The One in Front of the Gun Lives Forever: Cathexis, Kleos, and Emotional Containment in U.S. Military Enlistment
This thesis will explore how military enlistment is a product of unbound cathexis that turns into a bound identity through institutional structures, revealing how emotional struggles, class pressures and ancient ideals like kleos help shape the decision to serve. Although individuals choosing to serve in the United States military can be described as being driven by patriotism and seeking purpose, the real motivation involves emotional forces described in Eric Berne’s Theory of Cathexis. People who experience unbound psychic energy may undergo societal pressure from classism and nationalism to join the military, as this brings back control over their shaky feelings. Survey data and modern scholarly works supported through research shows that people join the military because basic psychological needs force the expression and not for any other reason or choice.
It is June 30th, 2015. I am lying on my mother’s couch in Kansas City, Kansas, after spending a week in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at a music festival. I begin to reevaluate my life. The only one keeping me company is the hamster my little brother was chosen to take care of during summer break. He has chosen to neglect her, as the family packed up for a vacation to California days before. The late night becomes an early morning, feeling as if I must have some greater purpose in life to serve than continuing as a Costco employee that is a concert photographer on the side. These four walls mirror that of the hamster’s cage, unfed and emotionally unfed, to the point where I become disconnected from the people and places in my life.
It is 7:30 p.m. the next day. I make my way to the recruitment office near my work in Lenexa, Kansas. All the offices are closed–all but the farthest one in the back left of the main hallway. I pass by each closed door: Army, National Guard, Coast Guard, Marines, and finally, I reach the open door, Navy. Two weeks later, I am sworn in and entered into the delayed entry program (DEP). I am meeting with the same recruiter I met that fateful night each month until I ship out. She tells me how there was no reason why she should have been at the office that late and tells me I am an RFG, a referral from God.
Looking back on all of this, from that night on the couch, all the way up to the day I shipped out, there was something deeper at work I did not yet understand: a quiet unraveling of emotional connection. It was not a clear decision. It didn’t feel calculated or even fully conscious, but something inside me had already let go of all I had been attached to. In psychological terms, this process is described through the concept of cathexis, a term coined by Sigmund Freud and further explored by Eric Berne: a psychoanalytic theory to refer to the emotional energy we invest in people, goals, and relationships.
The three forms of psychic energy contained in the human mind, according to Berne’s Theory, are bound cathexes for emotional energy invested in internal or external structures, free cathexes as potential energy to be invested, and unbound cathexes as energy being reclaimed. The neuroscience research, however, shows us that these states are connected to neuronal networks whose functioning implies such neural structures able to channelize attentional functions with a default operation (Messina et al. 51). Therefore, according to psychologists, people without direction seek to direct the energy of their mind outwards, via external structures, which suggests that people without direction are drawn to external structures. This is a phenomenon that is revealed through people’s military recruitment choices.
To gain a better understanding on how emotional detachment, class pressure, and national identity influences enlistment decisions, I conducted a survey on individuals who served in the U.S. military and received 53 responses. The survey focused on emotional support prior to enlistment, class-based factors that influence career choices, and attitudes toward emotional vulnerability during service. The results that were presented reflect underlying patterns consistent with the theory of unbound cathexis in relation to emotional energy seeking containment through military service.
Among the 64.2% of respondents who reported emotional support prior to enlistment, several described as having support coming from family members with a military background. Some participants indicated that their enlistment was framed as a traditional expectation. One respondent reflected, “I’ve never had anyone explicitly say they didn’t expect me to enlist – it was assumed.” Another noted, “If you’re willing to put your life on the line, it’s usually because it’s normalized or expected in your family/community.” These statements suggest that, for some individuals, emotional support was not purely unconditional but intertwined with implicit pressure to continue military service. Rather than representing personal freedom, this form of support reinforced nationalistic values and limited alternatives that may have been perceived outside of military service.
According to survey data, 79.2% of respondents indicated that economic limitations and social class position played a deciding factor on whether or not to join the military. One respondent stated, “Freshly graduated from high school with no idea what to do for a job or what to study and was worried about going into debt for a useless degree.” Another wrote, “After flunking out of college and facing debt, I started looking into alternatives to moving back home with my parents.” These responses not only reflect practical hardship, but an emotional state of disconnection in what Eric Berne would describe as unbound cathexis: emotional energy that is disconnecting from personal goals or meaningful roles. Unbound cathexis creates a condition of internal unrest that often compels individuals to invest in external structures offering stability and purpose (Messina et al. 50-51). With no other viable pathways to consider, the military serves as a structure to absorb unanchored energy (free cathexis) and reattach it to a fixed identity. What appears to be a rational or patriotic choice at the surface then is redirected emotional dislocation toward institutional containment.
In All About Love, bell hooks argues that the United States lives in a culture shaped by domination rather than care, where death is more acceptable than love. This is a critique on more than just violence; she calls out a society that rewards emotional detachment and punishes vulnerability (hooks 191). This is a dynamic that is present in the military, where emotional suppression is normalized and personal value is measured by sacrifice. One would only need to glance at the titles of glorified war video games, such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor for this to be clear, to see how easily sacrifice becomes mythologized. Both phrases hold the powerful weight of duty, sacrifice, and loss, yet are rendered hollow through repetitive, commercialized violent gameplay that desensitizes players to death while reinforcing the fantasy of heroism through domination.
This glorification is not something that is new; this is indoctrination that has existed across time and mediums, but to reduce it to propaganda alone would be incomplete. Sebastian Junger notes throughout his book, Tribe, that early storytelling of battles—whether around campfires or passed down through oral tradition—was not just meant to inspire valor; it also helped warriors process trauma. Junger emphasizes how these narratives gave emotional weight to suffering and provided an outlet through which individuals could grieve, reflect, and reconnect with their communities. Recalling a Veterans Day in 2015, he notes, “A community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought” (Junger 123). But much of this meaning behind storytelling has been lost as entertainment value overtook emotional purpose. The stories told became flattened, with sacrifice stripped of complexity, violence repackaged as spectacle, and no longer serving the purpose of healing. One of the earliest and most enduring examples of this shift from meaning to myth appears in The Iliad.
In Homer’s epic, Achilles faces a choice: return home to a long, uneventful life, or stay and die in battle but be remembered forever. “For my mother the goddess, silver-footed Thetis, telleth me that twofold fates are bearing me toward the doom of death: if I abide here and war about the city of the Trojans, then lost is my home-return, but my renown shall be imperishable; but if I return home to my dear native land, lost then is my glorious renown, yet shall my life long endure, neither shall the doom of death come soon upon me” (Homer 9.410–15). The Greek knew this as kleos: glory through death and eternal remembrance. This echoes in how military identity is constructed today. But with unbound cathexis, what may appear as strength or purpose is often of emotional detachment into mythic performance. The price of remembrance, in this system, is often in the death of emotional presence. As Kendrick Lamar puts it in a more contemporary form of mythmaking through his album good kid m.A.A.d city, on his song “Money Trees,” he states: “Everybody gon’ respect the shooter, but the one in front of the gun lives forever.’ This puts into perspective that even though The Iliad is an old tale, its framework lives on in the stories we tell though music, media, and the narratives that shape who we are allowed to become.
Looking back at the survey, across all branches of service, this emotional pattern holds with 13.2% Marine Corps participants, 17% Air Force, 39.6% Navy personnel, and 30.2% Army members. Civilians often enlist for hidden motives, such as economic or emotional ones, but the emotional power of nationalism glorifies military duty. Military service acts as a vessel for such people to expeditiously dump this volatile mental energy they produce from society. In Berne’s framework, the military process entails deliberate operations on the internal self (60.4% of participants indicated reassessing themselves). 92.5% of respondents admitted to keeping mute about their pain or grief, a psychic suppression on behalf of military norms. The evidence presented in the survey is that 62.3% of case units suppressed vulnerability, which led to self-damage. Whereas 90.6 % of respondents experienced personality change while serving.
Beyond the survey responses collected, informal public discussions also reveal similar emotional patterns behind military enlistment. In a post on the r/newtothenavy forum, a potential enlistee wrote, “I feel like I have no passion or drive. My life is static. I don’t know who I am.” Rather than expressing patriotic conviction or career ambition, the individual articulates an emotional vacancy and a desire for external structure. This mirrors the concept of free cathexis and supports the argument that military service often offers containment for psychic disconnection rather than fulfillment of clear, self-determined goals.
This is something I can relate to when further reflecting on my decision to join the military. Being the son of an undocumented father and a mother who was naturalized during the Reagan amnesty, I felt like I had to prove my worth to this country. I thought of no better way than to enlist in the United States Navy. Although I do not regret my service, it has caused an unintended consequence I had not considered. My father has not been actively in my life since being deported in 2014, and when I speak to him over the phone, it is clear that he is perceiving me through the lens of that fixed identity I had taken when I was in the military. And looking back at when I first enlisted, it was the only time that I could remember him saying he was proud of me.
In that realization, I felt as though he would never see me for who I am in this moment and never hear those words again. But much time has passed since my last day in the Navy, and out of all the times we have spoken over the phone, one sticks out to me the most. He recounted to me a time when I was entering kindergarten and all the kids in my class were tasked with completing a coloring page before we could go outside and play. He said as more of the children began to run outside, he grew concerned over why I was taking so long. When he finally observed the other pages left behind and back at mine, he noticed that I was taking my time to stay within the lines. Looking back at this conversation, I realized that he was always proud of me, and that goes beyond the simple phrase of “I am proud of you.”
And yet, with all this being said, there is something I must say directly rather than imply: when I decided to enlist in the military, I wished to die. This is something that I could not do by my own hand; I wished to die doing something I believed was noble. This is not a sentiment I speak of lightly, nor one I shared with anyone at the time. It is, however, something I later learned was silently shared by two out of three of my younger brothers, who enlisted after me.
I never told anyone about my interest in joining the military or why. It was not until I sworn in that everyone close to me received the news that I would be shipping out. Some friends did not believe me, others called me stupid, but their reactions were nothing compared to that of my mother. I had been so detached from everything that my hair was growing out and my shoes were wearing down, knowing that it would all be gone after I entered basic training. As the days started to count down to the final week, my mother bought me a pair of low-top converse, noticing my high-tops at the time were held together by glue. I told her that I would not need them come the following week and to give them to my younger brother. A few days later, she stood in the doorway and was in tears, asking me why I was leaving, as if it was her fault. What I feel now I did not feel then. But it pains me deeply to think about the toll that must have put on my mother, and how that opened the door for the rest of my brothers to follow, enlisting after me, against her wishes.
As I stated before, much time has passed since my last day in the Navy. And by divine intervention, or whatever you may call it, my purpose in the Navy was not to take a life, but to save one. I worked on ejection seats for pilots to ensure the preservation of their lives. Upon returning to civilian life, I then enrolled in college and immediately became the president of the Student Veterans Organization. Although I believed this to be a noble purpose, it was not my purpose and in the end, I burned myself out. I fell into a deep depression and found myself lying on a couch again, physically and emotionally unfed inside my loft in downtown Kansas City. The windows were so large, I felt like that pet hamster from where it all started. There was no running away this time and in desperation, I ended up writing a letter to everyone who I believed had ever hurt me, and the more I wrote, the more I realized it was a letter to myself. That moment of self-confrontation shifted everything and eventually led me to move in with my brother Daniel. He also joined with the idea of sacrificing his life for a noble cause but became a combat medic stationed at Fort Leavenworth, working in the penitentiary’s clinic. Given how he spoke about his job with such purpose, I left to find my own in Chicago, where I transferred to Columbia College to continue my degree in film and start to reclaim my own story.
But what he had not told me was how the changing political climate and returning government administration was conflicting with his identity and purpose. He attempted to reclaim his roots by taking leave back to where our family originated in Mexico but was denied. Having been severed from our cultural identity for so long and how it has been villainized made him feel as though no matter how hard we try to show our good intentions and humanity, the framed and adopted narrative painted over us as the sons of immigrants would always trump our efforts. During a break from my research and visiting family, my brother asked me to go on a walk. He broke down in tears as we went down a dirt road heading towards my car, hoping he would open up to me about his pain. Instead, he made a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and I held his head in my arms, wishing time would stop moving forward so I would not have to leave him behind. Had it not been for his unspoken suffering and final act, I may not have been driven to complete this research and shine a light on an issue that continues to plague fellow service members.
Although we may find temporary peace, freedom, and comfort in fitting into a mold that shapes how we understand the world around us, it is not meant to become who we are as individuals. As Krishnamurti once said, “The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again” (Goodreads). There comes a time when we must break free, not as a final act of destruction and domination, but that of creativity and liberation. And through this act, the social construct, labels, and definitions fade away and we begin to heal and align with our authentic selves. Reclaiming the energy that has been directed towards external structures and shifting it inward.
Works Cited
Messina, Irene, and Marco Sambin. Berne’s Theory of Cathexis and Its Links to Modern Neuroscience. Transactional Analysis Journal, vol. 45, no. 1, 2015, pp. 48–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0362153714566596. Accessed April 10 2025.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000. Print.
Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Twelve, 2016. Print.
Lamar, Kendrick. Money Trees. good kid, m.A.A.d city, Top Dawg Entertainment/Aftermath/Interscope Records, 2012. iTunes.
u/[deleted]. “I Feel like I Have No Passion or Drive. My Life Is Static. I Don’t Know Who I Am.” Reddit, r/newtothenavy, 11 Aug. 2020,
www.reddit.com/r/newtothenavy/comments/i9f6rt/i_feel_like_i_have_no_passion_or_drive_my_life_is/. Accessed April 29 2025.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by A.T. Murray, Harvard University Press, 1924, Book 9, lines 410–415. Perseus Digital Library,
Krishnamurti, Jiddu. The Day You Teach the Child the Name of the Bird, the Child Will Never See That Bird Again. Goodreads, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6760458-the-day-you-teach-the-child-the-name-of-the. Accessed 15 Jan. 2026.
Irvin Gonzalez (Gonzo) is a senior at Columbia College Chicago in May of 2026 with a BA in Film and Television. Their writing has appeared in Just Released Magazine for the Fall/Winter 2025 issue. Their work spans journalism, documentary, broadcast, and narrative filmmaking, with a focus on character, community, and lived experience. Gonzo is particularly interested in how film can generate knowledge and growth through the senses, using observation and embodied storytelling to challenge fixed perspectives and offer nuance. Their recent projects include the short film Leather-Bound, on which they served as editor and won best picture at Griffon Film Festival.
