Unconscious in James Joyce's Dubliners and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
Although the notion of a human unconscious preceded Freud, his work is certainly most useful for explaining what it actually is. With an understanding of a human unconscious we can apply some of its characteristics to the literature studied thus far. Much of Freud's work on the unconscious is contained within his book The Interpretation of Dreams' but a concise definition is hard to come by. Essentially Freud believes that the unconscious is the part of the mind that is beyond consciousness which nevertheless has a strong influence on our actions' . Dreams are, for Freud, a very important tool in studying the unconscious; he believes that they are one of the very few times when repressed' material can move from the unconscious into the conscious mind. However, these thoughts have been repressed for a reason and therefore they must be disguised through, what Freud calls, displacement and condensation. Freud describes displacement using the example of the Sappho- dream of my patient, ascending and descending, being upstairs and down, is made the central point; the dream, however, is concerned with the danger of sexual relations with persons of low degree.' Condensation is seen because the dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts.' Nevertheless, dreams are not the only way repressed material finds an outlet; Freud refers to the parapraxis' or slips of the tongue, pen or unintended actions' (Beginning Theory 97) as another way for repressed material to seep out into the conscious mind.
Therefore, when discussing the question of an existence of a literary unconscious we must regard it as a kind of dream. Some will argue that literature is not similar to dreams, such as David M. Rein. Rein who believes that the creator of a dream performs spontaneously
The author of a story plans deliberately'. However, the similarities between dreams and literature seem to be evidence enough for us to analyse them as such.
James Joyce's Dubliners' and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre' can be argued to have an unconscious in that there is similarities between Freud's view of the unconscious and the text itself. Certainly the individual stories of Dubliners' seem to greatly resemble dreams; the stories, much like dreams occasionally seem unsystematic and puzzling. For instance in the very first story of the book The Sisters', many events go unexplained.
The first basis of Freud 's belief system was found in the existence of the personal unconscious. The mind is a substance that incorporates much more than the simple conscious component. The unconscious component is the much larger than the
Stephen King’s perception in “The Symbolic Language of Dreams” gave me a new, profound insight on dreams. On the other hand, his interpretations also made me realize how little is known about them and their significance to our lives.
...f the waking state; it is built up by a highly complicated intellectual activity. Freud went beyond the boundaries of education. Freud explains his reasoning about dreams, “[Dreams] are not meaningless, they are not absurd; they do not imply that one portion of our store of ideas is asleep while another portion is beginning to wake” (330). He took a different approach about the way he analyzed people. His liberally educated mind allowed him to get past the typical mental analysis and utilize dream interpretations to fabricate theories.
Sigmund Freud believed that he “occupies a special place in the history of psychoanalysis and marks a turning point, it was with it that analysis took the step from being a psychotherapeutic procedure to being in depth-psychology” (Jones). Psychoanalysis is a theory or therapy to decode the puzzle of neurotic disorders like hysteria. During the therapy sessions, the patients would talk about their dreams. Freud would analyze not only the manifest content (what the dreamer remembers) of the dreams, but the disguise that caused the repressions of the idea. During our dreams, the decision making part of personality’s defenses are lowered allowing some of the repressed material to become more aware in a distorted form. He distinguished between
Freud’s understanding of the unconscious is organized into three echelons: the conscious mind, the preconscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind involves everything we are cognizant of. The preconscious mind signifies regular recollections. The unconscious mind contains emotions, reflections, memoirs and compulsions that are unknown to our conscious perception. Along with the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious, there are the three additional elements to Freud’s structure of personality: the id, ego and superego. Unlike Freud, Jung had a more optimistic theory of the unconscious.
In 1900 , an Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud produced a work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, reviewing the idea that dreams allow psychic examination, that the dreams that are happening contain some sort of psychological meaning which can be brought on by interpretation. Freud says that every dream will release itself as a emotional structure, full of importance, and one which may be assigned to a designated place in the psychic activities. According to Freud's original thoughts dreams have two contents, a manifest content which is the dream that one actually experiences and a hidden content which is the meaning of the dream as discovered by interpretation.
The fantastic tale “Was It a Dream?” by Guy de Maupassant is a story narrated from the first point of view, in which the main character, who remains anonymous, describes his desperation and overwhelming grief since the loss of his loved one. He also relates a supernatural event he experienced, while in the cemetery, in which he finds out the truth about his significant other’s feelings but refuses to accept it, or at least tries to ignore it. Maupassant’s readers may feel sympathy towards the narrator as they perceive throughout the story his tone of desperation, and are able to get to the conclusion that he was living a one-sided relationship. Maupassant achieves these effects in the readers through the use of figures of speech, like anonymity, symbolism and imagery, and the structured he employed in the story.
It is universally known that dreams are full of meanings and emotions. In Freud’s theory, all dreams are wish fulfillments or at least attempts at wish fulfillment. The dreams are usually presented in an unrecognizable form because the wishes are repressed. Freud proposes there are two levels in the structure of dreams, the manifest contents and the latent dream-thoughts. The manifest dream, a dream with understandable contents, is a substitute-formation that hides latent dream-thoughts, which are the abstract ideas in dreams. This translation of latent dream-thoughts to the manifest dream-content is defined by Freud as “dream-work”. Dream-work consists of certain types of transformation.
The psychoanalytic perspective was first discovered by Sigmund Freud which uncovers the nature of the mind and leads to the discovery of the unconscious. The unconscious is layered underneath as the proprietary element of the individuals mind, it is built over time and is only revealed through dreams, and slips. The development of the unconscious can be built at an early stage, as it shapes our personality. The individual does not have access to the unconscious as it’s deep in the mind and we find these events and feelings unacceptable for our conscious.
Freud (1960) said \"that very powerful mental processes of ideas exist which can produce all the effects of the mental life that ordinary ideas do, though they themselves do not become conscious\" (p. 4). This is an indication that there are other parts of the mind in which thoughts occur. According to Freud (1960), \"the state in which the ideas existed before being made conscious is called by us repression\" (p. 4). It is by the theory of repression that the concept of the unconscious is obtained.
One of Freud's major contributions was his appreciation of unconscious processes in people’s lives. According to Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, the dream images and their symbolic messages can be observed as one's fulfilled wis...
Psychology, neuroscience try to explain them, 2012). He studied dreams to better understand aspects of personality as they relate to pathology. Freud believed that every action is motivated by the unconscious at a certain level. In order to be successful in a civilized society, the urges and desires of the unconscious mind must be repressed. Freud believed that dreams are manifestations of urges and desires that are suppressed in the unconscious. Freud categorized the mind into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. When one is awake, the impulses if the id are suppressed by the superego, but during dreams, one may get a glimpse into the unconscious mind, or the id. The unconscious has the opportunity to express hidden desires of the id during dreaming. Freud believed that the id can be so disturbing at times that the id’s content can be translated into a more acceptable form. This censor leads to a sometimes confusing and strange dream image. According to Freud, the reason one may struggle to remember a dream is because the superego protects the conscious mind from the disturbance of the unconscious mind (Dream Theories,
During Freud’s time, society typically viewed dreams as an intervention of a higher being or entity (Freud, 1900, p.4). However, Freud made the claim that dreams are the product of the dreamer and also that it serves two purposes. First, dreams form to keep a person asleep at night by blocking out external stimuli, much in the same way a person consciously does when turning off the light and minimizing noise before going to bed (“Freud’s Approach,” 2000). Next, Freud (1900) viewed humans as having grotesque sexual urges that “are suppressed before they are perceived” (p.37) in order to protect the person and allow him or her to get along in society; however, dreams serve the purpose of releasing these repressed desires as wishes which are disguised in the dream. Because a person cannot readily be aware of the unconscious wish, the dream is divided into two ...
In the first chapter of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams the master himself explains to the reader that every dream divulges itself as being a structure of psychological nature. Freud goes on to describe that each dream is meaningful and that some dreams may be designated to a precise point in the activities of the wake mind.
In terms of the unconscious and conscious, Freud situates these conceptions in a topographic model of the mind. He divided it into two systems called the unconscious and the preconscious. Their knowledge in the unconscious system is repressed and unavailable to consciousness without overcoming resistances (e.g., defense mechanisms). Thereby, the repression does not allow unconscious knowledge to be completely aware; rather, it is construed by means of concealing and compromise, but only interpretable through its derivatives dream and parapraxes that overcome resistance by means of disguise and compromise. Within the preconscious system, the contents could be accessible, although only a small portion at any given moment. Unconscious thought is characterized by primary process thinking that lacks negation or logical connections and favors the over-inclusions and 'just-as' relationships evident in condensed dream images and displacements. Freud asserted that primary process of thinking was phylogenetically, and continues to be ontogenetically, prior to secondary process or logical thought, acquired later in childhood and familiar to us in our waking life (1900, 1915a).