ABSTRACT
The Doctor’s Wife provides a tantalising invitation, hinting at new insights into the Doctor and at some kind of family life. Among the unconscious psychological shifts explored in The Doctor’s Wife then, is the transition into marriage and what that means within the inter-subjective world of the TARDIS: for Amy, Rory, and, in particular, for the Doctor. The Doctor affirms his connection to his TARDIS in descriptions of himself as a “madman with a box”, a phrase used when the Time Lord meets adult-Amy in The Eleventh Hour. Part of the violence in The Doctor’s Wife can be attributed to the indirect dramatic expression of the unconscious anxieties of characters bearing the burden of the secrets while a new imaginary “household” is being built in the blue box, in an episode where the TARDIS is virtually destroyed—and then remade in the space of the drama.
