Eddie Kaspbrak and Myra Kaspbrak

Eddie Kaspbrak and Myra Kaspbrak's marriage is a near-perfect psychological reenactment of Eddie's relationship with his mother, Sonia. Myra is a large, anxious woman who, like Sonia, expresses love through obsessive concern for Eddie's health, and Eddie, in turn, is bound to her by a mixture of gratitude, guilt, and helplessness. The relationship is defined by a dynamic of caretaking and control that leaves Eddie infantilized and unable to assert his own will, a pattern he only manages to break when Mike Hanlon's phone call forces him to return to Derry.

The Freudian Circus

Eddie himself recognizes the uncanny resemblance between Myra and his mother. Shortly before proposing, he placed a photograph of Myra next to a picture of Sonia taken in 1944, when she was a relatively svelte one hundred and eighty pounds. He saw that they "could have been sisters" and promised himself he would not commit "psychological incest." Yet he married Myra anyway, acknowledging that "the old ways and the old habits had simply been too strong." Myra, like Sonia, had reached the "final, fatal insight into his character: Eddie was all the more delicate because he sometimes suspected he was not delicate at all; Eddie needed to be protected from his own dim intimations of possible bravery." This insight allowed Myra to condemn him with solicitude and chain him with sweetness, just as his mother had done.

The Medicine Cabinet as a Symbol of Control

Eddie's dependence on Myra is symbolized by his vast collection of medicines. His bathroom cabinet is stocked with dozens of bottles and jars—pain relievers, cold remedies, vitamins, laxatives, antacids, and prescription drugs like Valium and Percodan. He carries a blue tote-bag full of these nostrums when he flees to Derry. Myra, like Sonia, reinforces his hypochondria; she takes his rubbers out of the plastic bag on rainy days and places them by the door, and she sets out a dish of vitamins beside his breakfast each morning. Eddie's asthma, which he has been told is psychosomatic, is the central axis of this control. His aspirator, filled with nothing more than flavored water, is a talisman of his illness, and Myra's anxious care for his breathing keeps him in a state of perpetual vulnerability.

The Night of the Phone Call

On the night of May 28th, 1985, Eddie receives a call from Mike Hanlon. He immediately begins packing, telling Myra he has to go away. Myra is terrified and bewildered, unable to understand why her husband, who has never kept anything from her, is suddenly leaving. She tries to stop him with tears and pleas, offering to make his favorite foods and promising to take care of him. Eddie, struggling with his asthma and the weight of his decision, feels the pull of her desperation. He realizes that Myra is even more frightened than he is, and that his mother had been, too. This insight gives him the strength to leave, but he does so with a heavy heart, knowing he is breaking the pattern of his life.

The Break and the Promise

Eddie's departure is a violent rupture of the domestic order. He tells Myra she will have to drive Al Pacino herself, a task she finds terrifying. He leaves her weeping in the doorway, a "big black woman-shadow cut out of the light spilling from their house." On the train to Boston, Eddie reflects on his marriage and realizes that he has, in a sense, married his mother. He thinks of the promise he made as a child—to return to Derry if the horror ever started again—and understands that this promise is the only thing that can free him from the cycle of dependence. The marriage to Myra, for all its suffocating comfort, was a prison, and Derry, for all its terror, is the only place where he can be truly free. Eddie's death in the sewers, sacrificing himself to save his friends, is the final, tragic act of liberation from the life of anxious care that Myra and Sonia had built for him.