Jack Baur's entire life takes place in a fictional world similar to our own in every way, with the small difference that an any given point the entire place could explode into nothingness. Jack runs through life bouncing from one various potential world-ending crises to the next, and deals handles them with an all-or-nothing modus operandi in the most tension-creating way a team of screenwriters can conceive.

The paranoia and sense of constant threat which appears to pervade every hour of Mr. Baur's life, and the methods he employs to deal with said threats would appear to Freud to be the product of fears and desires originally manifested during an early stage of Baur's childhood development. Freud believed that all neurotic adult behavior can be traced back to childhood episodes and that such behavior is essentially an expression of fears and anxieties developed during that period.

An empirical relationship has exists between adult traits and common events during childhood and infancy. It is possible that Baur is the subject of a series degree of sublimation, that is to say his initial sexual impulses have been over time re-channeled by society into the ostensibly more useful medium of counter-terrorism and it is for this reason that he strives to save the world at any cost.

It may be that Baur obtained a fixation at the anal stage. Freud would possibly explain Jack's methodology for dealing with his superiors, everybody he believes to be on the wrong side, and people who stand in his way as the result of an anal expulsive character developed during the anal stage of his development. The anal stage occurs immediately after the oral stage. Beginning during potty training, and characterized by the subsequent shift in the primary erogenous zone from the mouth to the anus, it is during this phase that a conflict develops between the part of the child that wants to expel bodily waste and the newly present societal and parental pressure to control said desire. Children generally deal with this pressure in two ways. Either they outwardly rebel against their parents by expelling said waste particularly inconveniently, or they retain it in a move of passive-aggression. Children who choose the former, which probably describes Jack Baur, are characterized by recklessness, carelessness, and defiance, which quite accurately describes Jack Baur's particular idiom, as well as messy. Children who choose the latter tend to be the opposite.

However, Jack's methodology and masculinity are most probably explainable by fixation at the phallic phase. The phallic stage is characterized by the shifting of the primary erogenous zone from the anus to the genitals. According to Freud, during this phase as a child becomes aware of his genitals said child's instinctual love for his mother transitions to sexual love. He begins to see his father as an object standing in the way of his mother's affection, and as a result begins feeling envious of and aggressive towards his father. More so than aggression and envy, however, the child is afraid that the father will strike back and develops castration anxiety. As his castration anxiety greatly eclipses his desire for his mother, he represses this desire. Eventually, he learns to express this repressed desire vicariously through the father, which results in the child attempting to emulate and later identify with the father. Individuals who develop a fixation during this phase are characterized by recklessness, self-assurance, confidence and excessive narcissism. Fixation during this phase most accurately explains Jack Baur's masculinity as well as the manner in which he deals with objects that stand in his way.