Post 1: Digging Deep with the Psychoanalytical Lens

The psychoanalytical lens fascinates me, because it allows me to dig deep into the mind of characters in the book. It allows me to see a double meaning behind every word, and understand words below the surface. Moreover, this lens allows me to connect more to the text, compared to other lenses. The feminist, historical, and post-colonial lens don’t allow me to understand the text better; these lenses confuse me and make the text blurry.

I have used the psychoanalytical lens in texts such as Macbeth, Into the Wild, and Malcolm X. Moreover, the psychoanalytical lens allows me to propel my thinking into deep waters. It lets me think about what the characters are thinking, and feel what the characters are feeling.

However, there are several limitations to this lens. It doesn’t allow me to  analyze the text through other perspectives; with the psychoanalytical lens, I can’t understand the text through the time period and I can’t understand the text through a perspective of gender inequality. This lens only limits me to the minds of the characters, allowing me to see what their inner beliefs are, and how they words dictate their actions and inner judgements.

Though these limitations exist, the psychoanalytical lens allows me to determine several major and minor themes. With books such as Beloved, which focus on the amalgamation of slavery, ghosts, and murder, I can predict themes such as: Ghosts allow us to see the raw beliefs of the characters they possessed and We are all slaves to death; we do as death wishes.

Thus, the psychoanalytical lens will allow me to dig into the minds of character in the book Beloved.

As visible in the image above, the conscience composes of several levels, like an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg represents general conscious, representing what's right and what's wrong. Below the iceberg, exists several deeper levels of the conscience, such as the superego, ego, and id.