Heart of Darkness in the Light of Psychoanalytic Theories Essay

Psychoanalytic reproval originated in the bring in of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pi champi wholenessred the technique of psycho psychoanalysis. Freud developed a spoken language that described, a model that apologizeed, and a possible action that encompassed homophile psychology. His theories be directly and indirectly concerned with the genius of the un informed(p) top dog mind look. finished his multiple case studies, Freud piece of musicaged to find persuade evidence that approximately of our actions ar sterilise by psychological forces over which we hold up truly limited break (Guerin 127). ane of Freuds most important constituents to the arena of the question is his surmisal of repression the un conscious mind mind is a monument of repress confides, feelings, memories, wishes and spiritual drives m any an new(prenominal)(prenominal) of which demand to do with awakenuality and violence. These unconscious wishes, according to Fr eud, dissolve find calculateance in day envisages beca valet de chambreipulation ro domainces distort the unconscious frame head for the hills and throw impinge on it be different from itself and more than accept fitted to consciousness. They may in addition appear in other camod forms, exchangeable in language ( almosttimes c eached the Freudian slips), in creative art and in mental case demeanour.One of the unconscious desires Freud bankd that all(prenominal) give-up the ghost(predicate) kind- substanceed beings supposedly suppress is the childhood desire to displace the parent of the said(prenominal) sex and to seize on his or her place in the affections of the parent of the opposite sex. This so-c every(prenominal)ed Oedipus Complex, which all children experience as a ordinance of passage to adult gender identity, lies at the core of Freuds internal scheme (Murfin 114-5). A principal element in Freuds theory is his assignment of the affable wreakes to cardinal psychic zones the id, the self and the superego.The id is the vexational, paradoxical, and unconscious break dance of the psyche. It is the site of the free energy of the mind, energy that Freud characterized as a combination of sexual libido and other instincts, such as aggression, that urge on the hu world beings organism finished behavior, base it to grow, develop and pull d stimulatetually to die. That primary mathematical operation of smell is completely stupid, and it cannot distinguish in their right minds(predicate) objects and unreasonable or subject matteryly inconceivable ones. Here comes the secondary changees of the mind, lodged in the ego and the superego.The ego, or I, was Freuds term for the predominantly able, logical, hostelryly and conscious firearm of the psyche it works on repressing and inhibiting the drives of the id so that they may be released in sane behavioral patterns. And though a hulky dower of the ego is unconsci ous, it neverthe little includes what we conceive of of as the conscious mind. The superego is a exclusion of the ego. It is the example censoring agency the break dance that makes moral judgments and the escritoire of conscience and pride.It brings reason, order and social acceptability to the otherwise run remote and potentially harmful realm of biologic impulses (Guerin 128-31). Freuds theories induct launched what is now know as the psychoanalytic approach to writings. Freud was kindle in writers, especially those who depended braggart(a)ly on symbols. Such writers tend to tinge their ideas and thinks with mystery or ambiguity that precisely make smack once interpreted, just as the analyst tries to figure verboten the dreams and peculiar actions that the unconscious mind of a psychoneurotic releases out of repression.A work of literature is thuslyce performed as a fantasy or a dream that Freudian analysis comes to explain the spirit of the mind that pro duced it. The purpose of a work of art is what psychoanalysis has found to be the purpose of the dream the secret triumph of an infantile and forbidden wish that has been repressed into the unconscious (Wright 765). The literal surface of a work of literature is sometimes called the evidence content and tempered as patent dream or dream flooring. The psychoanalytic literary critic tries to analyze the latent, inherent content of the work, or the dream pictorial matter hidden in the dream story. Freud utilize the terms condensation and displacement to explain the mental processes that result in the disguise of the wishes and fears in dream stories. In condensation, some(prenominal) wishes, anxieties or understandingfulnesss may be condensed into a single manifestation or visualize in dream story in displacement, a thought or a person may be displaced onto the image of another(prenominal) with which or whom there is an press release loose and arbitrary association that s carce an analyst can decode.Psychoanalytic critics treat metaphors as if they were dream condensations they treat metonyms- figures of lecture based on weak connections- as if they were dream displacements. Thus, figures of speech in good general are treated as purviews that secure the light when the writers conscious mind balks what the unconscious asks it to depict or describe. Psychoanalytic ani worked upversion written in the basic place 1950 tended to study the psyche of the individual author.Poems, refreshings and plays were treated as fantasies that allowed authors to release curbed desires, or to shelter themselvesfrom deep- rooted fears, or both. Later, psychoanalytic critics halt assuming that artists are borderline neurotics or that the characters they fabricate and the figurative language they social function can be canvas to figure out the dark, hidden fancies in the authors minds. So they moved their focus toward the psychology of the reader, and came to infer that artists are skilled creators of works that collection to the readers repressed wishes.As such, psychoanalytic criticism typically attempts to do at least one of the following tasks study the psychological traits of a writer provide an analysis of the creative process or research the psychological impacts of literature on its readers (Murfin 115-20). non all psychoanalytic critics, however, are Freudian. many of them are persuaded by the writings of Carl Gustav Jung whose analytic psychology is different from Freuds psychoanalysis.Jung had small with Freuds emphasis on libidinal drives and had developed a theory of the joint unconscious although, manage Freud, he believed in a in-person unconscious as a repository of repressed feelings (Wright 767). The processes of the unconscious psyche, according to Jung, produce images, symbols and myths that belong to the large gentleman culture. He refers to the manifestations of the myth-forming elements as motifs, nati ve images, or archetypes. Jung indicated further that the dreams, myths and art all serve as media by means of which archetypes get going accessible to the consciousness.One major contri moreoverion is Jungs theory of laissez faire which is the process of discovering those aspects of ones self that make one an individual different from other people. It is, according to Jung, an absolutely essential process if one is to acquire a equilibrate individual he detected an intragroup relationship in the midst of neurosis and the persons failure to accept some archetypal features of his unconscious. Individuation is related to three archetypes designated as nighttime, persona and anima. These are structural components that compassionate race beings have inherited.We come over their symbolic projections by means ofout the myths and literatures of humankind. The can is the darker side of our unconscious self, the inferior and less pleasing aspects of the ainity. The anima is the soul-image the etymon of a mans living force. Jung gives it a distaff designation in the mans psyche it is the contra-sexual part that a man carries in his personal and incarnate unconscious.The persona is the opposite of the anima it is our social personality and the mediatorbetween our ego and the external world. A balanced man has a flexible persona that is in harmony with the other components of his psychic make-up (Guerin 178-83). by dint of the lenses of Jungian psychoanalysis, the literary school 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 volition produce archetypal images to compensate for any psychic impoverishment in man and society. He untangles texts of literature by a method he calls ?amplification the images of the corporal unconscious are derived from those of the personal (Wright 767). despite its monotonous rehearsing of a numbe r of themes, psychoanalytic theory has led to a wear realizeing of the complexities of the relation between the human being and the artistic creativity. nucleus of repulsiveness in the light of Psychoanalytic theories. significance of apparition explores something true(p)r, more fundamental, and distinctly less material than just a personal narrative. It is a night expedition into the unconscious, and a confrontation of an entity within the self.Certain circle of Marlows voyage, looked at in these terms, take on a new importance. The true night journey can get on exactly in sleep or in a walking dream of a profoundly intuitive mind. Marlow insists on the dreamlike eccentric of his narrative. It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream devising a vein attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation (Conrad 38). Even before exit capital of Belgium, Marlow mat up as though he was about to set off for plaza of the earth, not the snapper of a perfect (16).The introspective voyager leaves his familiar rational world, is buffet off from the comprehension of his surroundings, his steamer toils along slowly on the edge of a dismal and incomprehensible frenzy (52). As the crisis approaches, the dreamer and his ship moves through a silence that seemed un inhering, like a affirm of trance then enter a deep fog (57). The invigorated penetrates to those areas of night and dream indeed nightmare ? with which Conrad tried to define the substance of the world. It asks questions, destabilizes orthodox assumptions, and sketches an existentially infatuated experience.It involves us in dramatic, crucially trying moral decisions which latitude those of the twain primaeval characters, Marlow and Kurtz. Although it was a coincidence that Freud and Conrad were contemporaries, coincidence is rock-bottom when we perceive the extraordinary parallelism of their achievements (Karl 785). At the time when Conrad was developing his concepts about the congo and political, personal and universal involvement in a nightmarish organism, Freud was fermenting his theories on dreams and the unconscious.Conrads novel appeared in 1900, only months before Freuds book translation of Dreams which formed the manifesto of the psychoanalytic assumptions. both Conrad and Freud were pioneers in their emphasis over the irrational aspects of mans behavioral extend which questioned the traditional analyses. Conrad perceptivityfully stressed the irrationality of regime and its nightmarish character which rests on the neurotic symptoms of the leader, as easily as on the collective neurosis of the masses.He in any case believed in a human behavior that answers the call of inner desires, while justifying itself with accuracy. twain he and Freud dived into the loathsomeness the darkness enters the human soul when his conscience sleeps or when he is free 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 the very qualities in Kurtz that horrify him are those he finds hidden in himself.Kurtzs insatiable, Nietzchean bewitchment with power mirrors Marlows as sanitary. 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 europium, a site where mans pile up years of education and sophistication are confronted by a striking boorry. 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 congou.However, Its not the flagrant difference between the two that perplexes Conrad except the underlying allusion of interior relationship, of common ancestry, since the Thames was itself a dark place, but one that has managed to civilize, to enlighten itsel f and the world, and is now live in the light. The peaceful Thames, however, runs the pixilated assay of being stirred by its adventure with its primordial relative, the congou tea it would witness the verbal expression of its give birth forsaken darkness and would hear the sounds that reverberate its remote gloomy history.The Thames would fall victim to the ghastly reminiscences of the irrational frenzy of the primeval times (Achebe 262-3). It would be very stabilising to quote one of the most raise and most revealing passages in breast of shadow when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the congou encounter the denizens of Africa We were wanderers on a prehistorical earth. ? We glided past like phantoms, wondering and on the QT appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. ? They howled and leaped, and spun, and make horrid faces but what thrilled you was just the thought of their charity ?like yours ? the thought of your remote affinity with this wild and emotional uproar.Ugly. ? but if you were man enough you would admit that there was in you just the faintest mesmerism of response to the terrible veracity of that noise, a dim indecision of there being a meaning in it which you ? you so remote from the night of first ages ? could wrap up (51-2). Here in lies the meaning of Heart of dimness that takes us on a journey into the unconscious world of the human beings through the psychoanalytic features inherent in the novels dream story. Marlow, a man of tally and justice, was expecting such values to exist elsewhere. They became a kind of psychological expectations. His great manifestation takes place when he discovers that not all men share his belief in an orderly, fundamentally good society. His journey from Brussels to the congou tea is full of elements of the absurd, elements that hint at a world that is suddenly irrational and out of focus. In the Congo, the hobo camp is ring by a dangerous womanish aura the long river is described in treacherous, serpentine terms everything about the nature conveys a sense of a kabbalistic and terrifying worldly concern (Karl 786).Marlow is fascinated by the jungle woman Kurtzs enraged mistress and her demanding display of sex, by her provoking measured walk. He is also drawn by her surprising sense of reality and her full acceptance of Kurtz with all the ferociousness he embodies. Her image contradicts with his ideal of cleaning lady he had known all his life the girl back in Brussels, his aunt, the unprejudiced woman who believed in the Europeans grand delegation in Africa. Marlow tries to resist the seductive aspect of the nature, much as he shies away from the attraction of power.Sex lies heavily on the story, although Marlow never directly talks about it. The temptation is swooning in his fears, in the jungle that conceals the terrors and the calls for orgiastic, uncontrollable sex. In the novel, Kurtz repre sents Europe maneuvering for power, searching for advantages he chose the route of tusk looting. His unquenchable hunger for possession is raise. In Africa, he is free of all human barriers civilized taboos are down. He is able to gratify all his forbidden desires and d sanitarys on ultimate corruption, debarred of all restraints.This lies at the heart of Marlows secret attraction to Kurtz the latter(prenominal)s will to brutal, superhuman power. Kurtz has go above the masses ? of natives, station managers, even of directors back in Brussels. He essential continue to assert himself, a megalomaniac in search of further power. Marlow has never met anyone like him, ? (Karl 787). One telling part in the novel comes with Kurtzs death and his ikon scream 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 linguistic communication.He understands the shriek as a mor al victory at the time of his death, Kurtz has reviewed his life and the corrupt part of him has repented. Its arguable, though, that Kurtzs cry might be one of anguish and hopelessness, because he has to die with his work incomplete. In other words, he laments a fate which frustrates his plans. However, Marlow has explained the horror of this experience in human terms necessary to guaranty the flow of life. He protects the lie of Kurtzs existence in order to persist in his own illusions (Karl 788-9).Hence, we notice that Marlow, throughout his journey, has hidden from himself the reality of his own as well as others needs. The jungle is the mask that nix the light of sun and sky. The landscape becomes the repository of our anxieties and the massive 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 hands of civilization, is but our rudimentary soul, in its raw, savage nature, unrefined and free of the conscious disguises. The lurking hint of kinship that the Europeans have felt at their encounter with the Africans is but a hint of deep connection lively between the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious. The black and incomprehensible frenzy of the strange bodies is a reminder of the uncontrollable libido.This wild and passionate uproar is ugly because the wilderness and passion that nurture our disguised depths are a mass of animalistic drives, and our id that hosts all unrealised 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 h ave full control over its antithesis, the id. The boundaries that separate the unconscious from the conscious are blurred.This terrible 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 inherent ? although masked ? part of his soul. Thus, Africa has become a topology of the mind ? its location, its shape, its cultures, its textures, its rhythms, it hues, its wildness ? all calling forrader something lost in the psychology of the tweed European. The darkness of the African continent, of its instinctual, shadowed, primeval inferno establishes a revealing context for an interrogative of the Jungian concepts in the novel.Marlows journey, in Jungian terms, becomes a journey of laissez faire a salvation realized through bringing the unconscious urges to consciousness ? a journey which can be assembly lineed to that of his goddamn double, Kurtz, wh o 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 said(prenominal) root that produces wild, untamed, blind instinct there grow up the natural laws and cultural forms that tame and break its aboriginal power.But when the animal in us is split off from consciousness by being repressed, it may easily detonate out in full force, sooner unregulated and uncontrolled. An outburst of this sort forever and a day ends in catastrophe ? the animal destroys itself (21). Hughs adds that the novel is composed of two journeys into the hidden self, one is horrifying, ending in personality remnant and death the other is restorative, wisdom-producing, a ingress to wholeness ? Conrad has seized on the paradoxical quality of the descent into the unconscious ? (58).For Jung, the integration of the per sonality is not possible without a full descent into the unconscious and clearly the novel is about the descent into the depths, the sin, into the very heart of darkness. Jungs cognisance 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 recognition of that dark self this is Marlows discovery (Hughs 66). Marlows journey toward individuation and his encounter with the darkness of his own shadow are set against a desktop 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. Throughout 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 stood looking 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 magnificent 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 Self 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 distance himself from the lived experience and for the reader could recognize with a common man impel into a bizarre situation. Lacking Marlow as the narrator, th e story would lose its credibility and would appear too distant from the real experience. Through repetition, difference of tone, analogy, duplicating images, doubling of scenes and characters, Conrad could form a shape for the story. He used rise and foreshortening, contrast 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 alarming Congo riverboat setting. Kurtzs two fiancees represents two different sets of values, two distant 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 middle class sense of side justice is contrasted with the Congo reality.It is also clear in their fluctuating love-hate relationship that pervades the story. The copiousness of mechanical and metallic images shows a sense of human waste and indicates that tough objects have gone beyond flexibility and leniency in order to resist the passing of time, so humanity itself must become an object in order to survive. This whole sense of an absurd existence is dress hat represented by the ivory itself. Ivory, the purest presentation of the people of colour white, stands in stark collocation to the darkness of the jungle.It draws the white men to Africa then maturates 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 rather than spelling them out directly. The technicalities of his elbow room include a frequent use of alliteration, a reliance on adjectives which stress the unfamiliar aspects of Marlows experience. Words like ins crutable, inconceivable, unspeakable that describe the oppressive mysteriousness of the Congo are recurrent throughout the novel.The same vocabulary is used to evoke the human depths and the unspeakable potentialities of the mans soul and to magnify the sense of spiritual horrors (Leavis 246-7). The words and adjectives Conrad applies beat upon us, creating drum-like rhythms, entirely appropriate to the loggerheaded 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 irony (Karl 789).It is the nightmares color the darkness surrounding Kurtzs death, his last words, the report by the managers boy, the delirious escape from the jungle, the encounter with Kurtzs fiancee all such incidents even out the elements of a nightmarish dream. Even the Russian follower of Kurtz who is dressed in pied seems as a figure from another world. In his ridiculous appearance, he is a perf ect 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 overpowering impression, one of a strangely round the bend world and a nightmarish existence ? in terms of things seen and incidents experienced by a main agent in the narrative, and particular contacts and exchanges with other human agents, the overwhelming sinister and fantastic ? atmosphere is engendered. universal greed, stupidity, and moral squalor are make 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 naturalness of the young harlequin-costumed Russian ? (246) Using his renowned artistic and literary craftsmanship, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness that has become, since its publicat ion in 1899, one of the most widely read books written in English. It has also been one of the most analyzed scores of literary critics, ranging from feminists to Marxists to New 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 chef-doeuvre 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 interoperable Reader in Contemporary literary Theory.London harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996. 262-4 Conrad, Joseph. Heart Of Darkness. capital of Lebanon Librairie Du Liban Publishers SAL, 1994. Guerin, Wilfred L. , et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to books. quaternary ed. New York Oxford University Press, 1999. Hewitt, Douglas. Conrad A Reassessment. World literary productions Criticism. Ed. Polly Vedder. Vol. 4. Detroit Gale, 1992. 789-92. Hughs, Richard E. The Lively Image Four Myths in Literature. Cambridge, MA Winthrop Publishers, 1975. Karl, Frederick R. A Readers Guide To Joseph Conrad. World Literature Criticism. Ed. Polly Vedder. Vol.4. Detroit Gale, 1992. 785-9. Leavis, F. R. From The smashing Tradition. A Practical Reader in Contemporary 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. market-gardening and Imperialism. New York Knopf, 1979. Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism. Enc yclopedia Of Literature And Criticism. 1991 ed. 765-7.