Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story: When the “Monster” Speaks
TL;DR: Psychodynamic psychotherapist Rick Cox analyses Netflix’s Monster to explore how trauma leads to emotional fragmentation. Learn how containment fails and why facing internal shame and emotional avoidance is the core of therapeutic change.
True horror begins in isolation, and ends when we dare to look closer.
The Need to Look Away, and Why We Can’t
The true crime genre often forces us to confront the extreme edges of human behaviour. When a story like Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story is released, it pulls us toward the horrific, asking us to gaze into the void of human depravity. The instinctive reaction is repulsion, the profound need to look away.
But as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, my focus must always shift from what they did to why. If we simply label such acts as "evil" or "monstrous," we miss the painful truth: Extreme violence is frequently the culmination of a history of absolute psychological isolation and unprocessed trauma.
This post explores how the narrative of a monster speaks volumes about the human condition, emotional fragmentation, and the terrifying consequences of emotional avoidance.
The Collapse of the Container
The deepest tragedy revealed by Gein's story is the profound failure of containment, both external and internal.
In early life, containment is provided by caregivers who help us manage feelings that are too large, scary, or chaotic. When this foundational safety fails, the self splits into pieces, leading to a desperate attempt to regulate immense internal anxiety alone.
The individual becomes trapped in an unconscious emotional pattern. The fear, the self-loathing, and the punitive internal voice become so overwhelming that the person must resort to defences that are disconnected from reality just to survive emotionally.
• The Defence of Fragmentation and ‘Splitting’: When a person cannot tolerate their internal emotional reality, their psyche fragments. What emerges is not a whole, integrated person, but a desperate collection of self-states trying to enact a survival strategy.
• The Loss of Empathy: We often struggle to find empathy for the monster. But empathy requires connection to the full range of human feeling. In extreme cases of trauma and fragmentation, the capacity to feel for others breaks down because the individual’s system is entirely consumed by the fight to emotionally survive.
Bridging the Horror with the Therapeutic Journey
The reason this media analysis fits into our discussion of therapy is that it provides a critical, if extreme, reference point for the struggles we see every day: the fear that keeps you stuck and the self-sabotage that derails possibility.
Our ISTDP-informed psychodynamic approach demands that clients face their own internal "monster", the buried feelings, the old shame, and the devastating anger that have been avoided for years.
In therapy, courage means turning toward the fears that make you feel stuck or impossible. We use the safety of the relationship to deliberately confront what has been fragmented and split off. This is precisely where the work of emotional freedom begins:
The pain you feel isn’t who you are; it’s what you’ve carried.
We analyse the monster's story not to excuse the horror, but to underscore the desperate human need for healing and emotional integration when the past still lives on inside you.
“You’re the one that can’t look away.” Monster: The Ed Gein Story, only on Netflix October 3rd.
The Importance of the Unsaid
Part of my work is bridging psychotherapy and public mental health awareness. These true-crime stories remind us that healthy emotional processing, the ability to feel, tolerate anxiety, and transform defences, is fundamental to a sane and integrated self.
The fragmented self speaks loudly in these documentaries. Therapy offers a confidential space to speak, feel, and integrate those difficult, often shameful parts of your own history, ensuring that your future is driven by authentic human connection and not by the unseen scripts of the past.
If this reflection resonated, you might also explore
The Man in Black: How Johnny Cash (and My Therapy Uniform) Teach Us About Containment
From Pain to Possibility: What Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral Teaches Us About Being Human
These stories help us look at the darker corners of the psyche, not to glorify them, but to understand what fear and trauma are trying to protect.
Explore more psychotherapy in the media
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FAQ: When the Monster Speaks
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Empathy is not approval. It’s recognition of shared humanity, even in its most distorted forms. When viewers feel sorry for someone like Ed Gein, they’re responding to suffering and isolation, the emotional roots of his breakdown, not the crimes themselves.
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True crime allows us to confront fear safely. Psychologically, it’s a ritual of exposure: we engage with what’s forbidden to understand it, contain it, and reassert our sense of control.
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Therapy teaches that denial fuels repetition. What we face with honesty can change; what we repress returns in more destructive forms. Looking at darkness, in ourselves or others, is how integration begins.
