Irene Adler is Not a Loser - Part 1

 (Sherlock Meta by wellingtongoose)

I really love Irene Adler in BBC Sherlock, but even more I love the complex plot of A Scandal In Belgravia. This meta is dedicated to discussing the intrigues and deceptions that are only hinted at on screen and play out behind the scenes. I aim to show everyone why Irene is not a loser but an incredibly intelligent and ambitious woman. On the way I explore:

* Why dominatrix is not her only line of business
* Why Irene actually phoned Jim Moriarty – and what deal they came too
* Why Sherlock was just a pawn in a much bigger game

A Disclaimer before we start… 

This piece isn’t about sexism or the portrayal of women in the media. It’s much more focused on the plot of ASiB and analysis of Irene’s motives as if she was a real person, not an artificial construct presenting a particular literary troupe. Certainly, there are things that I would have changed about Irene if I had been one of the writers but then there are many things I want to change about myself and can’t. In this case I am going to think of Irene as person – not a representation of the female gender – and just accept that she has flaws but they do not make her any less brilliant.

A Journey of a Thousand Miles…



We can assume that before she made this phone call she had already obtained sensitive material on her phone. I had always assumed the sensitive information she had was the MOD email but there is no evidence at that time, Irene realised its importance or that she even possessed it. We do not know the timeframe over which she was being pursued by the Americans – it might have started just recently before Sherlock and John turned up (remember there is quite a long period of time between the pool scene and Sherlock meeting Irene).

At the time of the pool scene the MOD email could not have been the bait that Irene used to hook Moriarty because even if she had it she didn’t know why the email was important even or that it was important. The MOD man might just have been talking nonsense in an attempt to impress her and the code itself was a load of jumble even to a cryptographer. Moriarty certainly couldn’t figure out the information either because Irene had to manipulate Sherlock into given them both the answer when they realise it was important much later on.

So Irene couldn’t have got Jim Moriarty’s attention by saying “I have a nonsensical fragment of an MOD email that, according to the stupidly pathetic man who’s in love with me, is going to save the world.”

She must have had much more than just that email on her phone. As she suggests to Mycroft – she has all sorts of things on there and I certainly believe that she does.

The Americans were after her for one single email but it doesn’t mean that Mycroft and the British Government weren’t after her for much, much more.

The Economics of Being a Dominatrix 



From the clients she chooses to engage with (high ranking police officer, best cryptographer in the country, an official from the MOD), I think her line of business is more than just being a dominatrix. I think the most lucrative part of her business is actually the information she gets out of her clients. I’m sure the thrill of having power over powerful people was also very enjoyable but Irene is a very pragmatic, cunning person and she likes money. (I think people over look the fact that the entire point of her plot was to extort billions from the British Government)

If you think about it, all the clients she has picked are exactly the kind of people that actual spies want to get close to - people with access to classified and/or sensitive information. Irene has basically set up the ultimate honey trap and she makes Anna Chapman (professional Russian spy) look like a complete looser. ¨

Of course she’s not a professional spy –she doesn’t report what she finds back to some sinister foreign organisation. Irene is a freelance, independent stock broker in sensitive information and I think this definitely suites her personality.

However being a freelance information broker has its disadvantages

1. you don’t always have the right customers
2. you are dealing with some very dangerous, very ruthless people at both ends and there is no tag team of CIA agents to watch your back.

Customers for sensitive information do not appear like punters rolling up at the curb. Their reasons for wanting classified/sensitive information are definitely shady and as people they are probably even shadier. Her customers might work for a multitude of foreign intelligence services or be unofficial/commercial/terror organisations but these people are hard to find. This is why she needs Jim Moriarty. Not just to find these customers but also to make sure the deal is sealed without any of these people harming her. 

I think initially Irene did manage to build a small network of contacts to pass information onto. However like any shrewd businessman when there is more supply than demand, Irene wanted to expand her business. This is the second reason she comes to Moriarty – she must have hooked him with an immediately financially lucrative set of documents. Imagine what other classified documents the MOD man might have leaked to her before the Bond Air email? As Irene say she usually likes to visit her clients more than once.

Let us not forget that Moriarty is still a businessman despite being obsessed with Sherlock. He might have thrown £30 million away to get Sherlock to come out and play but it doesn’t mean he isn’t looking to recuperate that money elsewhere. What Irene proposes is simple: she’s provides the data, Moriarty is the middle man and gets his cut of the profit which can be substantial.

Irene also needs to find her own protection and that is where her celebrity clients and her camera phone come in. Firstly, celebrity clients get one some exposure/publicity within their circles – yes she is extremely controversial but she’s not anonymous anymore. You cannot just make her disappear overnight and not have people ask questions. Secondly, there is no reason to believe that all of her clients hate her guts, she doesn’t openly screw over everyone she meets – it’s not good for business. Some of her clients might actually think they are in love with her. Irene has the great power of making people “feel special”. She can make people love her and love is much more vicious motivator – perhaps enough for a motivator for them to protect her against enemies foreign and domestic?

When all else failed she had the material on her camera phone to fall back on. When clients became threatening or violent – she can always pull out that smart little device. However I doubt this happened very often because Irene is perfectly capable of keeping her clients sweet.

Before the Americans started turning up with their armed hit squads, I think Irene’s protection was perfectly adequate. She had Jim Moriarty for the information customers and her own resourcefulness for her clients. Irene is a small-timer compared to the huge network of spies and informers that nation states employ. MI6 might have been aware of her before she threatened the Royal family but just as likely, she managed to fly under the radar. She’s very intelligent and Irene would have known how important discretion is. As long as her clients never linked security leaks to their own blathering, there is no reason why anyone would suspect a lowly sex worker and even if they did – she had enough on her phone to ruin them.

It was only when she realised that there were trained killers out hunting her that she started to fear.

The Anatomy of a Royal Scandal 



 - -

Whether or not Irene actually demanded something from the Royal family, we don’t know. Mycroft claims she didn’t because Sherlock doesn’t do blackmail - he simply tells them to pay her off. Telling the Royal family that she has the photographs does sounds like a prelude to making some kind of request or demand in the future as well as a power play. I personally don’t subscribe to the idea that the Royal Family “have people whacked” – they are not that unrestricted or even that shady. They could easily provide her with enough money to get out of the country and change her identity but that’s not what Irene is aiming for. -

Irene is aiming to extort billions from the treasury before she leaves the country (and yes she was plotting this before she knew about Bond Air as explained in Part 2). -

Now that’s what I call ambition. -

However the Royal Family can provide a good second avenue of escape if her plot goes to pot but this is only one of the reasons she informed them about the pictures. -

There is no evidence at the beginning of ASiB that Mycroft sees Irene (and Moriarty) as anything more than mere insects – little conveniences compared to the broad power plays of entire nations. However both Irene and Moriarty desperately want his attention for very different reasons.

For Irene Mycroft is literally the key to the treasury. Her plot was never about Sherlock at all, he was at best a vital pawn and amusing distraction. Mycroft is probably the only man who has the power to authorise the transfer of such vast sums she’s demanding in one night. He has control over the spineless brainless government ministers and he can pull their strings like a master puppeteer. First she needs to get him to the negotiation table and there is no evidence that Mycroft took her at all seriously. He certainly doesn’t take her threat to national security seriously given he has real, highly trained operatives who could retrieve that cameraphone but he doesn’t use them. Instead he opts for his little brother, a civilian detective.

Moriarty obviously wants information on Sherlock but he’s perfectly willing to play along with Irene when they have the same goal in common.

When the Americans started chasing her – Irene must have realised she stumbled onto something really big this time – something utterly out of her league. It might have taken some time but she did eventually realise it was the MOD email. I think the first thing she did was use her own contacts and resources to try and crack it but when that failed she showed it to Moriarty. 

Obviously Moriarty couldn’t make heads or tails of it either but he suggests a solution that will kill two birds with one stone - getting Mycroft’s attention and cracking the code: GET SHERLOCK. The best way to get Sherlock was through his brother Mycroft who just happens to be very old acquaintance of the Queen.

Sherlock doesn’t get Irene’s camera phone and Irene learns to be careful what she wishes for because she really has attracted the attention of Mycroft Holmes with this shenanigan. I mean how forgiving is he going to be to someone who drugged his little brother? Now it’s personal.

From this point forwards the pair of them: Irene and Mycroft are locked in a ruthless game of chess Continued in Part 2

Other Parts in the Series: Hidden Heroines of Sherlock - Molly and Sally Why Molly and Sally are not just one dimensional characters but prime examples from strong, independent, professional women

For a List of Other Metas regarding Irene, Mycroft, Jim etc: Heroes and Villains series.

In Defense of Sally Donovan

 (Sherlock Meta by wellingtongoose)

Anonymous asked: How can you even defend Sally? She is such a b*tch to Sherlock! If I called someone a freak at work I would be fired. She totally deserves everything she gets.*

wellingtongoose: In reference to  my metas:  Heroines in Sherlock or Nuclear Meltdown at the Met 2, which are both mostly about Sally.

I personally find hatred for Sally Donovan on the Sherlock fandom disturbing and also incredibly illogical. Many people have condemned Sally for being “unprofessional” towards Sherlock and yet few have thought to use the same yardstick to measure Sherlock.

For a moment, let’s put aside the blinding vitriol and actually take a look at Sherlock, not Sally. Here is man, who to all intent and purposes, sets himself up as a professional. He holds an expert body of knowledge that gives him power over his clients. In the same way doctors have an expert body of knowledge that gives we us great influence over our patients.

How does Sherlock treat his clients, the people he is nominally trying to help? He treats them with disdain. Instead of attempting to reassure the client in ASIB, he rants off a list of the man’s very personal attributes to a complete stranger, right in front of the client and then condescendingly tells the man not to worry. In THoB, not only does he refuse to take Henry Knight seriously, he is completely dismissive of his very real fears.

How does he treat the people he works with? Sherlock consistently forgets to share information with John or withholds information deliberately so he can test out a pet theory. He runs off at regular intervals leaving John in the lurch and also has little consideration for John’s personal life, which Sherlock seems to think should be put on hold for him. I have no doubt that Sherlock values John as his friend, companion and blogger, but John definitely deserves to be treated better.

As for Lestrade and the CID – Sherlock has shown consistent contempt for the police and police procedure. There is a reason why you must not contaminate crime scenes or withhold evidence from the police. The evidence gathered is not admissible in a court of law. Sherlock might solve the case – but he’s made securing a conviction very difficult/almost impossible. The police have these rules so that they can actually lock the criminals away and secure justice for the victim and their families (Nuclear Meltdown at the Met)

Sherlock consistently refuses to behave professionally in the course of his professional duties.

In contrast, we do not see Sally treating crime victims or her colleagues with the same unprofessional attitude that Sherlock does.

Yes, Sally was unprofessional; I’m not saying that she is blameless. However we don’t know what has been said between Sherlock and Sally in the past and therefore we do not have a context for the comment. Given Sherlock’s willingness to drag Sally’s private life into their conversation right in front of her colleagues I would say their feud was ugly on both sides.

Sally definitely needs to improve on her professional attitude to Sherlock, but Sherlock needs to improve his attitude to everyone, including John and Mrs Hudson.

But Sherlock isn’t a real person - he’s a flawed protagonist and audiences find that appealing. For example: I love watching House because he says all the things I would never dare to say to my patients.

Sherlock has the emotional sensitivity of a tabloid newspaper but that’s what makes him Sherlock, and sets the BBC adaptation apart from Elementary/ITV Granada versions.

We can’t judge Sherlock for his bad behaviour, his flaws are central to the show. Therefore it’s decidedly unfair and equally fruitless to judge Sally for her reactions to him.

Sally represents how the average person would treat Sherlock (but not how they should treat anyone) and it accentuates the amazing patience, loyalty, dedication and personal sacrifices of John, Mrs Hudson and even Lestrade.

 *this is not the full text of the ask, I had to edit it because of the vocabulary used.

If you want to read my analysis of Sally’s actions during TRF: Nuclear Meltdown at the Met 2

The Empty Hearse – Holmes Brothers a Psychoanalysis

 (Sherlock Meta by wellingtongoose)

What I really love about The Empty Hearse are the scenes between Sherlock and Mycroft. It added wonderful new details to their relationship – slowly painting in the backdrop to their currently antagonistic affection. It also gives us new insights into the personality and emotional coping strategies of Mycroft and Sherlock.

I analyse the new details we have been given and explain how Mycroft and Sherlock developed into the characters we see, why their relationship is so difficult and yet filled with such deep emotion.

Sherlock’s and Mycroft’s behaviour are classic patterns of different emotional coping strategies and their conversation in The Empty Hearse had finally vindicated my original theories.

A Hat Trick

 

The deduction scene for the hat was well written, I just wished it actually tied in with the plot a bit more. It gives us an idea that Sherlock has always been running to keep up with his older brother even as an adult. Sherlock appears to deduce people on a conscious basis – he puts effort into his deductions but Mycroft deduces almost on reflex and is actually quicker than Sherlock. I have said before that Mycroft is very good at reading people on a level that Sherlock simply does not match. This is a vital component of his work as a “minor civil servant” (for more info on Mycroft’s job read James Bond was a Civil Servant too). Living people and their twisted motivations are often much more complex and difficult to deduce in comparison to objects in isolation, so I’m not surprised that Mycroft always wins.

I found it rather touching that Sherlock presents the hat to Mycroft for deduction and despite the brilliance of Mycroft’s logic he does not reach the same emotional conclusion about the hat as his brother. Sherlock believes it shows isolation whereas Mycroft merely believes that the wearer doesn’t care about being different.

I find it very interesting that Mycroft’s response is almost a refusal to acknowledge the possibility of negative emotions associated with being alone, whereas Sherlock’s response is very much laced with emotion. Thus we can see even from this short scene that the brothers project their emotions in different ways.

 I am of the firm opinion that Mycroft is intellectually very close to his younger brother – but that does not mean Mycroft fully understands Sherlock on an emotional level, which brings us onto the Thinker and Feelers.


The Controlled Hurricane and the Overblown Breeze

When people point out that The Empty Hearse shows us that Sherlock is now capable of experiencing emotion – I often feel the urge to write a very sarcastic reply.

Really? Have we been watching the same show or did I just have a very elaborate set of visual hallucinations?

Sherlock has always been capable of experiencing and expressing emotion. In fact he expresses his emotions in such a melodramatic fashion, even aliens from outer space could probably spot his unhappiness (think back to all the times Sherlock has screamed the word “bored”). The reason why it appears that Sherlock is both “odd” and “cold” is that he expresses emotions in socially unacceptable ways and fails to express appropriate emotion at socially acceptable times. His emotional outbursts are often the root cause of his social dysfunction.

Whilst many people have tried to fit Sherlock into all kinds of psychiatric boxes, I am of the firm opinion that Sherlock and Mycroft need to be approached from a completely different angle.

The development maturation model provides us with a perfect reason for the behaviour we see in both Holmes Brothers.

Sherlock is a classically dysfunctional Feeler and Mycroft is a classically dysfunctional Thinker.

The model predicts that during the first years of life, infants learn coping strategies for emotion. It is a vital part of human development which everyone undergoes but the path an infant “chooses” determines their future personality, their susceptibility to psychiatric conditions and response to psychiatric therapy.

All infants start off with the basic instinctive need to gain attention; it is an essential survival strategy but there are two broadly different methods that infants learn to use to gain attention.

“Feelers” are infants who learn the best way to cope with emotions is to amplify them because this brings attention/comfort from the primary care giver. “Thinkers” on the other hand learn that internalising their emotions in favour of pleasing the primary care giver leads to attention/comfort.

I think the best analogy for Thinkers and Feelers I can come up with is this:

If emotions were fine wine, the Feelers would all be drunk and the Thinkers utterly sober.

The functional Feelers would be amusingly tipsy, bringing joy and laughter to the party, whilst the functional Thinkers would be savoring all the subtle aromas of the bouquet and discussing the quality of the vintage.

The dysfunctional feelers would be smashing up the wine cellar in a drunken rage, whilst the dysfunctional Thinkers would be stoically standing the in the middle of the carnage refusing to acknowledge that wine can stain their suits.

Most well adjusted adults exist somewhere on the spectrum between two extremes. They are able to retain the good parts from their original “path” and learn the beneficial strategies of the opposite “path”.

Mycroft and Sherlock, unfortunately, are firmly stuck on opposing ends of the spectrum but they share one commonality - they are both dysfunctional.

Bored, Bored, Bored!



Sherlock is the classical dysfunctional Feeler. He never attempts to control his emotions when he does not feel the need to do so. For example when Sherlock is discontent everyone around him will know and suffer. Neither John nor Mrs Hudson can avoid giving him attention during one of his emotional tantrums. Sherlock has never learnt to put aside his own feels in consideration for the feelings of others. He is still very much stuck in the infantile stage of his emotional coping strategy whereby he will stop at nothing to get the external attention/comfort he needs to cope with negative emotions.

Of course Sherlock no longer cries like a baby – he has moved on to emotionally manipulating people in various crude ways. This is never clearer than in The Empty Hearse when he deliberately allows John to continue believing that he is going to die in the underground train. Sherlock needed to hear John say that he was forgiven because he simply didn’t want to live with his own guilt for a moment longer. It didn’t matter that John had to relive the worst memories he has ever experienced – Sherlock’s feelings were more important.

Feelers generally are not prone to introspection (which can be good  because too much introspection will make you depressed). Sherlock definitely doesn’t engage in introspection or self-reflection which is why he is often unintentionally rude to people and then looks completely baffled when he is criticized for it. It is not a sign that he does not understand human interaction – he has just never bother to reflect on the emotional impact of his words. I have often wondered if before meeting John, Sherlock truly understood that other people have emotions in the same way as he does.

Mycroft on the other hand is a different brand of nutter.

Mycroft vs Goldfish 



He is the classic dysfunctional Thinker. He copes with emotions by internalising and analysing them. Dysfunctional Thinkers never take the time to simply acknowledge that they are feeling emotion, they have to engage all cognitive facilities to evaluate the emotion for its “usefulness”. “Useful” emotions are kept for further appropriate expression, whilst “useless” emotions are suppressed and ignored.  An extreme Thinker like Mycroft does not display his emotions until he has consciously or subconsciously filtered, reflected and censored everything he experiences. This is why Mycroft is “The Iceman”.

Intelligent thinkers often turn their own emotional expression into a potent form of social lubricant. Emotions become a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.

Mycroft aims to only display emotion that is social appropriate and advantageous. The Iceman is in effect performing an eternally tasteful pantomime for the benefit of his audience (until his control slips).

Functional thinkers can be the nicest people you will ever meet. They make wonderful caring friends who will always be on hand to give you emotional support whenever you need it.

Dysfunctional thinkers on the other hand have taken the advantages of being a Thinker a few steps too far. They are out of touch with their own emotions but ironically very aware of other people’s emotional states, making them ideally suited to reading other people. Their obsessive and relentless campaign of filtering, analysing and organising their emotions often spills out into other aspects of their life making them predisposed to OCD. Unsurprisingly they are also more prone to chronic and treatment resistant depression – sadly because they won’t consciously or subconsciously accept that they are experiencing depression.

I think the exchange between the Holmes Brothers sums Mycroft up perfectly.

Mycroft: “I’m not lonely,”

Sherlock: “How would you know?”

Two men at the dysfunctional extremes of emotion management are very unlikely to emotionally understand each other. They are locked in a perpetual cycle of antagonism. Sherlock is metaphorically wrecking the wine cellar and Mycroft is still pretending that his Saville Row suit is waterproof.

I have no doubt there is deep love between the brothers and they do emotionally connect but it can never be the joyous function relationship that some siblings have the luck to experience.

Don’t Be Smart Sherlock, I’m the Smart One

 

This brings us onto the question: why did two brothers develop such different emotional coping strategies?

As I said before most well adjusted adults start off one path and then quickly learn elements of the other producing their own unique hybrid coping strategies. What the end result very much depends one’s social environment. Meeting a wide variety of people with a wide range of hybrid coping strategies really helps children to learn and develop into well adjusted adults.

Unfortunately it appears that in Mycroft and Sherlock’s formative years they didn’t get this vital opportunity. The scene in The Empty Hearse makes it quite clear Mycroft and Sherlock spent their early childhood isolated from other children. In fact they didn’t properly meet other children until Sherlock was old enough to have his intelligence judged.

I have several theories on why this happened which I explore in Mycroft vs Sherlock vs Goldfish

Whether an infant develops into a Feeler or a Thinker has a genetic influence but more importantly it is behaviour of their primary care givers that determines their “path”.

Thinkers usually develop in response to care givers who provide the infant with consistent attention (positive or negative) but according to the care giver’s own schedule. Whether the baby cries loudly or softly does not vastly affect the time lapse between episodes of attention. Feelers on the other hand have inconsistent primary care givers who respond quicker in certain circumstances leading to the infant learning that louder cries generate a quicker response.

Mycroft evidently had consistent primary care givers who firmly stuck to a strict schedule. Infant Mycroft had no power to dictate the time of attention he was given, so he learns to internalise his own feelings and project an image whereby he receives only positive attention when attention arrives.

This situation is not uncommon in the eldest of a group of siblings. Humans always start off with the best of intentions and usually spend a great deal of time researching, planning and organizing their lives for the first baby. They have an idealised view of how they will raise the child. Obvious when the baby eventually arrives, some parents break down quickly and all their plans fly out the window, but other parents whether out of stubbornness or resilience will stick it out because they still believe that their schedule will make the perfect child.

However the chances of people being able to repeat the feat again diminishes with each subsequent baby, if only because there are now more children for you to consistently parent. Many parents simply throw in the towel after the first child and let the others dictate their own schedule. We can call it “when Mummy gave up syndrome”.

Sherlock may suffer from this problem but even if family circumstances did not change between the birth of the two brothers Sherlock had an extra source of attention: his older brother Mycroft.

How many seven year olds are able to independently follow an external schedule and give consistent attention to a baby? Not even Mycroft is going to be able to do that. Besides Mycroft is a Thinker – his default operational mode is suppressing his own feelings for the benefit of others. So in the middle of the night when baby Sherlock is crying – how long do you think it takes for Mycroft to give him attention?

Even if their parents or nanny tried to be consistent, Mycroft was too young to have the self-discipline to follow their lead. Instead Sherlock ends up a Feeler and not a Thinker.

However this might have been easily rectified in early childhood by a wide range of peer interactions but the Holmes Brothers were almost completely isolated. The combination of a firmly entrenched Thinker and a developing Feeler spending nearly all their time together is a recipe for dysfunction, particularly as Mycroft is the Thinker and the older sibling with the socially imposed obligations to look after Sherlock.

Being the Thinker, Mycroft sacrifices his own emotional needs to tend to those of his younger brother. However infant Sherlock has already centered his entire narrow universe on his feelings, he does not need more attention when he expresses emotion but unfortunately seven year old Mycroft hadn’t quite finished a degree in child psychology yet.

Sherlock grows up with the reinforced fact that his emotions are paramount. He never has the chance to learn that other people’s emotions are just as important has his. Sherlock never acquires the skills or the motivation to think about other people’s emotions in a  meaningful way. Conversely, Mycroft never gets the chance to feel his own emotions because there aren’t other Thinkers around willing to facilitate his emotional expression. Had Mycroft spent most of his formative years in school with other children he would have made friends with other Thinkers and Feelers who would allow him to experiment with new Feeler type strategies.

Unfortunately Sherlock’s method of coping with negative emotions i.e. act out and demand attention doesn’t work in the adult world. If Sherlock seems curiously childish it is because he has never development beyond late infancy in his emotional coping strategy.

 Mycroft’s strategy on the other hand does work in the adult world, which is why Mycroft looks superficially better adjusted than his younger brother but he pays a very high personal price for the mask he wears.

Why The Holmes Parents are Perfect for Sherlock

 (Sherlock Meta by wellingtongoose)

Analysis of Sherlock’s parents and why their normality is vital in explaining how Sherlock became the man he is.



The moment I saw them I had the sinking feeling that Mr and Mrs Holmes are irreparably wrong.

Then I realise that this was only my own narcissism getting in the way of logical analysis because if one looks at them from an impartial perspective Sherlock’s parents are surprisingly right, in every sense of the word.

I explain:

* Why the Holmes Parents fit perfectly into Sherlock and Mycroft’s background. They had to be ordinary in order to explain why Sherlock and Mycroft are extraordinary.

* How normal loving parents can produce such eccentrically maladjusted offspring.

* What we can tell about the Holmes Brothers’ childhood from their parents.

Hot House Flowers

 

The Holmes parents’ apparently banality appears to have spoilt many deeply held fan beliefs regarding “Mummy”. The truth is I also fell into the horrific logical trap of assuming that just because Sherlock has arrested emotional development – his parents must be utterly eccentric, over medicated, psychologically unstable, adulterers who evidently neglected him something terrible.

What we all lacked was a sarcastic voice of reason to interject with a perfectly time “really?” and an elegantly raised eyebrow.

The age old belief that parents pass their problems onto their children is definitely true but the way these problems manifest in children can be surprising and counter-initiative.

For a doctor who has been surprised too many times to actually be surprised – I really should have seen the Holmes parents’ coming because actually they fit perfectly into Sherlock and Mycroft’s background.

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

 

Intelligence has a strong genetic component – but this does not mean it is directly inherited in the way eyes or hair colour are (Sherlock, IQ and the Concept of Genius).

We know that Mrs Holmes was a well educated and intelligent mathematician, and perhaps Mr Holmes merely downplays his own intelligence. However there is no indication that they are of the same intelligence level as Mycroft or Sherlock. Mycroft and Sherlock appear to derive most of their intellectual stimulation from each other and not their parents.

Even through the Holmes parents are not as outwardly eccentrically intelligent as the Holmes Brothers, it does not mean that the parents have to be disowned.

Strange things do happen – take Albert Einstein, he did not come from a family of geniuses. His parents were comfortably middle class and there was no indication that anyone else in his family had his unique talent. It is entirely plausible that Mycroft and Sherlock were both gifted their intelligence and observation powers by a quirk of nature. More importantly, Sherlock and Mycroft have worked very hard to hone their skills and sharpen their intelligence to end up where they are today. They have a wonderful symbiotic relationship where their interactions only serve to further train and enhance their intelligence.

To say that people with ordinary intelligence cannot have extraordinary children is an insult to all the parents of past and future Nobel Prize Winners and to all the great geniuses out there who work damn hard and didn’t just rely on their genes to get where they are today.

Making Sherlock’s parents intelligent but not exceptional geniuses is a brilliant move that I fully support.

The Holmes parents’ reminds us all that no matter who our parents happen to be, we are unique beings with our own paths through life.  As much as we love our parents, we are not destined to trudge the same track they did. We do not need Nobel Prize Winners for parents to become the next Einstein or Curie.

There is whole world out there and we should embrace all our talents (and our faults) to make the most of life.

The Counter Intuitive Equation

I had a firmly held belief that Sherlock’s emotional dysfunction cannot have come from a childhood with normal loving parents, but fate (and other psychiatrists) have made me eat my words.

Maladjusted parents do not have to produce maladjusted children or vice versa. That is just a long held folly.

I will now reiterate what I have been saying for the past three years: the Holmes Brothers do not have any psychiatric problems.

There are unfortunately hundred of children on my case lists who have been neglected, abused and exposed to parents with mental illness. From a psychiatric point of view Sherlock and Mycroft really do not resemble adults who have gone through that kind of deprivation in their childhood.

Emotional dysfunction of the kind seen in the Holmes brothers is both very common, and relatively harmless. It is because of the brothers’ exceptionally high intelligence that they seem particularly distant and eccentric.

Their emotional coping strategies are not unhealthy, but they would be a lot happier and easy to live with if they had more balanced/mature ways of dealing with emotion.

The Good Parenting Guide for Geniuses…



It is important to remember that the home environment does not need to be actively harmful to produce dysfunctional emotional responses in children.

All that is needed is misunderstanding, and you can be sure there was a huge amount of misunderstanding in the Holmes family.

Mr and Mrs Holmes did not know they were going to produce two geniuses and even if they did, how do you prepare for that? Raising one exceptionally gifted child is extremely difficult, raising two in a closed off and isolate environment is certain to create massive problems.

Sherlock states in The Sign of Three:

“You can talk to my mother but she understands very little”

We can see immediately that there has never been true communication established between mother and son. The entire conversation he has with his parents in The Empty Hearse is a classic example of two sets of people completely entrenched in their own beliefs, trying to communicate but failing miserably.

It is not that Mrs Holmes is stupid, she wrote a book on the Dynamics of Combustion, and she appears as possessed of her common sense as any sweet elderly pensioner I have had the pleasure to treat. Mrs Holmes just doesn’t understand Sherlock’s emotional needs and Sherlock has clearly never been able to get through to her, which is unsurprising given his innate tactic of dealing with emotions is to turn them into a melodramatic pantomime.

I often see very well meaning, competent, intelligent parents make an absolute mess of raising exceptionally gifted children. A significant proportion of OCD, depression, anorexia, self harm cases that I see are in children with outlier IQ scores. All of them get social services assessments and the majority of them come from homes where there are no safe guarding issues.  Their psychiatric problems are not the result of deliberate parental abuse; the parents simply do not know how to relate to the child on an intellectual or emotional level.

If we think of the parent – child relationship as a dance: the parent is trying to teach the child the steps through life. Parents on instinct teach the same dance to their children as they themselves learnt, which can work out very well if the child is similar to the parent and they can both adapt. However in the cases of exceptionally gifted children: the child is dancing to a completely different suite of music from the very beginning and thus this throws the entire dance out of sync as almost soon as it begins.

If the discord is consciously recognized and accepted, the parent can rejoin the dance and guide that child through their own unique suite of music with astounding success.

Of course, it is very difficult to understand the mind of a genius, let alone a child genius but problems arise when the parents refuse to acknowledge that they are not connecting with their child and simply escalate the same patterns of behaviour without questioning why it is not working. This creates a vicious downward circle where the distance between parent and child becomes irreparable. Often parents don’t become aware of this until it is too late.

What we see in Sherlock and Mycroft is the net result of two loving, ordinary parents who set out to raise normal children and simply didn’t realise where they had gone wrong.

The crucial reason they never changed or adapted their “dance routine” is because Mycroft was born first. Mycroft is a classic “Thinker” (The Holmes Brothers a Psychoanalysis). He suppresses his own emotional needs to facilitate the emotional expression of others. This means that even though his parents failed to connect with him, Mycroft was far too considerate to make this known to them. Superficially he appeared to be a successful product of the Holmes’ parenting skills. The problem with people is that when they find something that works, they prefer to doggedly stick to it rather than explore new and better paths. Thus when Sherlock came along and made it very clear that he wasn’t connecting with his parents, the Holmes  simply escalated the same pattern of behaviour they had “perfected” with Mycroft because it worked once so why wouldn’t it work again? All they had to do was try harder.

Unfortunately for Sherlock this was the worst thing that could possibly happen because instead of bonding with and learning emotional coping strategies from two mature adults, his only true source of emotional connection and teaching came from Mycroft who was a child himself and had yet to develop a balanced emotional coping strategy. Thus it is not surprising that both brothers ended up with dysfunctional approaches to managing their emotions.

A Very British Expression of Love



I have discussed previously in “The Holmes Brother a Psychoanalysis” that Sherlock and Mycroft are at two extreme examples of dysfunction emotional coping strategies.

Many people have interpreted this to mean that the brothers had a neglected or unhappy home life.

However, the fact that these two boys were given the emotional space to develop extremely different coping strategies shows that the Holmes parents were too tolerant and supportive of Mycroft’s introversion and Sherlock’s histrionics. They did not set boundaries firmly enough to prevent the two boys from journeying to their extremes but encouraged their unique brands of emotional coping too much.

We know that Sherlock and Mycroft care deeply about their “Mummy” and refuse to accept responsibility for upsetting her. Even in The Empty Hearse, whilst Sherlock is rudely shepherding his parents out his flat, he looks into his mother’s eyes and promises to ring her more often.

This is not a wonderful, open and happy relationship filled with mutual understanding but there is love and plenty of it.

Unfortunately the British have never been terribly good at expressing such sentiments. Instead we talk about anything other than our own emotions and the stronger the emotion, the more it is treated like a giant elephant in the room. This is the reason why we are experts on discussing the weather and making other inconsequential small talk. It means we don’t actually have to say anything meaningful because that could be embarrassing. The entire conversation between Sherlock and his parents is absolutely typical of this phenomenon. We see that Sherlock does care about his parents because he takes the time to ask if they have found the lottery ticket, even if it is in a grudging tone.

It is only when Sherlock forces them to leave, that Mrs Holmes finally says what she’s been wanting to say for the entire conversation. She misses her son, and she worries about him. I love the final moment when Sherlock looks into her eyes and lets go of his embarrassment to promise her (in a very quiet voice) that he will phone her more often.

If people were expecting some sort of rabid American display of affection, why are you even surprised it did not happen?

Despite love on both sides there is a yawning chasm in the parent-child relationship that simply screams: well meaning parents who just could not cope with these two gifted boys.

Now if the Holmes parents had been every bit as intelligent as Mycroft and Sherlock – it might explain their deduction skills but it would not explain their emotional dysfunction, which is a centre piece of this show. It is vitally important that the Holmes Parents were ordinary people or the entire scenario just doesn’t fit.

Diving Into The Goldfish Bowl

My theory for why Sherlock and Mycroft were isolated during their childhood has nothing to due with their parents being utterly eccentric underneath all that sensible clothing.

Mr and Mrs Holmes would never have purposefully isolated their children during such a critical time period in their lives. I have pointed out before that there is nowhere in Britain that is so remote that there are no educational services available and the Holmes Brothers had no chance to meet other children.

It is more probable that one of the parents had to work abroad in either developing countries without adequate educational services, or dangerous political hot-spots. The most likely profession is a post in the diplomatic service, a close second is probably oil/gas company employee.

It is very interesting that the parents did not want to split up the family despite the risks of moving them to certain countries. It shows that no matter how little they understood their exceptional sons, the Holmes parents never wanted to leave them.

Unfortunately Mycroft and Sherlock became incredibly isolated. They probably spent their life living behind the high walls of international enclaves, not able to socialise with native children. They really did only just have themselves, so how would Sherlock know he wasn’t stupid? He really had Mycroft as a benchmark.

The Holmes Brothers - Equal but Different

 (Sherlock Meta from before S3 by wellingtongoose)

Fandom accentuated their similarities without really looking too deeply into their fundamental differences. I think Sherlock and Mycroft deserve an analysis that looks into them as individuals.

* Why at first glance Sherlock and Mycroft appear similar
* Why they have a close relationship but one that is formed in adulthood and still developing.
* The fundamental differences in their choice of careers
* Their personalities - Sherlock is not a distorted reflection of Mycroft.
* What this can tell us about their actual childhood.


(credit tenshi-inverse)

“I completely disagree with the bit I bolded. Mycroft and Sherlock are extremely similar, personality-wise. In fact, as I’ve written before, Sherlock’s personality and skills are so similar to Mycroft’s that it leads me to believe that Mycroft was the primary influence in shaping who Sherlock is today”

 - Thecutteralicia (full post here)

My personal view is the Sherlock and Mycroft suffer from “the mathmo effect” (which by the way is not a recognised medical condition).

They are two incredibly intelligent people who are equally removed from the social “norm”. Because they are standard deviations away from the “norm” it is much easier to picture them as linked entities.

In essence because they are so different from everyone else, this accentuates their similarities and plays down their differences to the point that we think because they are so different from us, they must be the same as each other.

Not that Mycroft and Sherlock don’t have similarities – like any two people who are raised in the same stratum of society there is a very good probability that they will have some similarities: e.g. their intelligence, outward emotional detachment, choice of profession, deduction (which is will tackle in part 2).

I do believe the Holmes Brothers have a strong emotional bond but it’s not one that developed in childhood – it’s one that developed as adults and is still developing.

There is also a great deal of differences underneath apparent similarities that do in the end make them very different people, to the extent that I don’t think Mycroft is “Sherlock Plus” or the Sherlock is “Mycroft Lite”

Thinkers and Feelers:

One aspect of the brother’s similarities that fan consistently point to is their reaction to emotions. Both brothers appear on the surface to be emotional detached and reserved even with each other. There have been countless theories about the reason behind this, which I won’t get into.

However just because they both appear deficient in the art of emotional expression doesn’t mean that their underlying emotional coping strategies are in any way similar.

Emotional management/coping skills are a core basis of our personalities. The framework of emotional management we adopt in early life often guides our personality development in later life. From a child’s emotional coping strategy we can predict future personality traits and even the psychiatric illness that they are likely to develop.

In the development maturation model which is now being more frequently used in psychiatry: human emotional coping strategies fall broadly into two categories: thinkers and feelers.

Do not be confused by the names, they are very misleading.

Thinkers become adults who manage their emotions with active thought. Instead of merely accepting that one feels emotions, they have the tendency to internally over-analysis and judge their own feelings. The most important thing about thinkers is that they do not put great significance in their own emotions. They prefer to cater to the emotions of others. Sadly, these are the people who will put on a brave face, comfort others and never truly tend to their own emotional wellbeing

Feelers become adults whose lives revolve around their own feelings. Don’t get me wrong, these people are not anymore “in touch with their feelings” compared to thinkers. They are merely much more self-centred on the emotional front. They put a great deal of significance in their own emotions, and will often over amplify displays of emotions that they feel are important.

Now take a moment to analyse Sherlock and Mycroft through these models. Before, I thought both brothers had the same emotional management strategy. They do not.

Mycroft is most definitely a thinker: he cares deeply for Sherlock and is willing to suppress his own emotions in favour of indulging his brother’s emotional needs.

Sherlock is most definitely not a thinker, he is the archetypal maladjuster feeler.

His aggressive and often flamboyant displays of emotion (mostly negative emotions) are few and far between but they are there, and these episodes are the overwhelmingly majority of emotional displays that we see. His emotional displays almost have a pantomime quality to them (note his exasperation with the Met Police and his joy at getting a new case).

More importantly - these displays are all about Sherlock. Sherlock does not suppress his own emotions for the consideration of others. In Sherlock’s emotional strategy, his emotions are paramount, everyone else’s feelings are completely inconsequential.

These brothers have developed two very different emotional coping strategies and this has led them to develop different personalities in later life. They are not mirroring each other but taking two very separate paths through their emotional lives.

Both paths can lead to a healthy or an unhealthy relationship with emotions but the underlying cause is often different.

To find out why the brother developed different methods and what this can tell us about their mother please read Sherlock, Mycroft and Mummy,

Personalities

I personally do not think Mycroft and Sherlock’s personalities are actually similar.

Sherlock does not care that he is different from other people; in fact he treats it almost as a sign of divine providence. He does not even try to behave politely, sociable or normally even when there is much to be gained from it. Think how much easier his relationship with the Scotland Yard team would be. Think how many more interesting cases he would get if the other DIs were more willing to work with him. He is contemptuous, antisocial and downright rude because he can be and because that is who he is.

I do not believe for a moment that Sherlock has a psychiatric illness that prevents him from behaving like a nice, civilised person. He simply chooses not to and it is our choices that make us who we are.

Mycroft in contrast has embraced these social niceties and his position in society. He fits into the fabric of his society and demonstrates all the manners and grace that are expected of a man in his position. This is an essential part of his job but it is also something that he has chosen to do and not something he appears to distain or finds inconvenient.

Sherlock is not reflecting Mycroft. In fact he is being himself. Even if Mycroft had never been born Sherlock would still have the same personality he does (explained later).

As for emotions, I personally cannot see any strong evidence that Mycroft possess “a pretty immature, almost childish, view of human relationships” as Sherlock does. I would be happy if someone corrected me.

Mycroft certainly has a ruthless approach to human relationships worthy of Machiavelli. Yes, caring is not an advantage – Sun Tzu, Julius Caesar, James Bond and Harry Pierce from Spooks would have told us the same thing. It doesn’t mean that they or Mycroft suffer from the same deficiency in understanding human relationships as Sherlock.  At no point is Mycroft actually confused by human relationships the way Sherlock is – he just can’t always predict Sherlock as well as he thinks he can (re: end of ASiB)

Mycroft’s emotional detachment is not exactly that same as Sherlock’s either. He is “not more closed off than Sherlock”. He is emotionally reserved in a different way.

Sherlock refuses to be interested in people; he’s interested in consistent parts of the body and experiments involving bodies but not people. His relationship with John shows us that he can reach out to people, his empathy is intact, and he doesn’t have a mental illness. What he does have is a general complete disinterested in the complexities of human relationships and how to use them to his advantage. He has absolutely no motivation to demonstrate emotional attachment to anyone because he doesn’t deem it to be important. Sherlock is capable of normal human behaviour but he just can’t be bother negotiating the social niceties of everyday life. It is only through his friendship with John does he start to evolve and develop.

Mycroft’s choice of profession suggests that he is indeed interested in people and their normal relationships to each other. Mycroft’s reserve is not something completely unique to him, there is a whole stratum of British society that functions exactly as he does but not as Sherlock does (Sherlock is the oddball, they are not odd and odder). Mycroft’s reserve is very much the polite reserve one would expect a Victorian gentleman to display. The ideals of the “stiff upper lip” and “no public displays of emotion” are still entrenched in some parts of British society. His emotional distance does not at any point cause people to view him as socially inept or rude or sociopathic. For example his behaviour with Harry the Equerry appears to be entirely appropriate: somewhat formal distance with a casual undertone, politeness with an affectionate undertone.

The Scene in the Morgue - an Alternative Perspective



The brothers do have a caring relationship, but one that really only started as adults, because when we see them interact there is a distance and a discomfort there.

There is frankly no discomfort between Sherlock and John, or Sherlock and Mrs Hudson, or Sherlock and Angelo for that matter.

Sherlock does look to Mycroft for emotional guidance because he’s his older brother, not because he believes Mycroft has the answers to his “salvation”.

The scene shows us that they can’t open up to each other, not that they can’t open up to anyone. This does not look to me like a deep emotional bond made in childhood that somehow went wrong.

I have no evidence that the popular fan theory “something bad happened in their childhood making them resent each other” is wrong, but there is also no evidence that they had a deep emotional bond in childhood to destroy either.

As I was told repeatedly during my research project - “don’t go looking for things that don’t exist”. Instead of speculating what went disastrously wrong in a previous good childhood relationship, do we have evidence such a relationship really existed in the first place?

"I’ll be mother" literally means "I will pour tea" in the context Mycroft uses it in.

If Sherlock can summarise his childhood in three words, this does not bode well for the amount of time they spent together. Mycroft might have just done his duty as an elder brother and nothing more. “I’ll be mother” does not necessarily mean Mycroft raised Sherlock (which is unlikely - explained later). It could just mean Mycroft was bossy, controlling mother-hen of an older brother when he was around and Sherlock despised it.

The way he says it certainly implies that it was not something he remembers fondly or that he remembers much of at all.

Could the reason that Sherlock and Mycroft don’t really talk about their childhood (and possibly only have one memorable photo together) is that they simply didn’t spend much time together?

It’s just as plausible as the other accepted theory that they were incredibly close and then something went wrong. You do not need to be best friends in childhood  to love your brother because even when you grow up, he is still your brother.

It is only when you become an adult and have to leave the security of childhood that you realise the world is a lonely place and family is really all we have in the end.

Nothing is going to change the fact they are brothers and as adults they would appreciate this more than they did as children, which is why Sherlock in his moment of need is looking to his brother – who is probably the only family he has left.

“Mycroft is clearly attempting to comfort Sherlock, but he just has no idea how to go about it, and he’s uncomfortable trying. But he wants to, because he loves Sherlock” - thecutteralicia

I agree Mycroft utterly fails to comfort Sherlock. I think this is because firstly, he really doesn’t know Sherlock as well as he thinks because their relationship is still developing, and secondly, because his upbringing (most likely at a boarding school) didn’t give him much emotion experience to fall back on.

If Mycroft did indeed go to boarding school somewhere between the age of 7-13, he would have basically missed nearly all of Sherlock’s formative years because he was away at school. He may love his brother deeply but how well does he know Sherlock on an emotional level?

Mycroft might be able to deduce much about Sherlock but even so our hero is incredibly complex. Sherlock is still emotionally developing himself throughout the series and at times he doesn’t really know what he should be feeling.

In the morgue Mycroft thinks that being emotionally open with Sherlock will not work so instead opts for something much more logical – so logical it’s almost anti-social. It sounds uncharacteristically tactless for Mycroft. Mycroft is trying to put himself into Sherlock’s mind and reflect how he thinks Sherlock would comfort him in this situation.

I believe their relationship is one that is still developing. At the end of ASiB Mycroft fails to predict that Sherlock might have travelled across the world to save Irene not because he can’t read people – but because he hasn’t yet realised how complex a person Sherlock really is.

Childhood


(credit to suhnarl)

I personally think if Mycroft actually raised Sherlock through their formative years, Sherlock would be much more similar to Mycroft at least superficially – polite, reserved, social adept etc. These skills that can be learnt rather than innate attributes.

Psychiatrists (not psychologists) believe that personality and personality disorders are essentially fixed from birth or very soon afterwards. There is very little childhood nurture can do to change the underlying personality or personality disorder. However coping mechanisms for life are learnt not ingrained. Children raised together usually develop the same coping mechanisms despite different personalities. Mycroft and Sherlock have two very different ways of coping with life, which makes me think they spent significant amounts of time in separate non-home environments.

I agree they didn’t have much parental guidance but this is more likely because they were both away to boarding school at an early age. The Holmes Brothers appear to belong to the social stratum that does send their sons to prep school.

Their outward demeanours are two very different adaptations to institutional life that psychiatrists see in large orphanages (and boarding schools). Mycroft blends in with the crowd (the reason we think he stands out is because we don’t hang out with his crowd). He makes himself the epitome of the stereotype, at least superficially, and sets himself up a role model for aspiring others as well as praise from the instigators of this stereotype (i.e. teachers/orphanage carer etc.)

This is how he gains attention. Unfortunately this method takes considerable amount of self-discipline, sacrifice and time.

Sherlock is not like Mycroft – he craves attention but he wants everything quickly. The speediest way to stand out in a sea of identically dressed boys to rebel. I think that Sherlock had a fairly good idea of just how disgusting and painful some of his remarks are – and that’s why he says them (re Sally’s knees). He likes the shock factor, the power of being able to devastate with just a few words fired like bullets. This is both his attention spinner and his defence mechanism.

The brothers’ emotional detachment as I’ve said before is different. Mycroft’s emotional detachment is the “healthy norm” old British institutions still subconsciously foster. Underneath this regime most people have been able to emotionally mature. I mean Winston Churchill, product of Harrow, was an incredibly detached person (despite what propaganda says) but no one has yet accused him of being emotionally immature. However their displays of emotion seem to be incredibly cold to modern viewers because our perceptions what normal emotional behaviour should be have moved on. Mycroft’s reserve is almost a throwback to an older time – like the rest of him.

Sherlock’s emotional detachment has everything to do with the fact that he’s not very good with people (as he must have discovered very early on) so he doesn’t try. He’s not used to something he’s not able to accomplish quickly so he gives up on it entirely. He has never learned the art of the polite reserve. In fact he’s never really grown up because his personality simply wasn’t suited to ethos of the British public schools.

Careers and Skill sets



The Holmes Brothers consciously chose work that requires fundamentally different skills sets, although some skills on the surface do overlap.

Being a good doctor requires deduction skills (differential diagnosis, think House), acting skills (you try truly being cheerful after the fiftieth patient), the ability to manipulate people (into giving up their addictions), intelligence etc. It also has a fundamental principle of helping/saving others and protecting the weak as one might say of consulting detective/the British Government.

This does not mean that at its core the fundamental ethos or skill set for doctors is anything like that of a consulting detective/the British Government, nor that Sherlock/Mycroft would choose to play doctor. It also doesn’t mean the reason for people pursuing a career in medicine is anything similar to the reasons for pursuing a career as a consulting detective.

Even if Mycroft and Sherlock shared the exact same career this does not make them automatically copies of each other.

As a future doctor – I thought the medical profession attracted one particularly type of person – caring, conscientious, and sympathetic. I can honestly say this is a completely delusion. Doctors run the whole gamut of personalities from the Mother Teresa-esque to the utterly emotionally detached. As you would expect doctors do not get along with each other, in fact we quarrel like the Holmes Brothers. It does not take a childhood shared together to reduce people to toddlers in an argument.

We are not shown enough about Mycroft’s work but by the sounds of it he runs the British Government (I have speculated on what he actually does here). Crucially Mycroft’s work involves manipulating people and we see that he demonstrates the quality extremely well on John (getting him to take the case in TGG).

I assume his job (hobnobbing with the Royal family included) requires a great deal of interpersonal skills – not just acting skills, or intelligence or the ability to deduce. On the international stage you have to be able to build relationships with enemies and allies alike - reach out across cultures and continents to find the similarities that all humans share. To work within the British Government you need to make connections, allies acquaintances that last for years to decades (remember how the Queen is a very old friend, Mycroft isn’t taking about her age) and then you need to be able to exploit them over an even longer time frame. Political alliances are temporary and politicians come and go but at the core there are people who remain for decades. The government in the UK is not as fluid or socially mobile as people think, it is still the staunch bastion of the few and the privileged.

In short Mycroft has to understand and be able to manipulate other people’s emotions/desires over a very long period of time.

This interpersonal skill set is something that Sherlock does not care enough to demonstrate, it’s not important or interesting to him. He has deliberately chosen a job where his dealings with people are fluid and temporary. Sherlock’s unique profession does not require him to have good interpersonal skills – ever, although they would certainly help his clients. He does not need or want to build or break human relationships like Mycroft does. Lestrade needs him and is prepared to tolerate Sherlock’s blatant contempt. Sherlock is able to get all the cases he wants via clients and Lestrade without being socially adept and he knows this. He can be emotionally supportive when he wants to (i.e. comforting Mrs Hudson) but most of the time he doesn’t bother.

Sherlock is only interested in analysing the facts. In his line of business the facts do speak for themselves and Sherlock likes this. He has not wanted to bother his intellect with the inconsequential complexities of human relationships or psychology. Whereas, Mycroft’s job is all about the people and pulling their emotional strings. In fact he appears to be very good at doing this. The only time we see him messing up on the “dealing with emotions front” is when he’s dealing with Sherlock’s emotions in the morgue. Now what does that tell us about how well and how long he’s known his brother?

Mycroft’s abilities are not a natural extension of Sherlock’s. He may be more adept at socialising with people, but I doubt Sherlock would think this is an improvement on his abilities. Sherlock’s antisocial behaviour is not a flaw in his personality that can be improved on; it’s something that he consciously chooses to be because he can get away with it.

Motivation and Gratification - What Makes you Tick?



Sherlock is a man who likes concrete problems with concrete solutions. He pursues puzzles that have a correct answer and he pursues that answer relentlessly. Mycroft on the other hand chooses to work in an environment where there is no correct answer. There are many complex subtleties in the interpersonal relationships Mycroft’s job requires him to foster. In the real world, there are hardly any scenarios with a correct/ideal solution. He chooses to live in a world where negotiation, compromise and diplomacy are vital and he positively thrives on it.

Yes they chose jobs that are intellectually challenging, that requires them to solve problems but that is not something they have in common with each other, it’s something they have in common with a great deal of humanity.

Would you prefer a repetitive, monotonous job where you didn’t have to use your brain at all? Is there a profession you can think of that doesn’t require you to solve problems?

Mycroft and Sherlock are both great thinkers but this comes from the fact that they are vastly more intelligent than everyone else – Mycroft perhaps being even more intelligent than Sherlock. Intelligence is not a personality trait, great intelligence does not equate to the foundations of a strong relationship.

Take the Nobel Prize Laureates at Cambridge, how well do you think they get on with each other or other equally brilliant scientists who haven’t been awarded nobel prizes?  The answer is not great; the amount of petty argument that goes on would make an outsider think all research was conducted by toddlers.

Also you do not have to share a childhood with each other to regress to parent and child when arguing. The Holmes Brother’s exchange in Buckingham Palace reminded me initially of two professors, who shall remain nameless, arguing about lab space. Which role one ends up playing has everything to do with one’s personality and very little to do with one’s previous history.

Sherlock, I am quite convinced, has failed to emotionally mature. Mycroft on the other hand aspired to be a role model from day one (explained later). Even if they had never met as children - their argument style is going to end up being exactly the same once they really get going.

Just because you happen to be separated from the rest of humanity by a great sea of intelligence, this does not mean you will naturally be the same as with the other guys trapped on your little island.

As to the other ability the Holmes Brother have in common – deduction. In part 2 (reply to thenorwoodbuilder) I point out why it’s not a rare ability and also why it’s entirely possible Mycroft and Sherlock learnt it much later in life, separately.

The Holmes Brothers 2 - The Truth about Deduction

 (Sherlock Meta by wellingtongoose and thecutteralicia)

wellingtongoose:

I have pointed out in part 1 how the Holmes Brothers’ apparent similarities in personality and career choice are not actually that similar.

I now tackle the question of deduction namely: “if they didn’t spend their childhood together why are they both so good at deduction? Mycroft must have taught Sherlock!”

Deduction as a skill is really not rare. It’s not something the Holmes Brothers have in common with just each other but something they have in common with a great deal of people.

Deduction is a skill they didn’t have to have learnt from each other.


(credit Cosmic-Caterpillar)

 “both of them felt the need to develop since a very young age (apparently, since their childhood) a VERY peculiar ability at “practical deduction” – thenorwoodbuilder

I completely agree that deduction is a peculiar ability for the Holmes brothers to acquire; but it’s actually not a very peculiar or rare ability.

It is definitely something that you can learn and if you’re incredibly intelligent you can learn it very quickly.

Why Sherlock would have been Great Spy or Doctor…

 

There are many professions that require practical deduction skills that the Holmes Brothers display. I’m just going to use two as examples spies and doctors.

MI6/MI5 train all their intelligence field officers on the “peculiar” ability of being hyper-observant (which is a related skill set), so observant the things that they notice seem almost supernatural, and their intelligence officers are not all geniuses. They don’t just look at the objects on a person; they learn to read people’s hidden emotions through their expressions, the subtle movements of eyes etc. Like professional gamblers they are trained to find your “tell” and then ruthlessly exploit it (for the safety and security of the country).

Interrogations experts are trained in the art analysing individuals. There are techniques that work on everyone but the best interrogations are ones which are personalised. They deduce what makes you tick, in the same way Sherlock deduced why the cabbie went around killing people. Often they will have more information than Sherlock, but also a much more difficult task because the people they come up against may be professional spies or terrorists rather than…crooks.

Doctors deduce people every day but on a different set of criteria to the Holmes Brothers. It is said that in medicine when a patient walks through your door, you should already know what their diagnosis is. Obviously this is an over exaggeration but the art of making differential diagnoses in medicine is exactly the same Sherlock’s process of deduction except unlike on TV, deduction in real life is not quite the precise art Sherlock makes us think it is.

To give a few examples a paediatrics consultant used to be able to “miraculously” tell what the kids had for breakfast by listening to their tummies. I never quite worked out how she did but we all thought it was a combination of crumbs and the child’s breath.

A neurologist diagnosed his patients from his window as they walked through the car park. Obviously he never told his patients he already knew what was wrong with them and they could go home before they even set foot in the hospital.

The reason you never hear your doctor deducing you is because you are not a problem to be solved, you are a person (and also there aren’t that many spot diagnoses – most of you should not be visible when you see your doctor, certainly not your internal organs). Although in some cases we might be able to tell what your diagnosis just by looking at you, we have no idea how your illness is affecting your life. As doctors it is important to support the patient socially, emotionally and psychologically.

Imagine for example you’ve been feeling run down, find it difficult to keep your eyes open and suddenly develop a nasty cough with some blood. You think you’ve got pneumonia, better see your doctor. How would you feel if your doctor, as soon as you came into the room said:

“I can tell by the muscle wasting in your hand, your drooping left eye lid, your constricted pupil, dry skin and blood stained tissue that you have an apical lung tumour. The tumour has eroded into a main airway and you have only months to live.”

(these are real features of a pancoast tumour and there are patients who present like this)

You’d be a) shocked and b) devastated.

The way that Sherlock casually spews information out at everyone within in earshot without ever checking his facts or thinking about the consequences of what he says is not, as John might think, brilliant. In fact it can have devastating consequences. How do you think the driver in ASiB would have felt when Sherlock diagnosed him with a serious heart condition as an aside?

Of course if you have the symptoms mentioned above you might not have a pancoast tumour, there are other things that cause some of these symptoms, together known as Horner’s syndrome. This is why we need to take a chest x-ray to confirm – the burden of proof is on the doctor.

Sherlock never has the burden of proof placed on his deductions – it’s the police who have to gather all the physical evidence for him. We don’t always find out if everything he has deduced is correct because there is no fact checking afterwards. In the show we are suppose to assume that he just is.

Deduction in real life is not the precise art that Sherlock makes it out to be. Although I am somewhat pleased to see the Sherlock mistook Harry for a man and never thought it could be a woman.

Side note - Carl’s flaky skin. There are plenty of other dermatological problems that cause your skin to flake in much greater amounts than eczema and thus would be better conclusions. Conversely not all types of eczema cause shedding of skin - some of them present as boils.

Eczema is usually confined to the flexures: wrist flexures and sometimes finger webs. You do not use your wrist or finger webs to tie your shoe laces. If your eczema is so bad your skin is practically shedding everywhere even without contact - you should be getting treatment, you wouldn’t be able to tolerate it otherwise.  So if Carl had bad eczema, there should be traces of steroid cream on his show laces not skin. (feel free to correct me)

So why does John think Sherlock is so amazing? He’s a doctor right?



Well to be honest I don’t actually think the writers understand, anymore than the average person, what doctors do, or how they think.

But for an in-universe explanation – John is a GP. His patients usually come in with really rather vague symptoms that no doctor can get to bottom of just by looking and listening. Whereas in neurology and dermatology there are many spot diagnoses (and also plenty of things that utterly baffle). GP patients often have complex psycho-social problems that manifest as physical symptoms without logic or explanation.

Also John has learnt to deduce medical phenomena only. Also patients are entitled to their privacy and using your skills to deduce the state of someone’s marriage when its no relation to their medical condition is unethical.

To meet Sherlock who seems so confident and correct in his deductions, John must be impressed because he knows how much of an imprecise art deduction can be. Had John and Sherlock ever need to diagnose a patient - well then John would look much better.

Learning the Art

 

 There is no particular reason why deduction had to have been developed in childhood. The intelligence officers and doctors didn’t start practicing as children but it doesn’t make them bad at deduction.

Sherlock and Mycroft are incredibly good at deduction but to be incredibly good you do not necessarily have to have done something over a very long period of time. One important factor of intelligence is how quick you can absorb new information and given how intelligent we all agree the Holmes Brothers are, a short intense period dedicated to perfecting the art may be all they need to master it and continued use of deduction in their careers prevents their skills from rusting. Also learning as an adult is very different to learning as child. You have more drive and definitely more focus, which will enable you to master something you want in a shorter time period than a child.

I would also like to point out deduction is not an easy skill to develop by on your own without instruction  not matter how clever you are. You need to learn to make the correct associations between what you observe and what you conclude. You also need to learn where to look and what to look for. If you make one wrong association your entire conclusion goes to pot. Learning deduction by trial and error is an incredibly arduous process with no guarantee of success. This is because if you are learning on your own, there is no one to check your conclusions, give feedback, facilitate reflection of what you would do differently next time - which are all very important for association focused learning.

The problem with calling deduction a science is that although it has a methodology, this cannot be applied to all deductions. Some associations are not the common-sense type that Sherlock blurts out, they require specialist knowledge to deduce correctly e.g. ezcema. Other associations are just not logical in the slightest because you are deducing people and people are not known for their logical behaviour. Illogical deductions really are things you need to be taught/have pointed out to you.

For example one would not think to check for kidney failure if a patient is peeing more than usual but in fact in the early stages, this is a symptom of kidney failure. You can’t make this association until you’ve been specifically taught to do it.

This is why I don’t think Mycroft learnt how to deduce people on his own and then taught Sherlock.

Deduction is certainly a very useful skill but that does not mean it was developed by the Holmes Brothers in self-defence or with their future careers in mind. In fact had Sherlock never developed this skill, less people would have wanted to punch him and his relationships might have been less fraught. Once again, deduction is something Sherlock likes to do in order to show off how different he is to everyone else. In the same vein Mycroft also uses this ability to awe and intimidate.

It appears to be something that the Holmes Brothers enjoy – it’s almost like a very useful hobby. Look how happy Sherlock and Mycroft are deducing John’s night at Sarah’s in TGG.

I think this is the only interest the two of them have in common and something that anchors their relationship through the turmoil.

A Niche for every type of Misfit

 

This hobby, like having similar professions, does not automatically make them similar people that shared a close childhood. I turned up to University to discover that there was an entire group of people who went around assassinating complete strangers for fun! Well obviously no one really died but that was one peculiar hobby.

Were they all siblings? Did they all share traumatic childhoods that meant they now felt the need to spend huge amounts of their time ruthlessly hunting down and pretending to kill strangers?

No, they were a very diverse bunch of people, some of who were quite nice (after they had wiped you off their to-kill-list).

When these people leave university – their employers/families/flatmates are incredibly creeped out by the abilities they have developed because there is no reason on earth why these young people should be able to do some of the things they can (scaling sheer surfaces being one of them). Other people will start to find ways to explain why their employee/child/flatmate spent their university years pretending to kill people for fun. Certainly a set of three siblings who all went to work for the same company were inundated with requests to see the resident counsellor about their shared “traumatic childhood”. We found this incredibly funny because they came from perfectly normal (rather boring) middle class family.

As one assassin pointed out: just because he goes to the same student society as his sister, doesn’t make him a warped male version of her. He joined the assassins’ guild not because he made the same decision as his sister – but because he made the same decision as the two hundred other members.

I don’t see why Sherlock and Mycroft might not have been engaged in a “deduction club” at University. There are some very crazy student societies out there – Cambridge, I believe, has a niche to fit every type of misfit.

Amendment in response to thecutteralicia. Click here to read: full response

Sherlock most likely went to a different University to Mycroft but both I believe went to Oxbridge (Oxbridge - Camford, Sherlock’s university life)

Hence Sherlock could easily have discovered a deducting club at his university and he wouldn’t ever be haunted by the spectre of his older brother or be accused of following in his footsteps.

There is no evidence that Sherlock completely shuns things he enjoys just to spite Mycroft. On the surface he refused to take the case in TGG but he did go about solving it anyway. He doesn’t refuse to take the case in ASiB because it intrigued him. Hence there is no reason why Sherlock wouldn’t join a deducting club, particularly if the club had never even heard of Mycroft Holmes

Sherlock was seen as lone weirdo by Sebastian (and probably the rest of his college) because he  blurted out all his deductions of people’s private lives without any thought to the consequences. I do not think Sherlock was hated and alienated because of his skills but rather because of his vocal demonstration.

I very much doubt Mycroft ever voiced his deductions outside the club unless he would gain something positive. Like the assassins I mentioned earlier, most people who have “unusual” hobbies that have the potential freak others out do not go around loudly advertising the fact.

Obviously they soon surpassed their teachers but their love for this art never died down. Deduction is a skill that you can practice all the time, anywhere so even if you leave the club you can keep doing it until it really is second nature.

“Sherlock still displays towards Mycroft the attitude that a pupil would display towards his mentor.” - thenorwoodbuilder

Well why not? It’s not surprising Mycroft is better at deduction than Sherlock, he’s generally more intelligent or at least intelligent in a different way. He also has had more experience with people to be able to form his own set of connections between observation and conclusion.

Sherlock is learning deduction skills from Mycroft now that they are seeing quite a lot of each other. This doesn’t mean he first learnt them as child from his brother who developed the skills himself. Their shared love of deduction may have been the only common ground they had as adults but that was something Mycroft built on during their bonding as adults.

thecutteralicia:

I think there’s a crucial flaw in the theory that Sherlock learned to deduce at university. In canon (by which I mean the series), we meet one of Sherlock’s peers from university, Sebastian Wilkes. When he points out that Sherlock’s deductions made everyone hate him, Sherlock looks wounded. Sherlock is also a) blatantly eager to impress Sebastian, even though they’ve been out of school for years and Sebastian is an ass, and b) downplays his abilities in front of Sebastian. Those are the hallmarks of a student who was alienated and mocked for his ability, not one who was surrounded by a company of like-minded peers who were learning the same skills (as in some sort of deducers’ club). Sebastian’s dialogue implies that Sherlock was a lone weirdo, not likely if there were others on campus. Even if Sherlock was still mocked by Wilkes and his cronies, that would be mitigated somewhat by his knowledge that there were other deducers among his peers.

I also find it highly unlikely that Sherlock would have followed in Mycroft’s footsteps and taken up the same hobby that Mycroft did in university, at an age when most people are at their most rebellious and eager to carve out their own paths (independent of parents or older siblings). The only way I could see it would be if Sherlock took up the hobby out of spite and in order to compete with Mycroft. Yet that’s disproved by the series, where we see that Sherlock will play stubborn games and push back against Mycroft in just about every area except deduction. Sherlock would rather sit naked, clad in only a bedsheet, in Buckingham Palace just to get Mycroft’s goat, yet when Mycroft corrects Sherlock on a deduction, Sherlock is open and immediately accepting of the rebuke. Not the behavior of someone who is used to competing with his brother on the issue.

wellingtongoose:

Let’s look at what Sebastian actually says in TBB:

"We were at uni together, he had a trick he used to do…you’d come down for breakfast in the formal hall and this freak would know who you’d been shagging the previous night.”

The use of “formal hall” makes very likely that Sherlock and Sebastian went to Oxbridge. The hall is where all students in a college have all their meals communally (some colleges provide breakfast). Can someone think of other universities that have their students eating in formal halls? I would welcome correction.

Oxbridge is made up of constituent colleges - which like Hogwarts houses are where you live, eat, sleep, spend the vast majority of your time etc. Your social life within the college is very much restricted to the same group of peers, whether you like it or not. Colleges can be stiflingly small with only 80 people in any given year group - everyone has to live in close proximity with everyone else.

Only by going to do University level activities like student societies do you get to escape from the people you cannot stand (like Sebastian).

Sebastian  might not have come across anyone else with Sherlock’s obvious skills because:

a) he doesn’t chose to spend time with other people like Sherlock. In Sherlock’s case Sebastian pretty much has no choice. Deducting is something you can do alone, it’s not necessarily a social activity, so it probably attracts people who are similar to Sherlock (there are a lot more than you think at Oxbridge) but the loners don’t all end up living or studying together. It’s a big university and students are forcibly segregated into colleges.

b) other members of the deduction club realise it is rude to use your skills to pry into other people’s private issues and therefore keep their deductions to themselves

c) there might not have been anyone else with Sherlock’s obvious skill (other members might not have been as good as he was) wondering around the college grounds or on Sebastian’s course for him to meet. Hence in Sherlock’s college he really was the lone weirdo. 

Sherlock was alienated and mocked for his abilities within his college, this does not mean that within the whole university he would not have found others who enjoyed deduction. However clubs generally only meet once a week at most, so 99% of Sherlock’s time is spent with the people in his staircase in college (who happened to be awful), whether he likes it or not. So he isn’t surrounded by like minded people and there is nothing he can do about the situation because of the college system. However this does not mean he could not have attended a deduction club.

He might not have got on that well with the people at the club either, given his  lack of social skills. This might have contributed to his general alienation. From personal experience if you put lots of people like Sherlock in a room, they do not get on no matter how similar they are. Sherlock, however, is not the type of person to give up something he like just because the company is bad. He continues to solve crimes with Lestrade despite how Sally and Anderson treat him.

The second point is that Sherlock was alienated by his peers not because of his skills but because he insisted on blurting out his deductions about people’s very private matters. It is not his slightly unusual skill that makes him enemies but his complete lack of social skills.

I very doubt Mycroft ever spoke his deductions out loud unless he knew he would get something out of it. His college friends would have admired his ability rather than shunned him for it because he knew how to use it to his advantage.

In the same way, the other members of the club would have kept their abilities to themselves, like the assassins guild members I mentioned in the meta, because it freaks other people out or used their skills to impress in a more socially accepted way.

There are literally hundreds of student societies at Cambridge, some of which are huge but incredibly niche and you have to actively search them out.

By the time Sherlock went to university, Mycroft would have graduated over four years ago, hence there is no overlaps of students who knew Mycroft and Sherlock.  Also Sherlock probably went to a different university and hence a different club, so he’s not following in Mycroft’s footsteps.

There is no evidence that Sherlock completely shuns things he enjoys just to spite Mycroft. On the surface he refused to take the case in TGG but he did go about solving it anyway. He doesn’t refuse to take the case in ASiB because it intrigued him. Hence there is no reason why Sherlock wouldn’t join a deducting club, particularly if the club had never even heard of Mycroft Holmes.

Deduction isn’t a sport with competitions. It can be fostered in a co-operative environment, very much like pub trips where “assassins” meet up to swap tips about how to kill. The assassins are actually in competition with one another, Sherlock would never have been in competition with Mycroft or Mycroft’s legacy. It appears that Mycroft has made deduction a bonding point between himself and Sherlock. It is likely the one subject where they do share common ground and don’t descend into arguments, so it makes it a very important part of their bonding as adults.