I agree with the parallel between 7.4 Dean and this Dean. Both when lost in guilt and when lost in resentment, Dean can lose perspective. He looks at ghost!Jo -- someone who was an adult when she got into hunting, someone who had her own complex issues with her own parents driving her decisions, someone who was in the end satisfied with the life and death she had -- he looks at her and he sees Dean. There's a darkness to Dean's guilt, a tendency to appropriate other lives, that shows there, a tendency that was literalized in the erasure of parts of Lisa and Ben in 6.21.
And, under the spectre's influence, he's looking at all of Sam's choices (and non-choices: soullessness was hardly a decision Sam made) and measuring them in that same self-referential way, as betrayals of him. It's very telling that the idea that Sam resents Dean for dragging him into hunting came up in both cases, and was denied by Sam in both cases. Dean can't separate himself from Sam enough to see that Sam's issues with hunting might be Sam's issues with hunting, not Sam's issues with him. I think Dean is deep down terrified of Sam's decisions not being about him at all, because to Dean's damage that would mean Sam not needing him or loving him. It would be worse than a Sam who constantly betrays Dean, because at least being betrayed makes Dean a part of Sam's life. Where I think this is headed on Dean's side is to Dean eventually seeing the part of Sam's life that is independent of Dean not as a threat or as a betrayal, but as something that makes them able to choose each other and give freely to each other.
Sam has a very different set of problems. Sam's reactions are profoundly defensive, and I think that goes way back beyond trying to deny guilt about not searching for Dean. Right from his childhood rebellion against John, Sam experienced his selfhood and his choices as being under siege. And of course they were, not only in the human tangles of his upbringing, but in the cosmic manipulation of his destiny. Though it's enormously hurtful to Dean (and it's been pretty hurtful to fandom!) I can understand both why the profound emptiness of losing Dean had an element of relief for Sam, a feeling that his choices were finally being made without pressure, even the pressure imposed by loving and being loved by someone. And I can see why Sam seems to need to hold Dean at a distance and even reject him, because not only is Dean's return the return of inevitable pressure, but Dean has, in fact, been very directly applying that pressure, disallowing the choices Sam made in that year of emptiness and pushing his own sense of mission for both of them. So Sam ends up excluding and rejecting Dean, overdefending his boundaries against not only Dean's judgmental riding of him (which Sam has every right to limit) but against Dean's legitimate need for an understanding of why Sam did what he did, and Dean's equally legitimate need for Sam to understand where Dean is coming from with Benny, how Dean's own experiences in this instance aren't about Sam. After all, it's only retroactively that Benny can have become the better brother to Dean: the basis of Dean's friendship with Benny was simply shared experience in its own right.
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Date: 2012-11-11 03:37 pm (UTC)And, under the spectre's influence, he's looking at all of Sam's choices (and non-choices: soullessness was hardly a decision Sam made) and measuring them in that same self-referential way, as betrayals of him. It's very telling that the idea that Sam resents Dean for dragging him into hunting came up in both cases, and was denied by Sam in both cases. Dean can't separate himself from Sam enough to see that Sam's issues with hunting might be Sam's issues with hunting, not Sam's issues with him. I think Dean is deep down terrified of Sam's decisions not being about him at all, because to Dean's damage that would mean Sam not needing him or loving him. It would be worse than a Sam who constantly betrays Dean, because at least being betrayed makes Dean a part of Sam's life. Where I think this is headed on Dean's side is to Dean eventually seeing the part of Sam's life that is independent of Dean not as a threat or as a betrayal, but as something that makes them able to choose each other and give freely to each other.
Sam has a very different set of problems. Sam's reactions are profoundly defensive, and I think that goes way back beyond trying to deny guilt about not searching for Dean. Right from his childhood rebellion against John, Sam experienced his selfhood and his choices as being under siege. And of course they were, not only in the human tangles of his upbringing, but in the cosmic manipulation of his destiny. Though it's enormously hurtful to Dean (and it's been pretty hurtful to fandom!) I can understand both why the profound emptiness of losing Dean had an element of relief for Sam, a feeling that his choices were finally being made without pressure, even the pressure imposed by loving and being loved by someone. And I can see why Sam seems to need to hold Dean at a distance and even reject him, because not only is Dean's return the return of inevitable pressure, but Dean has, in fact, been very directly applying that pressure, disallowing the choices Sam made in that year of emptiness and pushing his own sense of mission for both of them. So Sam ends up excluding and rejecting Dean, overdefending his boundaries against not only Dean's judgmental riding of him (which Sam has every right to limit) but against Dean's legitimate need for an understanding of why Sam did what he did, and Dean's equally legitimate need for Sam to understand where Dean is coming from with Benny, how Dean's own experiences in this instance aren't about Sam. After all, it's only retroactively that Benny can have become the better brother to Dean: the basis of Dean's friendship with Benny was simply shared experience in its own right.