Psychoanalysis Analysis Of Pi

Haiden Maples

Dr. Leslie Moore

UGS 302

26th September 2017

Pi-choanalysis

“When you look into an animal’s eyes, you are seeing your own emotions reflected back at you,” (Lee, 2013, scene 50) a young Pi Patel’s father tells him after being found sticking his hand into the cage of Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger kept at their family zoo. From an early age, the boy had connected to a sense of humanity and personhood in the animals he grew up around, something that grows to animate itself even further in his adolescence when Pi finds himself a castaway with Richard Parker and several other animals after the ship carrying his family of people and jungle creatures from India to Canada sinks in the middle of the Pacific. Many years later Pi tells the story of his struggle for survival to an American writer, claiming that it will make him believe in God. His father’s foretelling assertion echoes in the ears of film analysts, as the relationships Pi describes forming with his companions at sea can be interpreted as a symbolic manifestation of Pi’s own psychological processes. Through using a psychoanalytic lens to analyze Pi’s story

While this psychological achievement may not be possible in psychoanalysis and the application of such theory in the real world can be controversial, it is valuable in a literary context for two reasons. First, Pi’s story postulates a creative proposition of how an individual could overcome fixation on their object petit a which provides useful criticism and grounds for deeper exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The second justification follows with the question Pi asks the American writer, “Which story do you prefer?” (Lee, 2013, scene 176). One could listen to Pi’s brutal and true tale of what happened at sea, but the one with the tiger is the better story. And so it goes with