I was retreading the Socially/EmotionallyCrippledMulder territory with Phile-in-Denial recently, and it got me to thinking, and thinking some more.  I ended up giving a long e-mail reply, and here it is, since others of you who sometimes scratch your head puzzling over Mulder may find it useful:

I guess I'll begin my commentary at the beginning--Mulder's childhood. I think you're right about there probably being a lot of silence and hostility happening in that household. When you figure that Bill is off working on a project that nearly defies reality, one he becomes disenchanted with (and definitely not one he can bring home with him and confide to his wife--who would believe all this stuff?), we can see where Bill could get distant and uncommunicative pretty easily, regardless of however he may have begun in a relationship with Teena. Couple that with the fact that Teena has had some kind of affair with CSM (CC, in an interview earlier this year, admitted that CSM was Samantha's father) and you have the makings for a pretty chilly home atmosphere. I also think, as you say, that Mulder may have been a very nurturing brother to little Samantha, allowing his warmth to shine for her in an otherwise cold environment (and yes, babies are great sources of unconditional love expressed back to you.) I can see where she could easily have affected him deeply. (My oldest son, age 4 1/2 at the time, was deeply attached to his little sister and easily the one most affected of the three older kids--much more so than his sister, 8 at the time. or his 3-year-old brother, when she passed away at a very young age. He's a very self-contained person, but he'd opened up to this sibling and she was his little dolly. So I know parts of this dynamic from real life.)

If you've followed any of the Briggs-Meyers personality test results on the characters we've done recently, you may find that  a lot of Mulder-facets can be explained pretty well from the Briggs-Meyers categorizations.  (If you haven't, Zuffy brought this test to my attention; evidently everyone at her workplace had taken it.  Skeptical of tests that drop you into neat little boxes, she was impressed by the accuracy of the results in her case and then, as a further test of the test, went online and took it as Scully and was really impressed with how on-target the characterization was. So she mailed me and asked me to take the test as Mulder, since I seem to be able to put on the Mulder-suit pretty easily. I did, and what I found there helped explain a lot of little Mulder-dynamics to me. I also went back and took the test as Krycek, Scully and Skinner, and each time the characterizations were amazingly accurate.)

Here's Mulder's profile--characteristics picked and chosen because they apply, emphases mine; I'll comment below this:

-'Healer' (INFP) (comprises about 2% of the population)
-capacity for deep caring/passionate caring about a few people or causes
-Aim: to bring peace and integrity to their loved ones and the world
-boundless idealism -will make extraordinary sacrifices for someone or something they believe in

-Healers seek unity in their lives.

-Tend to have unhappy childhoods; but they wish to please parents, try to hide their differences from other 'normal' siblings; are made to feel that something bad or evil is in them, and they wonder whether they are quite 'okay'.

-deeply committed to the positive and the good, yet taught to believe that there is evil in them; perform acts of self-sacrifice in atonement.

-never lose their sense of wonder

-can see the good in almost anyone or anything

-their extreme depth of feeling is often hidden, even from themselves, until circumstances evoke an impassioned response (think of the hallway scene in FTF)

-strong people-awareness

-may turn to inferior exrtraverted Thinking for help in focusing on externals and for closure

-can even masquerade in ESTJ business suit, but not without expending considerable energy

Now, one of the things I could never figure out is why Mulder would keep on plugging away at a relationship with Teena when she has consistently been cold/unhelpful/unfeeling, etc. I mean, here is your kid, sincere, passionate, trying to do something to find his sister--your child--and all she can ever say is, "It was all so long ago" and, essentially, why are you doing this to me--tormenting me with these constant questions? As a mother, I couldn't bring myself to have a heart of ice like that.

And yet I think Mulder is way beyond dutiful.  We see this clearly from the way he treats her in the hospital when she's had the stroke (*Talitha Cumi) and when he goes home to check out the vacuum cleaner later in *Paper Hearts. INFPs, so the profile says, have a desire to please parents where kids in other categories just throw in the towel and go on with their lives. I think it's part of the healer profile; I think he has hope--Mulder has an almost infinite capacity for hopefulness. I think he sticks with her because he thinks there *is* a chance that things will change between them. I think he wants to heal her, to make her happy. Anyone without this desire or hopefulness would have given up on Teena long ago, I think.

Re Mulder's relationship with his dad: it's always interested me that Bill Mulder seems to treat him like a child, and as you observed, distantly. The defining scenes, of course, are when Mulder goes to his father's house in *Colony because Samantha has turned up, and he goes to hug his dad and Bill coldly holds out his hand instead; and the scene where Bill Mulder shows up on his doorstep in *End Game and makes Mulder feel like the responsibility for 'losing Samantha' is all his, as well as the detrimental effect this will have on his mother (especially hypocritical when we later discover that it's Bill's choice that Samantha is taken and not Fox himself. What kind of father could dump on his son this way?) Even in *Anasazi, when Bill calls Mulder to come to his house and is about to tell him about his involvement in the Project, he refers to Mulder as a 'boy' ("You're a smart boy, Fox. Your politics are your own. You've never thrown in...") This 'boy' is 33 years old. Would your dad call you 'boy'?...And of course, as you point out, this is another loss for Mulder in the end, because just as Bill is ready to open up to his son, he's killed and the opportunity to finally forge a relationship is lost.

The other childhood factor the INFP profile brings up is the fact that these children's 'otherness'--their sense of being different from most people--leads them, or the people around them, to see themselves as somehow deficient. Speaking for myself (an INFJ, also about 2% of the population, along with three other Cave-friends who have had very similar experiences to mine), this sense of 'otherness' can really leave you in a state of self-doubt. You think/experience things on a level/in a way that most people don't; when you try to convey this, people look at you as if you're crazy. Eventually you learn to keep it to yourself. You can spend a great deal of your life this way, sublimating the things you really live for, hoping sometime you'll come across someone else who will 'get it'. Finding a 'connection' after years of this is a very powerful thing to those of us in these small-percentage categories. It was only when we started toying with the Briggs-Meyers in the Cave that Listen and I, and then Littljoe, and finally Michele, discovered that we were all in that same 2%, and we all had startlingly similar reminiscences of growing up as 'fish out of water'. So as far as that goes, I understand very well why Mulder craves connection, and at the same time why he isn't liable (you learn from painful experience) to open up to just anyone.

Re " With role models like his mother and father, it is no wonder that Mulder has grown to be a man who has formed no emotional attachments. He doesn't know how to establish them": I'd add that he's justifiably wary about establishing them because the ones he's had have either been painful and unfulfilling (his parents) or ended in abandonment (involuntary, in Samantha's case.) I'd also have to say that he has an emotional attachment to Scully bigtime. He has very naturally let her into his core self (whether she feels as much a part of his inner self as he feels she is, is another matter, however.) It is reciprocated as far as the partnership goes--how many other people do you know who would go out and risk life/limb/reputation for each other? Hobrock has made the case that in many ways Mulder and Scully are analogous to Paul and Katt in *All Quiet on the Western Front, brought together by the shared dangers of battle, devoted to each other's well-being and survival, closer, as Paul expresses, than husband and wife. Mulder, perhaps out of necessity but also from correctly assessing Scully's ability/willingness to handle his heart, opens it to her and overall she has proved a faithful guardian of it.

Re failing to save Samantha: yes, we know he feels guilty, whether he should or not. Sara Stegall commented in one of her reviews (www.munchkyn.com ) that it's not really Samantha that Mulder is seeking, but rather the wholeness of his family that Samantha represents to him, and I think that this is true. Mulder has always sought a wholeness, one that in actuality his family has never really experienced. Yet he still knows what that is and craves it, in the same way a hungry man may not have experienced good food, but he surely knows what he's missing when it's not there. Of course, this wholeness is not something he can ever achieve in the way he's searching for it. Samantha, if he ever found her, wouldn't be the same little girl he'd lost, and his father is dead. No family wholeness there. In reality, I think the closest thing to wholeness he experiences is with Scully in the way they are always ready to sacrifice themselves/their jobs/their lives for one another; that unselfish aid freely given is really at the heart of the partnership/connection they have.

Hope the above explains a little the seeming contradiction of Mulder's social 'ineptitude' vs. his being easily exploitable. He needs a connection--heaven knows I felt this way for years myself, just wondering if there was anyone else out there who would 'get' me.  It's an extremely lonely position to be in, especially if you're full of enthusiasm for something you have a need to share.  So when one offers itself, he's vulnerable--as vulnerable as the starving man is to reaching for that plate of food someone just set in front of him.

Re women taking the lead in relationships: Littljoe did a great post that addressed this, 'Calling out in the dark'. Essentially, though, the fact that he feels deficient due to being different (the INFP complex again) makes Mulder the non-agressor. He doesn't feel he's in the position to present himself, or push, saying, "Such a deal I have for you!" People's reaction to him have taught him not to expect too much in the way of positive response, so his strategy has become to present himself, wait to see if there's any interest expressed, and if so, proceed with caution. "A lesson once learned is so hard to forget," Sting says in a song, and it's so very true. A history of rejection, in this case, can be a powerful shaper of behavior. If every time you open the door, someone punches you in the face, you become very cautious about opening the door, if you do it at all. But since he's developed this alternative "present your merchandise and wait to see if anyone wants to buy", the response Mulder has gotten has been from buyers eager to strike a deal--assertive females like Phoebe Green or Diana Fowley (whose motivations, BTW, are probably as CSM-based as purely her own.) Unfortunately, this approach will never work with Scully, but I'll get into that later.

Yes, he meets Scully and I also can initially see him resenting the partnership in principle, because she just seems to be a corporate spy, which is exactly what she's been recruited to be. Except that Scully is more than meets the plotting eye of the Roush-associated higher-ups.  I've been starting to watch the series beginnings as they're now starting to run on FX, and I've noticed some interesting things about this partnership-forming dynamic. It seems, from a close look at the pilot and the first few episodes, that M/S seem to hit it off as participants in an interesting intellectual jousting match.  Take it right from that first exchange in the office, Scully's "what I find fantastic is the idea that there are explanations beyond the realm of science" and Mulder's "that's why they put the 'I' in FBI". It's a game, a sparring match that pulls them both in and that they're both willing and able to participate in. Both of them seem to know a lot beforehand about the other, and each seems to be impressed, she with Mulder's reputation as a profiler, he with her senior thesis, which he bothered to take the time to read. Although their methods/opinions are very different, they each seem to have a healthy respect for each other's ability (as Mulder says in *Squeeze, though she may not agree on interpretation of evidence, "you respect the journey," something that's extremely important to him as a laughing-stock, and which is also validating to him as a person. Scully can be very blatant about what she thinks of his ideas, but because she respects that journey, Mulder is willing to look at her end of things and realizes, with time, that her science can legitimize his work--when the crucial evidence doesn't just up and disappear--in a way he could never do himself. I think he also has a feeling for how close to the edge he operates, and he realizes that her skepticism is a healthy tether for him, to keep him from flying off too easily into the skies of non-credibility. As he tells her in the FTF hallway scene, science/strict rationalism have kept him honest, and he realizes the value of that even while he chafes at its restrictions.

Now, yes--Mulder has feelings for Scully. This guy's a profiler, and in spite of the fact that the hardest person for anyone to profile or see clearly is him/herself, this guy is not that stupid. I think he knows exactly what he feels for Scully. But, there are factors involved. One is the fact that his methodology--shaped by his history as an 'other'--is to present the goods and wait for the customer to buy. Scully's not out to buy; she's going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way to the cash register. Second is that Mulder already has a connection to her, an incredibly valuable connection he has with no one else, and how easily is he going to drop that one trapeze rope for the chance of grabbing that other one swinging by? If you finally had a connection after years and years of feeling so alone inside yourself (if you've never experienced this in RL it may be hard to grasp, but I know this one all too well--been there, done that) it could be a very hard jump to decide to make. If you don't manage to catch that other rope, you fall and you're dead--or at least, your connection may be. Emotional death: just about as bad as its physical counterpart. So it just may be a whole lot more attractive--and safer--to keep on swinging where you are.

Which doesn't change or negate his feelings. In the hallway scene Mulder tells Scully she's made him a whole person; that's not something that comes from someone with the emotional IQ of a vegetable. (Note, too, that Scully's never said anything comparable in that scene about his value to her life.) In the hallway he attempts to kiss her (and note that after a distinct bout of panic-face, she settles herself into a state of acceptance of the coming kiss; she doesn't appear at all to be getting actively involved. She's going to let him kiss her. Mulder also reads it this way or he wouldn't have immediately apologized when the bee stung, assuming he'd blown it.) Remember, from his POV Mulder has something very valuable to lose if he makes the wrong choices/the wrong moves here, and the result is...caution. Re his feelings, his "but I'm no Eddie Van Blundht, am I?" also speaks to his desires. He wants to be there with her, but he hasn't seen any indicators that she'd be inclined to head in that direction, that he wouldn't be throwing away what he already has to buy a dollar ticket in the WinTheScully lottery.

Re Scully: Nope, I don't believe for a minute she's trying to draw Mulder out. Yes, she did seem to warm to Eddie's conversational approach, but again, she was waiting for Mulder to come to her; she didn't invite him over, she didn't bring out the wine. And for that matter, she was--just as in the hallway--getting ready to let someone kiss her. She wasn't moving forward there, she was waiting for him to reach her. Scully has more walls than a medieval fortress. She doesn't open her inner self to people. In the depths of herself I think she finds a weakness she deems unacceptable, and she puts forth a vigorous effort to keep that perceived weakness hidden from people.  Remember that in *Irresistible she tells the counselor she feels she shouldn't be subject to these fears because she's 'a professional'; she also quickly rejects the counselor's idea of confiding in Mulder, saying she doesn't want him to know how much the case is bothering her. And how many times--count 'em--have we heard her say, "I'm fine, Mulder" when it's patently obvious that she's nothing of the sort?

You seem to imply--if I'm reading your mail right--that Mulder buries himself in his work because he has no other life, because he has no success at connecting with people. Current pseudo-psychological models would no doubt agree (we seem to live in an age where everybody's an amateur psychologist and feels fully qualified to judge everyone else's mental health/stability--and the only people who pass the test are the ones who follow conventional patterns.) However--speaking for the 'others' of the world--there are people, no matter how small a minority, who live for causes, for ideas, for art or inventing; in short, who are absorbed in and by their work. Thomas Edison was one of these.  He may have been a hard taskmaster, but nobody's pointing and laughing too much these days. The Spanish playwright Lope de Vega (120 + plays) was one. There are lots of other prominent examples: Leonardo da Vinci, etc. I think Mulder is one of these. Yes, there's emotional baggage attached, but as Mulder himself says, "This is my life."

It's his life, not his excuse. No, it's not perfect, and there are things he wants that he doesn't know how to get successfully (Scully). But I think we all can say the same. All of us have strengths and weaknesses. Mulder's life is his work--his quest--and what he wants is someone to live it with him. I think it's often overlooked--or ignored, our conventional biases being what they are--that for as crackpot as his theories may seem to us, the viewers, within the XF universe, Mulder is on target a lot more often than anyone else. He's got vision, the ability to make connections, to make leaps of faith and locate the evidence that Scully can then legitimize with her science. I don't believe we can simply characterize Mulder as a loser workaholic who uses work as the Bondo to fill in the holes in his otherwise dinged-and-dented life. He's got a gift--a calling (albeit unconventional), and he has the courage to follow that leading in spite of the ridicule he reaps from those around him. Yes, he's driven, but it takes guts to do what he does, to keep going the way he does in the face of adversity/ridicule/loss of evidence/CSM's efforts against him. Most other people would have thrown in the towel long ago ("Screw it; I'll just go off and lead a normal life, get some comforts for myself, larger issues be damned.") Mulder doesn't fall for this, refuses to acquiesce.  In a sense, that's heroic.

Re "get thee to a therapist": I don't think a therapist is what Mulder needs. A therapist (and I've done a lot of close work with a blind psych grad student, so I've got a bit of background here) would try to 'cure' Mulder, to make him fit into one of the societally or psychologically-accepted molds; in essence, they'd try to remold him into something or someone he isn't. Scully, also, isn't going to come off with flying colors in your conventional psychological test-for-normality either. But, like you, I think there's hope, and I think that hope lies in what they can do to heal and bring out each other. The cement of the partnership, as I see it, is the freely-given support they offer each other. They have figuratively been to hell and back together.  Each knows the other better than anyone else does, and each sees the real value in the other and is willing to make that stretch-across-the-abyss to reach them. As you say, success in drawing each other out could easily result in a rebirth for both of them--a rebirth that would leave them both stronger. Each has unacknowledged strengths they must be willing to face, and I think their partner is the one most likely--and willing--to see and identify those strengths and to help them to recognize them for themselves.

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