The Child is the Father of the Man

Masterclass

Over the week I had the chance to re-watch what I consider to be the greatest drama series ever created, Mad Men. Although at surface level the show appears to be about drinking, business, and sex, these are mere plot-enhancers. Created by one of the lead writers on The Sopranos, Matthew Weiner, Mad Men is an art piece facilitating a philosophical and psychological conversation while using the advertising business and the culture of the 60s era as the backdrop. Each time I’ve watched the series I walk away with a greater appreciation for the nuance and detail while recognizing another layer of depth. 

Mad Men may have the greatest writing and character development of any series ever created. While I could examine and write about the arcs of many of the characters, for the sake of brevity, I am going to analyze the protagonist, Don Draper. Part of the show’s genius is found in the show’s ability to live in ambiguity, not giving the viewer a clear answer but asking them to draw their own conclusions. While the tone of this essay is declarative, it is impossible to say my take on the series is an objective fact, it is purely my own subjectively drawn conclusions. However, I think I’m close.

Mad Men

Don’s profession as well as the industry that serves as the backdrop to the show, is advertising. The term itself was created by the real-life men of the advertising game and it plays on multiple levels. For one, a person working in advertising was referred to as an “Ad Man.” Second, the advertising agencies were concentrated on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, hence “Mad” short for “Madison Avenue.” And finally, the term “Mad Men” can be referred to a man that is insane or that has “Gone mad” due to the Wolf of Wall Street lifestyle many in the industry were living. The advertising industry was often scorned during this time period as it was looked upon as inherently deceitful and promoting mass materialism and consumerism. The counterculture of the time, those that we now think of as “Hippies” despised the advertising industry due to its promotion of capitalism and consumerism, two of the main tenets of advertising. The fictional Don Draper was an exceptionally talented Mad Man.

Don Draper

Donald Draper, creative director of the advertising agency Sterling Cooper, is the embodiment of what every man aspires to be and what every woman wants, or so it appears. Draper is an exceptionally rare combination of creative artistic genius and hyper-conscientiousness, in the real world we might think of someone such as Steve Jobs as someone who embodies these characteristics. While he is always clean-shaven, wearing a flawless expensive suit, and without a single hair out of place, between the ears, he is much closer related to an artist of Greenwich Village. In the ad game, Don is universally respected as a creative genius for his unique style of advertising that is profound and with depth. Naturally, by working in this lucrative industry, Don attains wealth, power, and everything that goes along with it.

While by day Don Draper is a titan of industry, by night he very much indulges in the playboy lifestyle. Throughout the series, Draper has women that are treated as possessions whose sole purpose is to satisfy his desires and make him feel wanted. In the pilot episode, we follow Don along his day beginning in bed with a woman then through the work day and finally the end scene provides us with a twist. Don leaves the city, takes the train to the suburbs, and enters a home where we are introduced to his wife and children. Though he has a family, he finds no fulfillment in them. As much as he tries to play the role of “the family man,” his heart and his mind are at work, at the bottom of a whisky bottle, and with his mistresses. It is here that we are presented with the anti-hero element of his character. While he is brazenly dishonest in his personal life, he also tries to abide by a guiding ethic, one that is moral and honest. Don routinely does the right thing and shows glimpses of his personal conflict, wanting to be a good person but being unable to do so. He performs unprovoked good deeds for people that have nothing to offer him. While being tough, short-tempered, and often harsh towards his subordinates, he is fair and treats people respectfully. In an industry riddled with immorality, it is Draper who is often the most moral, loyal, and honest in his business practices, at one point being referred to as “The good little boy.” In a time of rampant sexism, he hires Peggy Olsen, played by Elisabeth Moss, going so far as making her his protégé and taking her under his wing without caring what others may think. In a time of rampant racism, Don is color-blind, treating racial minorities as equals. Don hires a black woman as his secretary at a time when it was unheard of for a black person to be able to get an office job on Madison Avenue. In an era when to be gay was to commit career suicide, Don appoints a gay man to be the company’s art director. Draper exhibits a quality that we should perhaps all observe, finding the immutable characteristics of others to be the least significant part about them and instead only judging one another on character and in the professional setting, merit. However, despite his best efforts to be a good and ethical person, he makes those close to him as miserable as he is through his self-destructive behavior.

The art of advertising is often the creating, promoting, and selling of a brand, often using deceptive practices to do so. Of all of Don’s brilliant advertising campaigns, it is perhaps Donald Draper that is his greatest creative endeavor.

Dick Whitman

Early on we are introduced to the fact that Don Draper does not exist, or at least not anymore. Donald Draper is a persona that Dick Whitman has assumed. Dick Whitman grew up desperately poor and went on to fight in the Korean War. Upon doing so, he was to report to his commanding officer Leutinient Donald Draper. After an accident caused by Dick Whitman, Leutinient Donald Draper becomes blown up and dies while Dick is merely injured. Dick Whitman crawls over and swaps dog tags and as a result, Donald Draper (actually Dick Whitman) is to be honorably discharged and sent home. In his desire to leave harm’s way overseas in addition to seeking a new life, Dick Whitman simply assumes the role of Donald Draper and continues living a new life under this false identity.

Dick Whitman was born into rural poverty to a dishonest and immoral drunkard of a father and a prostitute mother who dies while giving birth to him. His father’s wife resents his existence due to the manner in which Dick Whitman was conceived and treats him poorly. After watching his father die in front of him as a young boy, his family loses the farm and he is forced to move in with an uncle who lives and operates inside a low-class brothel. Growing up fatherless and with a maternal figure who abhors his very existence, the only maternal figure he had in his young life was one of the prostitutes. The prostitute was the first and only woman who was kind to him, providing him with some semblance of the maternal figure he was deprived of. However, the woman proceeds to take Dick’s virginity at a young age. The deep deprivation of love combined with the one person who provides him with it becoming his first sexual experience leads to the conflation of love and sex. This conflation of love and sex embeds itself deep into Dick Whitman’s psyche and ultimately haunts him in his adulthood.

Wordsworth

There is a remarkable line in one of the episodes that is borrowed from poet William Wordsworth’s My Heart Leap Up, “The child is the father of the man.” This line is used in an episode in which Don is finally starting to examine the part of himself that he has spent the last several years trying to forget, Dick Whitman. The chosen line expresses the sentiment that aspects of our childhood, both positive and negative, tend to follow us in our adulthood, shaping our perceptions and behaviors.

Dick’s early life, filled with abuse, death, and the deprivation of love, leads to the formation of child abandonment syndrome that acts as a haunting phantom. Due to never feeling loved or wanted, he exhibits self-destructive behavior that leads to the destruction of his relationships, alcoholism, and never allowing himself to accept or express love. Though his adult persona, Donald Draper, is a man who seemingly has everything a man may desire including wealth, power, influence, a beautiful family, beautiful mistresses, and the professional respect of his peers, he is a man who has nothing. This underlying torment shapes his every perception, making him completely miserable and with intense feelings of isolation. Donald Draper is simply an advertising brand, a persona that he is selling to the world. While Don draper has it all, Dick Whitman has nothing. While Don Draper is a talented and decorated war officer, businessman, artist, and family man, Dick Whitman is just (as he puts it) a “Whorechild” whom no one loves and accepts. The more success that Don Draper achieves, the worse he feels because he believes it to be a fraud based on a lie. With each milestone Don reaches, Dick becomes more miserable because the lie only becomes bigger. With all that Donald Draper accomplishes, the thing that he is most in search of is that which is unattainable, happiness.

Happiness

In a scene where Don is attempting to court Dow Chemical, a potentially huge client, he is told that Dow is “Happy” with the advertising work being done by another company. It is at this moment that we are granted a glimpse into Don’s psyche. Don retorts, “What is happiness?! It’s a moment before you need more happiness!”

What is happiness? Is it simply the presence of joy? Is it simply the absence of chaos and suffering? Or is it perhaps reaching a state of inner peace and contentment? Joy is temporary and fleeting, to chase joy is to seek out externalities. Chaos and suffering are inevitable when you consider that life is a terminal condition, everyone and everything shall perish. To be at peace, however, is to gain an understanding of nature and the world and the learning to accept the ebbs and flows of life while maintaining a positive attitude. This is not to say that one should live in a state of naivety and denial, but rather to be aware of the negative aspects of ourselves and nature while making the conscious decision to persist nonetheless.

Happiness eludes Don because he is controlled by his id. The “id” is a Freudian term used to describe the dark part of our personality that lies in our subconscious mind, we might think of it as the devil on our shoulder that whispers into our ear. As a means to escape pain, the id, through the “Pleasure principle,” searches for immediate gratification through impulse and desire. In the case of Donald Draper, rather than looking inward for his desired peace, he is constantly looking for exterior forms of temporary relief from his pain. The immediate gratification he frequently indulges in is alcohol, women, material goods, and status. Naturally, by attempting to fill the gaping hole within his soul with pleasure, he only succeeds in going round and round in an endless cycle of destruction and despair while taking everyone close along with him.

It is as if he is in a sinking boat and using a thimble to throw water back into the sea while the boat is taking in more and more water.

Moonshadow

Philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung stated, “The king constantly needs the renewal that begins with a descent into his own darkness.” The aim for a benevolent king, or an individual person for that matter, should be to look into the dark corners of our psyche, or soul, and through radical self-honesty acknowledge the existence of the thoughts and behaviors that we suppress, attempt to forget, or that feed negativity. This is the same psychological principle found in the catholic church’s tradition of confession. To pray and seek forgiveness for your transgressions is to be honest with yourself and god, acknowledging wrongdoing against others and yourself. From the secular psychological perspective, it is acknowledging the negative aspects of ourselves and then following that thread down the rabbit hole until we reach the root cause of what is causing the negative behavioral patterns. This innate part that we all carry can also be referred to as our “Shadow.” The shadow “personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself.” Once you gain an understanding of what is triggering destructive thoughts or destructive actions, you incorporate the knowledge of its existence into your conscious mind and can begin the process of gaining control and managing this negative aspect to us. This is the beginning of a process called individuation, a process that leads to the formation of an identity, or a sense of self. “The process of washing one’s dirty linen in private.” With the formation of the Self comes what Jung would refer to as the “Dissolution of the Persona.” This idea of having two identities that are separate and unknown to one another is quite literally personified through Don Draper.

Mad Men’s creator and writer Matthew Weiner credits Sigmund Freud as an influence on his philosophy. Freud’s influence is very much written into his character arcs, including and especially in his protagonist. Dick Whitman created Donald Draper, it is a character and a brand that he successfully sold to the world but failed to sell to himself. The invented persona of Donald Draper sought to lock away the existence of Dick Whitman, hoping he’d disappear into a forgotten memory. In the attempted locking away of Dick Whitman came the attempted locking away his past. From a Jungian perspective, he repressed his shadow, in a Freudian sense, he denied the existence of his id, and as a result, it went on to control him. By seeking out only temporary relief from pain through short-term acts of desire, it did not allow him to examine his past to try and find out why he is the way he is, why he is miserable, alone, depressed, and expressing suicidal ideation. To borrow a line from physicist Stephen Hawking, “It is the past who tells us what we are, without it, we lose our identity.” Don’s endless search for happiness and fulfillment was oriented by the id’s pleasure principle causing him to become a destructive drinker, a terrible husband, and a terrible father. He could not love those close to him in a meaningful way because he did not love himself. Don didn’t love himself because he didn’t even know who he was.

The Greek philosopher Socrates stated, “All philosophical commandments could be reduced to one expression, “Know yourself.” Donald Draper and Dick Whitman can be reduced down to each representing the conscious and the subconscious mind. By refusing to allow the two to meet and integrate he was creating a further divide between them, deepening his negative emotion in the process. The “Dissolution of the Persona” involves the combining of both the public and private persona into one, effectively forming an individual identity that is unique from the crowd, our true and authentic self. This idea is characterized well by American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne who stated, “No one man can, for any considerable time, wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which is the true one.” This idea is characterized both metaphorically and quite literally by the presence of both Dick Whitman and Donald Draper. By living his life as Don, his manufactured persona, he was repressing the “Shadow” that was Dick Whitman. Because a shadow cannot be effectively repressed without manifesting itself in other ways, often destructive, this causes him to become progressively more miserable.

Both Sides Now

Toward the end of the series, Don is finding it increasingly difficult to keep Dick Whitman locked away and begins to crack. Through several powerful scenes, we are beginning to see Dick Whitman bubble up to the surface where Don is forced to examine why he is the way he is.

Donald Draper has a fractured relationship with his children, especially with his eldest, Sally. Sally, who is old enough to recognize that Don is a miserable husband and father, tells him that she knows absolutely nothing about him. This idea of Don beginning the journey of insight is brilliantly portrayed in a scene where he takes his kids to the now-abandoned brothel he was raised in. As the four of them step outside of the car and gaze at the dilapidated house, the song “Both Sides Now” begins to play in the background. This is symbolic on a couple of fronts. First, Sally gives her father a look as if to say, “Now that I’ve seen both sides of your life, both your persona and your roots, I can see why you battle demons.” Don then looks at Sally as if to say, “See?” Second and most significantly, this scene is meant to represent Don beginning the journey of insight. He is quite literally beginning to see both sides of himself now, both Don Draper and his shadow, Dick Whitman. A similar portrayal of “Returning to whence we came” is characterized in The Lion King (as well as countless other works of literature and film) where Simba was trying to lock away the existence of pride rock in his mind due to the shame and guilt associated with his past. Only when Mufasa tells him he must return home to reclaim his throne and bring peace to both himself and the ecosystem does he realize he must reconcile his past, return to his home of pride rock, and become who he is supposed to be.

In the series finale, Don Draper reaches the destination on his journey.

Unification

Amid an existential crisis, Don flees New York and goes on a hiatus until he eventually finds himself at a hippy retreat along the California coast. After suffering a mental breakdown that leaves him in a paralyzed state at rock bottom, Don is approached by a therapist who eventually gets him to attend a group therapy session with her.

While being in a state of emotional shock signified by the glazed look over his face, a man by the name of Leonard begins speaking and it captures the attention of Don. Leonard begins sharing his feelings of intense isolation and insignificance. Leonard says, “I work in an office, people walk right by me and I know they don’t see me. Then I go home and I watch my wife and my kids – they don’t look up when I sit down. It’s like no one cares that I’m gone. They should love me, maybe they do, but, I don’t even know what it is. You spend your whole life thinking you’re not getting it, people aren’t giving it to you. Then you realize they’re trying, and you don’t even know what IT is. I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off, and I know everybody’s out there eating And then they open the door, and you see them smiling. They’re happy to see you. But maybe they don’t look right at you, and maybe they don’t pick you. Then the door closes again. The light goes off.”

While in appearance, importance, wealth, power, and influence, Don has seemingly nothing in common with this man, Dick Whitman has everything in common with this man. Don who was completely disinterested in the therapy session is now overcome with an intense feeling of being finally understood. Draper then walks over to Leonard who is now crying and embraces him, squeezing him as they sob together. This is perhaps meant to symbolize Don being introduced to himself for the first time in his life and embracing himself. To dig a little deeper, this scene can also be interpreted as the symbolized integration of his shadow or the dissolution of his persona, the formation of identity, the finding of the Self, the reconciliation of his past, and the arrival to consciousness. To quote Carl Jung once more, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

The final scene of the entire series takes place on a cliffside where we see Dick Whitman taking part in a group meditation session. It’s been said that meditation is the journey to know yourself, this is true of the final scene. While “Om’ing,” Don’s face exudes a sense of being at peace while the sound of a “Ding” is heard followed by a subtle smirk as if to signify the formulation of an idea. Next, we’re introduced to the infamous “Coca-Cola Hilltop ad” which we’re led to believe was the result of Don’s epiphanic thought.

Bert Cooper, the founder of the advertising agency that Don works for and the characterized “Wise elder” of the series, states in an earlier episode, “The Japanese have a saying: A man is whatever room he is in.” After Don’s coming-to-consciousness moment, he accepts that he is both Dick Whitman and an ad man. The Coca-Cola ad went on to become one of the most memorable and impactful ad campaigns ever created and from it, we gain insight into Don’s present psyche. The commercial features dozens of people from ethnicities and cultures spanning the world standing on a hilltop singing a song about coming together and finding peace. Themes we can draw from the commercial could include peace, love, harmony, and most significantly, unity. On a cultural level, it represented the unifying of the 60s counterculture and capitalism. On a geopolitical level, the ad was created in the midst of the Vietnam and Cold Wars that had the world divided. On a personal level, perhaps we can draw the conclusion that Don’s creation of an advertisement involving the theme of unity is meant to represent the unification of his soul. Throughout the entirety of the series and the entirety of Don’s life, he was a tortured soul who sought to suppress his shadow. Not until the final five minutes of the series does he integrate his shadow and form the conception of Self, finally finding the peace that he has endlessly searched for his entire life.

The overarching theme of the series is the journey to self-actualization and the search for personal meaning. 20th-century psychotherapist and philosopher Viktor Frankl said that “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner portrays this idea by ironically creating characters who seemingly have it all but are miserable because they don’t know who they are and continually search for fulfillment in all the wrong places instead of searching within themselves. This idea seems to be a common theme among many of the great thinkers over the centuries and probably dating back forever. The idea that life’s greatest purpose and greatest challenge is to gain knowledge of one’s self and to become who we truly are and who we’re meant to be. Under that criteria, in some sense, we are all Mad Men.

The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself.”

Ghandi

The purpose of life is to know yourself, create yourself, experience yourself as Who You Really Are.”

Neale Donald Walsch