Unit 00’s soul and the primal scene
I’m really intrigued by the theory that the first Rei clone – or at least a portion of it – is present inside Unit 00. Apparently it is the prevailing theory because there is the most supporting evidence relative to contrary suggestion, but ultimately we will never really know, and I just happen to like it for symbolic reasons.
We know that Rei is Yui Ikari’s clone and a vessel for the soul of Lilith. We also know that all the Evas, with the exception of Unit 01, have been engineered from the genetic material of Adam. The two together constitute a version of the “forbidden fusion” like the one Gendo Ikari seeks to catalyze Third Impact and thus reunite with his dead wife.
The first version of Rei that we glimpse is a child. What strikes me about the interpretation that her soul, or a portion of her soul, has been implanted into Unit 00 is its parallels with Freud’s primal scene (i.e., the traumatic witnessing of parental intercourse and its interpretation by the child). If Rei, who is a Lilith vessel, pilots the Adam-derived Evangelion in a union that symbolically mimics the primal scene, it makes sense for the child Rei – the Rei soul that inhabits Unit 00 – to become violent and confused.
Ernest Becker interprets the primal scene as traumatic not because the child feels frustration at his exclusion from the act (see: Freud), but because it is representative of betrayal and a kind of anxiety-provoking, existential contradiction:
“He can well feel betrayed by them: they reserve their bodies for the closest relationship but deny it to him. They discourage physicalness with all the powers at their command, and yet they themselves practice it with an all-consuming vengeance. When we take all this together we can see that the primal scene can truly be a trauma, not because the child can’t get into the sexual act and express his own impulses but rather because the primal scene is itself a complex symbol combining the horror of the body, the betrayal of the cultural superego, and the absolute blockage of any action the child can take in the situation or any straightforward understanding that he can have of it. It is the symbol of an anxious multiple bind.” – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
No wonder, then, that Unit 00 is on a hair trigger to go berserk, smashing its own skull into the walls of the test chamber when Rei 2.0 – the teenage Rei that we see for the majority of the series – is in the entry plug. If Rei 2.0 has whatever remains of Rei 1.0’s original soul, reuniting the two of them in the pilot seat of Unit 00 forces confrontation with unresolved trauma. For Becker, the fundamental trauma is any reminder of the dualistic human condition: that we are the “gods who shit,” or conscious entities capable of comprehending meaning and existence while being trapped in a decaying, defecating animal body. Uniquely transcendent, yet destined to rot like every other beast on the planet. We thus construct our lives around a culturally-sanctioned causa sui project – a self-generated purpose and practiced self-delusion of identity, the vital lie of a self with meaning – in which we attempt to carve out symbolic permanence for ourselves in the face of the anxiety of death and oblivion.
What Gendo seeks to achieve is an ultimate transcendence of the body through Third Impact, or the fusion of Adam (the seed of life, and in a Beckerian interpretation, representative of the animal body) and Lilith (the seed of knowledge, representative of the mind and conscious awareness). The irony is that he is pursuing this goal in a way that is symbolically and inescapably sexual and thus grounded in the very bodily reality he is attempting to escape. Furthermore, his desire to be reunited with Yui is itself a sexual goal and thus doomed to fail as a causa-sui project:
“No wonder, too, that most of us never abandon entirely the early attempts of the child to use the body and its appendages as a fortress or a machine to magically coerce the world. We try to get metaphysical answers from the body that the body – as a material thing – cannot possibly give. […] It is comfortingly infantile in its indulgence and its pleasure, yet so self-defeating of real awareness and growth, if the person is using it to try to answer metaphysical questions. It then becomes a lie about reality, a screen against full consciousness.” – Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
When Unit 00 tries to punch the shit out of him in a fit of self-destructive insanity, it is Rei’s terror and confusion at the primal scene and a rejection of the forceful imposition of Gendo’s causa-sui project on her. (This rejection is bookended at the conclusion of the series by Rei as a whole, maturing woman and not just the fragmented Rei child-soul within Unit 00.) She is a replaceable cog in his misguided machinations, trapped within his doomed and sexual preoccupations, and Unit 00 is raging against the repression of Rei’s individual will and ability to self-determine.
