Chapter 5 - The Death of the Supertramp

Summary

“The Death of the Supertramp” examines the extent to which psychoanalytic concepts inform contemporary expressions of the American wilderness myth. It does so by focusing on the much-publicized death of Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), as well as his cult following. McCandless takes to an extreme an idea popular within the deep ecology movement: that by quitting human civilization one might recover a repressed, authentic sense of wholeness. McCandless equates this lost unity with the expansive scope of the ecosystem as a whole rather than a bounded sense of self. Krakauer’s account demonstrates the centrality of Freud’s developmental schema to the young man’s logic: McCandless believes that his civilized ego represses a natural, more expansive psychic condition. It also suggests that this influence introduces a certain political quiescence to both wilderness discourse and mainstream environmentalism in general. In dismissing the importance of his self-identity – the ego that gives him reason to stay alive – McCandless does the most authentically ecological thing possible: he dies, consequently allowing his bodily matter to circulate.