrong, would have wanted him to act according to FBI protocol. And technically, he should feel guilt over acting this way, but I believe that the desires of the id were so strong, because losing Bones would be such a devastation to him that it needed to be taken care of as well and quickly as possible, that it overcomes this guilt from the super ego.

Then, there is Kohlberg's six stages of moral development, which is quite a bit simpler in this situation. In most cases, Booth would react to this kind of thing in a level 4 way, which states that laws and protocols give the final say in the action one takes, but in this situation, where the person in danger is Bones, he reacted in a level 3 way, in which the relationship determines the action taken.

It should be noted that Kohlberg's stages stem from an objective world view, and so level 3, actions stemming from relationship, is considered less moral than level 4, actions stemming from laws. However, my analyses stem from a subjective world view, in which the morality of levels 3 and 4 are both in a gray area, and which is more moral truly depends on the situation (hence subjective) – from the subjective world view, in this case, I believe level 3 is more moral than level 4. Henceforth, Booth did the right thing.

Which, of course he did. He's Booth.