What is Psychoanalysis?
Psychoanalysis is a way of understanding the mind that goes back to Sigmund Freud. The idea is that not everything we feel or do is fully conscious. A lot of our thoughts, desires, and conflicts stay buried in the unconscious, but they still shape how we act and how we see ourselves.
Instead of just looking at what someone says on the surface, psychoanalysis looks for contradictions, slips, hidden meanings, and the push-and-pull between what someone wants and what they fear. It’s less about diagnosis and more about trying to understand the inner world a person lives in.
A Split Self
One of the clearest patterns in Dylan’s writing is the feeling of being torn in two. On some pages, he craves love and connection. He writes about wanting “someone who can love me… someone I can kiss, someone to be with.” He longs for intimacy and understanding.
But on the other side, he’s harsh and hopeless. He calls himself “different” and says he lacks “true human nature.” He describes himself as if he’s broken beyond repair.
This push-and-pull: wanting love but believing he doesn’t deserve it is what psychoanalysis calls a split self. It’s the experience of living with two inner voices that never stop fighting each other.
Projecting Pain
Dylan often judged others as shallow or fake. He wrote about his classmates as “robotic” and ignorant. In psychoanalysis, this is seen as projection. It’s putting your own unwanted feelings onto others.
By seeing everyone else as empty, Dylan didn’t have to face his own deep sense of emptiness. It’s easier to blame the outside world than to sit with the pain inside.
Suicidal Longing and the Death Drive
Dylan wrote about suicide often, and not just in passing. He described it as something that gave him “hope.” In one entry, he said:
“Thinking of suicide gives me hope… that I’ll finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe.”
In psychoanalysis, Freud called this pull toward self-destruction the death drive. The desire for quiet, stillness, and release. For Dylan, suicide wasn’t just an escape from pain; it became a kind of promise of peace, the only place where he imagined the inner war would stop.
Music as a Mirror
Dylan also wrote about how he played music constantly, even while sleeping. This can be seen as a coping mechanism. Music acted as a mirror for feelings he couldn’t put into words. Bands like Nine Inch Nails gave shape to his anger, alienation, and sadness.
Music became what psychoanalysts call a container: something outside himself that could hold and express emotions too big or confusing to manage on his own. But instead of lifting him out of despair, it often reinforced the dark thoughts he lived in.
Final Thoughts
Through a psychoanalytic lens, Dylan Klebold’s journals show a young man stuck in contradictions. He wanted love but believed he could never have it. He hated others but was really projecting his own emptiness. He longed for life but was drawn to death.
This doesn’t explain away his later violence, but it does show how unstable and painful his inner world was. Reading his journals this way gives us insight into how someone can feel both desperate for connection and convinced they’re beyond saving.
A deadly mix when left unchecked.
Echoes in the Columbine Archive 
Leave a comment