Heart of Darkness in the Light of Psychoanalytic Theories Essay

psychoanalytical criticism originated in the work of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who pioneered the technique of psychoanalysis. Freud real a language that described, a model that explained, and a conjecture that encompassed merciful psychological science. His theories ar directly and indirectly concerned with the nature of the un certain head word. with his multiple case studies, Freud sm every-armaged to convalesce convincing evidence that most of our actions are motivated by psychological forces over which we lay d deliver very special(a) carry (Guerin 127).One of Freuds most important contri thoions to the study of the headspring is his possibility of repression the un informed(p)(p) hear is a secretary of subjugate desires, feelings, memories, wishes and instinctual drives more of which have to do with cozyity and violence. These unconscious wishes, harmonise to Freud, can find expression in intakes beca custom fantasys distort the unconscio us substantive and make it start different from itself and more acceptable to consciousness. They may also appear in other disguised forms, standardised in language (sometimes c on the wholeed the Freudian slips), in creative art and in neurotic conduct.One of the unconscious desires Freud believed that solely homosexual existences supposedly suppress is the childhood desire to displace the workforcetion of the comparable sex and to take his or her place in the affections of the cite of the oppo set sex. This so-c tout ensembleed Oedipus Complex, which all children experience as a solemnity of passage to adult gender identity, lies at the core of Freuds versed theory (Murfin 114-5). A principal ele workforcet in Freuds theory is his assignment of the mental processes to three psychic zones the id, the egotism and the superego.The id is the love lifeal, ir shrewd, and unconscious infract of the psyche. It is the land site of the energy of the assessment, energy that Freud partingized as a combination of sexual libido and other instincts, such as aggression, that propel the human organism by dint of and through life, moving it to grow, develop and eventually to die. That primary process of life is alone ir coherent, and it can non distinguish reasonable objects and unreasonable or socially unacceptable ones. hither comes the secondary processes of the mind, lodged in the ego and the superego.The ego, or I, was Freuds term for the preponderantly rational, logical, driftly and conscious take time strike of the psyche it works on oppress and inhibiting the drives of the id so that they may be deprivation awayd in sane behavioral patterns. And though a large part of the ego is unconscious, it nevertheless includes what we think of as the conscious mind. The superego is a projection of the ego. It is the virtuousistic censoring agency the part that makes moral judgments and the repository of conscience and pride.It brings reason, order and social acceptability to the other uncontrolled and potentially harmful realm of biological impulses (Guerin 128-31). Freuds theories have launched what is now kn throw as the psychoanalytic approach to literary works. Freud was interested in writers, especially those who depended largely on symbols. Such writers tend to tinge their ideas and figures with mystery or ambiguity that only make adept once interpreted, only if as the analyst tries to figure out the day aspirations and bizarre actions that the unconscious mind of a neurotic releases out of repression.A work of literature is thusly treated as a fantasy or a dream that Freudian analysis comes to explain the nature of the mind that produced it. The purpose of a work of art is what psychoanalysis has found to be the purpose of the dream the secret gratification 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 manifest content and treated as manifest dream or dream story. The psychoanalytic literary critic tries to analyze the latent, underlying content of the work, or the dream cerebration hidden in the dream story. Freud delectationd the damage 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 psyches may be condensed into a single manifestation or image in dream story in displacement, a thought or a person may be displaced onto the image of another with which or whom there is an passing loose and arbitrary association that only an analyst can decode.psychoanalytical critics treat metaphors as if they were dream condensations they treat metonyms- figures of speech based on weak connections- as if they were dream displacements. Thus, figures of speech in general are treated as aspects that see the fire up when the writers conscious mind disagrees wh at the unconscious asks it to depict or describe. Psychoanalytic criticism compose in advance 1950 tended to study the psyche of the individual author.Poems, fabrications and plays were treated as fantasies that allowed authors to release curbed desires, or to protect themselvesfrom deep- rooted fears, or both. Later, psychoanalytic critics stopped presume that artists are borderline neurotics or that the characters they fabricate and the figurative language they use can be examine 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 understand that artists are sure-handed creators of works that appeal 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 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 developed a theory of the incarnate unconscious although, like Freud, he believed in a percentagel 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 human culture. He refers to the manifestations of the myth-forming elements as motifs, primordial images, or fenders. Jung indicated further that the dreams, myths and art all serve as media through which archetypes become accessible to the consciousness.One major(ip) 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, according to Jung, an absolutely essential process if one is to become a equilibrate individual he detected an intimate relationship amidst neuroticism and the persons failure to accept some archetypal features of his unconscious. personal identity is related to three archetypes designated as hind end, persona and anima. These are structural components that human beings have inherited.We encounter their symbolic projections throughout the myths and literatures of humankind. The shadow is the darker side of our unconscious self, the inferior and less pleasing aspects of the genius. The anima is the soul-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 personal and incorporated 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 o f 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 furbish up for any psychic impoverishment in man and society. He untangles texts of literature by a method he calls ?amplification the images of the joint unconscious are derived from those of the personal (Wright 767). Despite its monotonous rehearsing of a number of themes, psychoanalytic theory has led to a better understanding of the complexities of the relation between the human being and the artistic creativity. tinder of Darkness in the crystallise of Psychoanalytic theories. Heart of Darkness explores something truer, more fundamental, and distinctly less material than just a personal narration. It is a dark journey into the unconscious, and a confrontation of an entity within the self.Certain circumstances of Marlows voyage, looked at in these term, take on a new importance. The true night journey can occur only in sleep or in a walking dream of a profoundly intuitive mind. Marlow insists on the dreamlike quality of his narrative. It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream making a vein attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation (Conrad 38). Even before leaving capital of Belgium, Marlow matte up as though he was most to set off for ticker of the earth, not the center of a continent (16).The introspective voyager leaves his familiar rational world, is cut off from the comprehension of his surroundings, his steamer toils along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible madness (52). As the crisis approaches, the idealist and his ship moves through a silence that seemed unnatural, like a pass on of trance then enter a deep fog (57). The falsehood penetrates to those areas of shadow and dream indeed night mare ? with which Conrad tried to define the sum of money of the world. It asks questions, destabilizes orthodox assumptions, and sketches an existentially absurd experience.It involves us in dramatic, crucially difficult moral decisions which parallel those of the two central characters, Marlow and Kurtz. Although it was a coincidence that Freud and Conrad were contemporaries, coincidence is trim back when we perceive the extraordinary parallelism of their achievements (Karl 785). At the time when Conrad was developing his imaginations roughly the congou and political, personal and universal involvement in a bloodcurdling existence, Freud was fermenting his theories on dreams and the unconscious.Conrads novel appeared in 1900, only months before Freuds book Interpretation 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 conduct which questioned the traditi onal analyses. Conrad perceptiveness in fully stressed the irrationality of politics and its nightmarish character which rests on the neurotic symptoms of the leader, as well as on the collective neurosis of the tidy sum.He also believed in a human behavior that answers the call of sexual desires, while justifying itself with accuracy. Both he and Freud dived into the dimness the phantasm enters the human soul when his conscience sleeps or when he is free to give out 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 enthrallment with power 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 a ntithesis of a school atomic number 63, a site where mans accumulated years of education and sophistication are confronted by a striking savagery. 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 conspicuous difference between the two that perplexes Conrad but the underlying allusion of intimate relationship, of jet 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 livelihood in the light. The peaceful Thames, however, runs the flagitious risk of being stirred by its encounter with its primordial relative, the Congo it would witness the reflection of its own forsaken iniquity and would hear the sounds that echo its remote gloomy history.The Thames would fall victim to the mad reminiscences of the irrational frenzy of the primitive times (Achebe 262-3). It would be very laboursav ing to quote one of the most interesting and most telltale(a) passages in Heart of Darkness when representatives of Europe in a steamer going down the Congo encounter the denizens of Africa We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth. ? We glided onetime(prenominal) 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 terrible faces but what thrilled you was just the thought of their domain ?like yours ? the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.Ugly. ? but if you were man generous you would admit that there was in you just the faintest trace of result to the terrible frankness of that fraudulent scheme, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you ? you so remote from the night of first ages ? could clasp (51-2). Here in lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness that takes us on a journey into the unconscious world of the human be ings through the psychoanalytic features inherent in the novels dream story. Marlow, a man of discipline and justice, 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, fundamentally good society. His journey from Brussels to the Congo is full of elements of the absurd, elements that hint at a world that is abruptly irrational and out of focus. In the Congo, the jungle is surrounded by a dangerous feminine aura the long river is described in treacherous, curved terms everything about the nature conveys a good sense of a unavowed and terrifying reality (Karl 786).Marlow is fascinated by the jungle woman Kurtzs savage mistress and her demanding display of sex, by her provocative measured 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 wit h his ideal of womanhood he had known all his life the girl back in Brussels, his aunt, the naive woman who believed in the Europeans grand mission in Africa. Marlow tries to resist the seductive aspect of the nature, much as he shies away from the fondness of power.Sex lies heavily on the story, although Marlow never directly talks about it. The temptation 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, searching for advantages he chose the route of ivory looting. His unquenchable hungriness for possession is consuming. In Africa, he is free of all human barriers civilized taboos are down. He is able to gratify all his forbidden desires and dwells on ultimate corruption, debarred of all restraints.This lies at the heart of Marlows secret attractor to Kurtz the latters will to brutal, superhuman power. Kurtz has risen above the masses ? of natives, station managers, even of directors back in Brussels. He must move on 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 closing and his double scream The inconsistency 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 row.He understands the shriek as a moral 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 despair, because he has to die with his work incomplete. In other words, he laments a requirement which frustrates his plans. However, Marlow has explained the horror of this experience in human terms necessary to batten the flow of life. He protects the lie of Kurtzs existence in order to preserve his own illusions (Karl 788-9).Hence, we noti ce 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 bars the light of sun and sky. The landscape becomes the repository of our anxieties and the vast 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 existing between the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious. The black and incomprehensible frenzy of the strange bodies is a monitoring device of the un controllable libido.This wild and passionate uproar is ugly because the wilderness and passion that nurture our disguised depths are a mass of physicalistic 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 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 compliance, its cultures, its textures, its rhythms, it hues, its wildne ss ? all calling forth something lost in the psychology of the uncontaminating European. The darkness of the African continent, of its instinctual, shadowed, primeval nether region 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 bringing the unconscious urges to consciousness ? a journey which can be contrasted 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 cultural forms that tame and break its pristine power.But when the sensual in us is split off from consciousness by being repressed, it may easily burst out in ful l force, kinda unregulated and uncontrolled. An outburst of this sort always 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 destruction and death the other is restorative, wisdom-producing, a gateway to unity ? Conrad has seized on the paradoxical quality of the descent into the unconscious ? (58).For Jung, the integration of the personality is not possible without a full descent into the unconscious and clear the novel is about the descent into the depths, the sin, into the very heart of darkness. Jungs cognizance 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 backdrop 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 loand 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 for at us with a stir, and like the wilderness itself, with an air of meditativeness 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 mo dern 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 come in with a common man thrown into a bizarre situation. miss Marlow as the narrator, the story would lose its credibility and would appear too outback(a) 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 heightening 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 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 middle sectionalization 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 mechanical and metallic images suggests a sense of human waste and indicates that tough objects have gone beyond tractableness 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 represented by the ivory itself. Ivory, the purest presentment of the color white, stands in stark juxtaposition to the darkness of th e 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 rather than spelling them out directly. The technicalities of his style include a frequent use of alliteration, a reliance on adjectives which emphasize the unfamiliar aspects of Marlows experience. spoken communication like inscrutable, inconceivable, odious 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 thick texture of the jungle (Karl 789). The darkness of the jungle goes hand in hand with darkness everywhere, alluding at the lightlessness 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 constitute the elements of a nightmarish dream. Even the Russian follower of Kurtz who is milled in motley seems as a figure from another world. In his ridiculous appearance, he is a perfect 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 particular contacts and exchanges with other human agents, the overwhelming sinister and fantastic ? atmosphere is engendered. Ordinary greed, stupidity, and moral squalor are made to look like behaviour in a fire-eater 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 inviolate innocence of the young harlequin-costumed Russian ? (246) Using his renowned artistic and literary craftsmanship, Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness that has become, since its publication in 1899, one of the most astray read books written in English. It has also been one of the most analyzed scores of literary critics, ranging from feminists to Marxists to advanced Critics, have all tried to stool their own meanings from the pages of the book.The novel does seem to invite a wide conformation 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 ambit of Africa Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness. A Practical Reader in Contemporary literary Theory.London 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 hypercritical Approaches to Literature. 4th ed. New York Oxford University Press, 1999. Hewitt, Douglas. Conrad A Reassessment. World Literature 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 force To Joseph Conrad. World Literature Criticism. Ed. Polly Vedder. Vol.4. Detroit Gale, 1992. 785-9. Leavis, F. R. From The Great Tradition. A Practica l 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. Culture and Imperialism. New York Knopf, 1979. Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism. Encyclopedia Of Literature And Criticism. 1991 ed. 765-7.