Things can only get Stranger: theoretical and clinical reflections on Netflix’s Stranger Things

The popularity of Stranger Things lies in its ability to depict the unconscious aspects of personality and the psychological processes constellated during crucial years of development and maturation. First, Jung’s notions of the mother complex and dual mother archetype frame the metamorphoses experienced by Will Byers and El. Second, a psychoanalytic understanding of nostalgia, loss and mourning elucidates the associations audiences make between their own experiences and those of the show’s central characters. Ironically, it is through an exploration of the monstrous and the fantastic that the series draws us closer to what it means to be human; the stranger things get, the closer we come to reality and grasping the operations of the psyche.