Bagpipes!

I did my blog critique on an episode of How I Met Your Mother, and perhaps this is backwards, but it only made sense to post this as part of my blog. I hope you'll read through it and give me some feedback!

I'm not sure how much background is needed for those who don't watch the show, but I'll give a little information-- The narrator is Ted, and he is years in the future, telling his kids the story of how he met their mother. Makes sense now, right? Apparently everything in the episode is relevant to this long, elaborate story about how they met. FYI, five seasons in, we have yet to be introduced to the mom, so forget about that. What does matter are the relationships and weird situations the five friends constantly get into.

This is the episode I analyzed: http://tvshack.net/tv/How_I_Met_Your_Mother/season_5/episode_6/a:699692/


In the season 5 episode “Bagpipes” of How I Met Your Mother, Barney’s seemingly perfect relationship with Robin – apparently they never even fight! His strategy for walking away and her strategy for getting naked seems to fix any conflict – makes him think he has the right to give relationship advice to Marshall about his marriage with Lily. Barney seems to think their marriage is crumbling because Lily has him do the dishes immediately, though Marshall doesn’t care one way or the other; that is, until Barney said something.
In the show, the three men almost perfectly represent Freud’s theory of id, ego, and superego. Barney is the id, which is dedicated to fulfillment of all sorts of desires, especially sexual. Barney is known for being a womanizer, and being monogamous doesn’t seem to halt his carnal desires and pleasure-loving. He works based on instinct without care to the consequences (he doesn’t seem worried about any repercussions of his promiscuity throughout the series) and pretends to spout of how he thinks like it is logic, though it is not. (He always wears a suit and tie, and the tie has often been interpreted as a phallic symbol, perhaps in that he always desires to be erect.) When Barney informs Marshall on how to deal with his problem, his fantasy that involved Lily’s submission to his sexuality is an excellent example of his voyeuristic mindset, or his scopophilia.
In comparison, Marshall is the superego: he internalizes all sorts of social values (including the values in his relationship with Lily) into a sense of right and wrong, and as a result he is constantly suffering from guilty about what he shouldn’t do because of how he has been programmed. He is very constrained.
Ted, their best friend, is the ego, since he is one who faces the world realistically and consciously (he is the narrator, after all) and referees between Barney and Marshall, as he attempted to do the entire episode. When Marshall says to Barney, “Okay, so you walk away, Robin gets naked… Those are the two stupidest ways to have a conflict I’ve ever heard.” Ted injects, “Actually, the naked thing ain’t bad! Okay, that felt weird.” This quote represents Ted’s inability to relate to either the superego or the id, though he’s balancing between.
Barney is certain that Marshall’s relationship is doomed because Marshall follows Lily’s rules, specifically about the dishes left in the sink. According to Freudian perspective, the sink could be a yanic symbol, representing Lily’s potential for control. Marshall’s submission is a result of castration anxiety, or the fear being reduced to the powerless position of women by the loss of his manhood. (Marshall says partway through the episode, after Barney messed with his head, that, “Those dishes are my manhood! And if I want to leave my manhood dirty in the sink, caked with ketchup and pasta, then dammit, that’s my right! I’ll wash my manhood when I’m good and ready!”) Lily, on the other hand, suffers from penis envy, or as it can be more accurately interpreted here, power envy, so she takes advantage of what power she does have to control Marshall by making him wash his dishes in the sink instead of leaving them there for her.
Barney’s relationship with Robin is not so perfect, however, as we find out. Nor is he, for that matter. He has a selective perception about his relationship with Robin in order to keep believing they are as perfect of a couple as he portrays, and has selective memory about their fights; in other words, he suffers from denial. He believed that conflict avoidance was the best approach and attempted to project this philosophy onto Marshall’s relationship with Lily.
In conclusion, this episode of How I Met Your Mother had many examples of Freudian’s theory of psychoanalysis. It consisted of the id, ego, and super ego; scopophilia; phallic and yanic symbols; the Oedipus complex through its representations of penis envy and castration anxiety; and unconscious anxieties and defenses.