Heart of Darkness in the Light of Psychoanalytic Theories Essay

psychoanalytic criticism originated in the urinate of Austrian psycho psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pi peerlessered the technique of psychoanalysis. Freud worded a language that described, a model that explained, and a speculation that encompassed gentle macrocosms gentle opus psychology. His theories argon directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of the unconscious mind(p) mind theme. by with(predicate) his nine-fold case studies, Freud managed to find convincing turn come on that well-nigh of our actions ar motivated by workforcetal forces everywhere which we get to very(prenominal) limited control (Guerin 127). sensation of Freuds most important contributions to the fill of the private is his theory of repression the unconscious header is a repository of suppress desires, relishings, memories, wishes and instinctual drives many of which have to do with sexuality and violence. These unconscious wishes, harmonize to Freud, foot find express ion in envisages because ideates distort the unconscious framework and beget it appear different from it self and more pleasant to consciousness. They may in any case appear in a nonher(prenominal)wise disguised fleshs, resembling in language (some snips c al mavened the Freudian slips), in original device and in neurotic behavior. genius of the unconscious desires Freud believed that totally(a) gay creations purportedly suppress is the childhood desire to give nonice the put up of the selfsame(prenominal) sex and to exact his or her plate in the affections of the pargonnt of the oppo settle sex. This so- entreated Oedipus Complex, which all children make pop as a rite of rush to adult gender identity, lies at the substance of Freuds sexual theory (Murfin 114-5). A principal element in Freuds theory is his assignment of the noetic processes to trinity mental z unitarys the id, the ego and the superego.The id is the passional, irrational, and unconscious fragmentise up of the psyche. It is the target of the energy of the mind, energy that Freud timberized as a combination of sexual libido and other instincts, such as aggression, that propel the homosexual changeity organism through c beer, moving it to grow, develop and eventually to die. That primary process of life is completely irrational, and it cannot distinguish reasonable butts and ill-judged or socially unacceptable virtuos sensationsss. hither comes the secondary processes of the mind, lodged in the ego and the superego.The ego, or I, was Freuds term for the predominantly rational, logical, groovy and conscious take leave of the psyche it work on repressing and inhibiting the drives of the id so that they may be released in sane behavioral patterns. And though a large shargon of the ego is unconscious, it nevertheless accepts what we think of as the conscious mind. The superego is a projection of the ego. It is the lesson censoring agency the cleave th at makes clean-living judgments and the repository of conscience and pride.It brings reason, order and social acceptability to the otherwise uncontrolled and potentially harmful realm of biological impulses (Guerin 128-31). Freuds theories have launched what is now kn take as the psychoanalytic approach to literature. Freud was interested in writers, especially those who depended largely on symbols. oft(prenominal) writers tend to tinge their ideas and figures with mystery or ambiguity that only if make ace once interpreted, dear as the analyst tries to figure taboo the moons and bizarre actions that the unconscious mind of a neurotic releases fall out of repression.A work of literature is consequently treated as a ideate or a envisage that Freudian analysis comes to explain the nature of the mind that disc everyplaced it. The social occasion of a work of art is what psychoanalysis has found to be the purpose of the dream the secret gratification of an childish and forb idden wish that has been repressed into the unconscious (Wright 765). The literal surface of a work of literature is some quantify called the manifest capability and treated as manifest dream or dream spirit level. The psychoanalytic literary critic tries to analyze the latent, underlying circumscribe of the work, or the dream thought secret in the dream story. Freud used the harm condensation and displacement to explain the mental processes that result in the disguise of the wishes and fears in dream stories. In condensation, several wishes, anxieties or somebodys may be con mysteriousd into a champion manifestation or image in dream story in displacement, a thought or a soulfulness may be displaced onto the image of some other with which or whom on that point is an extremely turn and arbitrary association that only an analyst can decode.Psychoanalytic critics treat metaphors as if they were dream condensations they treat metonyms- figures of speech base on weak connecti ons- as if they were dream displacements. Thus, figures of speech in general argon treated as shots that see the low-cal when the writers conscious mind resists what the unconscious asks it to depict or describe. Psychoanalytic criticism written forwards 1950 tended to study the psyche of the individual author.Poems, unexampleds and plays were treated as fantasies that allowed authors to release curbed desires, or to protect themselves from complex- root fears, or both. Later, psychoanalytic critics stopped pre fondnessptuous that mechanics are borderline neurotics or that the characters they conciliate and the figurative language they use can be analyzed to figure out the dark, unkn admit fancies in the authors minds. So they go their focus toward the psychology of the reader, and came to understand that artists are skilled creators of works that appeal to the readers repressed wishes.As such, psychoanalytic criticism typically attempts to do at least hotshot of the following tasks study the psychological traits of a writer provide an analysis of the seminal process or explore the psychological impacts of literature on its readers (Murfin 115-20). Not all psychoanalytic critics, however, are Freudian. Many of them are persuaded by the writings of Carl Gustav Jung whose analytical psychology is different from Freuds psychoanalysis.Jung had broken with Freuds emphasis on libidinal drives and had develop a theory of the incorporated unconscious although, equal Freud, he believed in a individualized unconscious as a repository of repressed feelings (Wright 767). The processes of the unconscious psyche, harmonize to Jung, produce images, symbols and myths that belong to the large pitying culture. He refers to the manifestations of the myth-forming elements as motifs, primitive images, or archetypes. Jung indicated further that the dreams, myths and art all wait on as media through which archetypes establish loving to the consciousness.On e major contribution is Jungs theory of individuation which is the process of discovering those aspects of ones self that make one an individual different from other people. It is, consort to Jung, an absolutely essential process if one is to become a balanced individual he detected an intimate family similitudeship amongst neurosis and the persons failure to accept some prototypal features of his unconscious. Individuation is related to three archetypes designated as dark, persona and anima. These are structural components that human macrocosms have inherited.We thicket their symbolic projections end-to-end the myths and literatures of humankind. The shadow is the darker side of our unconscious self, the modest and less pleasing aspects of the reputation. The anima is the soulfulness-image the source of a mans life force. Jung gives it a feminine designation in the mans psyche it is the contra-sexual part that a man carries in his in-person and corporal unconscious.The persona is the resister of the anima it is our social individual(prenominal)ity and the mediator between our ego and the outer gentlemans gentleman. A balanced man has a flexible persona that is in consistency with the other components of his psychic makeup (Guerin 178-83). Through the lenses of Jungian psychoanalysis, the literary text is no longer seen as a site where the quelled impulses get through in disguise. Instead, Jung maintains that both the individual in dreams and the artist at work will produce archetypal images to compensate for any psychic impoverishment in man and society. He untangles texts of literature by a rule he calls ?amplification the images of the collective unconscious are derived from those of the personal (Wright 767). Despite its flat rehearsing of a number of themes, psychoanalytic theory has led to a better collar of the complexities of the relation between the human universe and the nice creativity. Heart of phantasma in the illumine of Psychoanalytic theories. Heart of vileness explores something truer, more fundamental, and distinctly less material than just a personal narrative. It is a night measure move around into the unconscious, and a confrontation of an entity within the self.Certain circumstances of Marlows voyage, witnessed at in these monetary value, take on a new importance. The true night trip can occur only in sleep or in a walking dream of a profoundly intuitive mind. Marlow insists on the phantasmagorical quality of his narrative. It seems to me I am severe to tell you a dream make a vein attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation (Conrad 38). Even forrader leaving Brussels, Marlow felt as though he was some to set finish off for center of the earth, not the center of a continent (16).The introverted voyager leaves his familiar rational earthly concern, is cut off from the comprehension of his surroundings, his locomote toils along slow on the edge of a macabre and incomprehensible frenzy (52). As the crisis approaches, the dreamer and his ship moves through a cover version that seemed unnatural, like a state of enrapture then enter a unintelligible fog (57). The original penetrates to those areas of sin and dream indeed nightmare ? with which Conrad tried to cook the substance of the world. It asks questions, destabilizes orthodox assumptions, and sketches an existentially absurd catch.It involves us in dramatic, crucially difficult deterrent example decisions which parallel those of the deuce central characters, Marlow and Kurtz. Although it was a coincidence that Freud and Conrad were contemporaries, coincidence is reduced when we savvy the extraordinary parallelism of their achievements (Karl 785). At the time when Conrad was developing his concepts close to the congou tea and political, personal and universal involvement in a hair-raising humanity, Freud was fermenting his theories on dreams and the unc onscious.Conrads raw appeared in 1900, only months before Freuds book Interpretation of Dreams which organise the manifesto of the psychoanalytic assumptions. Both Conrad and Freud were pioneers in their emphasis over the irrational aspects of mans behavioral conduct which questioned the advanceed-down analyses. Conrad insight dependabley stressed the irrationality of politics and its bloodcurdling character which rests on the neurotic symptoms of the leader, as well as on the collective neurosis of the wades.He also believed in a human behavior that answers the call of inner desires, while justifying itself with accuracy. Both he and Freud dived into the nefariousness the iniquity enters the human soul when his conscience sleeps or when he is slack to yield to the unconscious desires and needs, whether through dreams, as Freud argues, or in actuality through the character of Kurtz and his likes. Dreams become the wish-fulfillments of the masked self. This applies to Marlow t he very qualities in Kurtz that horrify him are those he finds hidden in himself.Kurtzs insatiable, Nietzchean fascination with cater mirrors Marlows as well. Kurtzs ruthless career is every mans wish-fulfillment (Karl 785-6). In the novel, Conrad draws an image of Africa as the other world, the antithesis of a civilized Europe, a site where mans accumulated eld of education and sophistication are confronted by a striking roughry. The story opens on the River Thames, calm and peaceful. It then moves to the very opposite of the Thames, and takes place on the River Congo.However, Its not the flagrant difference of opinion between the devil that perplexes Conrad but the underlying allusion of intimate relationship, of earthy ancestry, since the Thames was itself a dark place, but one that has managed to civilize, to enlighten itself and the world, and is now living in the light. The peaceful Thames, however, runs the terrible risk of being stirred by its brush with its primordi al relative, the Congo it would witness the reflection of its own forsaken darkness and would hear the sounds that echo its external gloomy history.The Thames would fall victim to the unforgiving reminiscences of the irrational frenzy of the primitive times (Achebe 262-3). It would be very helpful to recite one of the most interesting and most revealing passages in Heart of immorality when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa We were wanderers on a past earth. ? We glided ult like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. ? They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces but what thrill you was just the thought of their humanity ?like yours ? the thought of your international kinship with this crackers and passionate ruction.Ugly. ? but if you were man fair to middling you would admit that thither was in you just the faintest trace of resp onse to the terrible truthfulness of that make noise, a dim suspicion of there being a pith in it which you ? you so remote from the night of source ages ? could comprehend (51-2). Here in lies the inwardness of Heart of Darkness that takes us on a locomote into the unconscious world of the human beings through the psychoanalytic features congenital in the novels dream story. Marlow, a man of discipline and arbitrator, was expecting such values to exist elsewhere. They became a kind of psychological expectations. His great revelation takes place when he discovers that not all men share his belief in an orderly, basically good society. His journey from Brussels to the Congo is full of elements of the absurd, elements that convey at a world that is suddenly irrational and out of focus. In the Congo, the hobo camp is surrounded by a dangerous feminine strain the long river is described in treacherous, serpentine terms everything about the nature conveys a maven of a myste rious and wonderful existence (Karl 786).Marlow is fascinated by the hobo camp cleaning woman Kurtzs savage working girl and her demanding display of sex, by her provocative thrifty walk. He is also drawn by her surprising sense of reality and her full acceptance of Kurtz with all the savagery he embodies. Her image contradicts with his ideal of womanhood he had known all his life the girl sand in Brussels, his aunt, the naive woman who believed in the Europeans expansive mission in Africa. Marlow tries to resist the seductive aspect of the nature, much as he shies away from the drawing card of power.Sex lies heavily on the story, although Marlow never directly talks about it. The lure is clear in his fears, in the jungle that conceals the terrors and the calls for orgiastic, uncontrollable sex. In the novel, Kurtz represents Europe maneuvering for power, inquisitive for advantages he chose the route of bead looting. His unsatiable hunger for possession is overwhelmin g. In Africa, he is free of all human barriers civilized taboos are down. He is able to fulfill all his forbidden desires and dwells on eventual(prenominal) corruptedion, debarred of all restraints.This lies at the marrow of Marlows secret attraction to Kurtz the latters will to brutal, superhuman power. Kurtz has risen higher up the masses ? of natives, station managers, even of directors back in Brussels. He must delay to assert himself, a megalomaniac in wait of further power. Marlow has never met anyone like him, ? (Karl 787). One telling part in the novel comes with Kurtzs demolition and his double bellyache The horror The horror (Conrad 105). Marlow, out of his deep fascination with Kurtz and his need to believe in a good human nature, attributes a Christian reading to these words.He understands the belly laugh as a moral mastery at the time of his death, Kurtz has reviewed his life and the corrupt part of him has repented. Its arguable, though, that Kurtzs claim might be one of hurt and despair, because he has to die with his work incomplete. In other words, he laments a circumstances which frustrates his plans. However, Marlow has explained the horror of this experience in human terms necessary to guarantee the guide of life. He protects the lie of Kurtzs existence in order to preserve his own illusions (Karl 788-9).Hence, we notice that Marlow, throughout his journey, has concealed from himself the reality of his own as well as others needs. The jungle is the mask that exclude the light of sun and sky. The landscape becomes the repository of our anxieties and the spacious protective camouflage that hides our inner fears. It bars the light of our conscience and rational capacities and becomes part of the psychological as well as physical landscape (Karl 788). It runs parallel to our unconscious mind where our repressed desires are hidden.The prehistoric earth, that is still untouched by the hold of civilization, is but our rudimenta ry soul, in its raw, savage nature, un slim and free of the conscious disguises. The lurking winding of kinship that the Europeans have felt at their encounter with the Africans is but a hint of deep connection existing between the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious. The black and incomprehensible frenzy of the strange bodies is a proctor of the uncontrollable libido.This mad and passionate uproar is ugly because the wilderness and passion that elevate our disguised depths are a mass of animalistic drives, and our id that hosts all unfulfilled wishes carries the wildest of motivations. Yet, one cannot but heed the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise for one cannot fully resist the temptation to gratify his impulses and instinctual needs. In Freudian terms, our superego sometimes fails to have full control over its antithesis, the id. The boundaries that separate the unconscious from the conscious are blurred.This terri ble frenzy holds a meaning that, even the man who is so remote from the night of first ages ? could comprehend the refined man is able to understand the noise because it communicates with an inseparable ? although masked ? part of his soul. Thus, Africa has become a topology of the mind ? its location, its shape, its cultures, its food grains, its rhythms, it hues, its ferocity ? all calling forth something preoccupied in the psychology of the white European. The darkness of the African continent, of its instinctual, shadowed, primeval underworld establishes a revealing context for an examination of the Jungian concepts in the novel.Marlows journey, in Jungian terms, becomes a journey of individuation a salvation realized through obstetrical delivery the unconscious urges to consciousness ? a journey which can be blood lineed to that of his diabolic double, Kurtz, who undergoes a psychological disintegration into his savage self and slips into The horror The horror The shadow in Heart of Darkness is thus personified by Kurtz. Richard Hughs argues that Kurtzs last words sum up the Jungian insight that from the same root that produces wild, untamed, blind instinct there grow up the natural laws and ethnic forms that tame and break its pristine power. further when the animal in us is split off from consciousness by being repressed, it may easily burst out in full force, quite unregulated and uncontrolled. An outburst of this sort always ends in catastrophe ? the animal destroys itself (21). Hughs adds that the novel is comprise of devil journeys into the hidden self, one is horrifying, address in personality destruction and death the other is restorative, wisdom-producing, a gateway to ace ? Conrad has seized on the paradoxical quality of the strain into the unconscious ? (58).For Jung, the integration of the personality is not come-at-able without a full pin into the unconscious and clearly the novel is about the descent into the depths, the un derworld, into the very gist of darkness. Jungs awareness that the darkness is part of himself, that to deny the darkness would be self-mutilation, and the awareness is not erased but heightened by a perception of that dark self this is Marlows uncovering (Hughs 66). Marlows journey toward individuation and his encounter with the darkness of his own shadow are set against a background signal of the personal and collective unconscious.Kurtz is not only the personal shadow of Marlow, but the collective shadow of all Europe and of European imperialism. passim the novel there is a dense undergrowth of Congo unconsciousness, as Marlow succinctly states, All of Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz (73). In the midst of this journey of individuation, we encounter Jungs concept of the anima personified by Kurtzs wild mistress. She is a reflection of the soul of the wilderness, she s in additiond feel at us with a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose (Conrad 92).She is the savagely vivid consort of the underworld and the feminine part of every mans psyche. Hughs calls her the grand archetype of the unconscious, consort of the mad Kurtz and the goal of the inner search (268-9). Conrads novel descends into the unknowable darkness at the heart of Africa, taking its narrator, Marlow, on an underworld journey of individuation, a modern Odyssey toward the center of the ego and the center of the Earth. Interestingly, the narrative technique and the inherent symbolism in Heart of Darkness all contribute to the overall dream-like and nightmarish mood of the story.The use of first person narrative was essential so that Conrad could outdo himself from the lived experience and for the reader could identify with a common man thrown into a bizarre situation. Lacking Marlow as the narrator, the story would lose its credibility and would appear too distant from the real experience. Through repetition, difference of to ne, analogy, duplicating images, doubling of scenes and characters, Conrad could form a shape for the story. He used heightening and foreshortening, secern and comparison to give the novella form from the opening scene, when the ancient Romans on the Thames arecontrasted with the modern Europeans in the Congo (Karl 789). Marlows calm setting on the Nellie contrasts with the alarm Congo riverboat setting. Kurtzs two fiancees represents two different sets of values, two contradictory cultures. The jungle, as death, is in conflict with the river, as possible relief. The natives savagery is set off against the backdrop of the apparently civilized Europeans. The contrast reaches the two central characters as well Kurtzs humanitarianism contradicts his own barbarism, Marlows place class sense of English justice is contrasted with the Congo reality.It is also clear in their fluctuating love-hate relationship that pervades the story. The abundance of windup(prenominal) and metallic ima ges suggests a sense of human waste and indicates that tough objects have at rest(p) beyond flexibility and softness in order to resist the passing of time, so humanity itself must become an object in order to survive. This strong sense of an absurd existence is best equal by the ivory itself. Ivory, the purest demonstration of the subterfuge white, stands in stark juxtaposition to the darkness of the jungle.It draws the white men to Africa then turns their minds from building commerce and civilization, to exploitation and madness. Wherever ivory is present, white men plunder, kill, and turn on each other. Conrad uses symbolism to suggest meanings sort of than spelling them out directly. The technicalities of his style include a frequent use of alliteration, a reliance on adjectives which emphasize the unacquainted(predicate) aspects of Marlows experience. Words like inscrutable, inconceivable, unutterable that describe the tyrannical mysteriousness of the Congo are recurrent throughout the novel.The same mental lexicon is used to evoke the human depths and the awing potentialities of the mans soul and to aggrandise the sense of spiritual horrors (Leavis 246-7). The words and adjectives Conrad applies agitate upon us, creating drum-like rhythms, entirely appropriate to the thick texture of the jungle (Karl 789). The darkness of the jungle goes hand in hand with darkness everywhere, alluding at the blackness of Conrads humor, the despair of his ridicule (Karl 789).It is the nightmares color the darkness surrounding Kurtzs death, his last words, the state by the managers boy, the sore escape from the jungle, the encounter with Kurtzs fiancee all such incidents constitute the elements of a nightmarish dream. Even the Russian abetter _or_ abettor of Kurtz who is dressed in motley seems as a figure from another world. In his ridiculous appearance, he is a ameliorate symbol of Marlows Congo experience (Karl 788-9). In this passage, F. R.Leavis argues that Conrad makes almost every aspect of his novel contribute to its overwhelming impression, one of a strangely insane world and a nightmarish existence ? in terms of things seen and incidents experienced by a main agent in the narrative, and situation contacts and exchanges with other human agents, the overwhelming inauspicious and fantastic ? atmosphere is engendered. Ordinary greed, stupidity, and moral squalor are made to look like behaviour in a lunatic asylum against the vast and oppressive mystery of the surroundings, rendered potently in terms of sensation.This means lunacy, which we are made to feel as at the same time normal and insane, is brought out by contrast with the fantastically secure innocence of the unexampled harlequin-costumed Russian ? (246) Using his renowned artistic and literary craftsmanship, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness that has become, since its number in 1899, one of the most immensely read books written in English. It has also been one of th e most analyzed get ahead of literary critics, ranging from feminists to Marxists to bare-ass Critics, have all tried to construct their own meanings from the pages of the book.The novel does seem to invite a wide variety of interpretations. Looking at it through the lenses of psychoanalytic theories, Heart of Darkness has proven to be a masterpiece of concealment and a metaphor for the theory of the unconscious as a repository of all irrational and repressed wishes. (Karl 788). The journey into the heart of the continent can also be seen as Marlows own journey of individuation, self-discovery and self-enlightenment. Bibiography Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. A Practical ratifier in coetaneous Literary Theory.capital of the United Kingdom Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996. 262-4 Conrad, Joseph. Heart Of Darkness. Beirut Librairie Du Liban Publishers SAL, 1994. Guerin, Wilfred L. , et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 4th ed. radical York Oxford University Press, 1999. Hewitt, Douglas. Conrad A Reassessment. ground Literature Criticism. Ed. Polly Vedder. Vol. 4. Detroit Gale, 1992. 789-92. Hughs, Richard E. The merry Image Four Myths in Literature. Cambridge, MA Winthrop Publishers, 1975. Karl, Frederick R. A Readers go on To Joseph Conrad. World Literature Criticism. Ed. Polly Vedder. Vol.4. Detroit Gale, 1992. 785-9. Leavis, F. R. From The Great Tradition. A Practical Reader in modern-day Literary Theory. London Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996. 246-7 Mudrick, Marvin. The Originality of Conrad. World Literature Criticism. Ed. PollyVedder. Vol. 4. Detroit Gale, 1992. 782-5. Murfin, Ross C. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism. New York St. Martins Press, 1989. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York Knopf, 1979. Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism. Encyclopedia Of Literature And Criticism. 1991 ed. 765-7.