A Psychological Reading of A Rose for Emily Essay

Freud and Faulkner A psychoanalytic Reading of â€Å"A Rose for Emily† Abstract Undoubtedly Sigmund Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. He was an influential thinker of the early twentieth century who elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system and the structural investigation of which is the proper province of psychology. Freud articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression and he proposed tripartite account of the mind ‘s structure, all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Freudian approach can be†¦show more content†¦in this stage where girls develop â€Å"penis envy†, the solution is to obtain the father’s penis (sexual desire) through identifying with the mother and mimicking her in order to replace her. Emily fails to resolve the conflict in the phallic stage because she was unable to identify with the same-sex pa rent. We can only hypothesize that the mother may have abandoned her or died during this time so that there was no same-sex parent to identify with. Failure to identify with the mother led to the failure of successfully obtaining the penis, and the failure to understand through psychosexual competition with the mother for the father, that all women do not and cannot possess a penis. Emily then begets a nonnegotiable necessity to have a phallic figure around in her life, and if she can’t, a possession of the â€Å"penis† herself. Emily’s submissiveness to letting her father control her romantic life can be interpreted as the need to have her father’s phallic figure around but when her father died, the phallic figure was â€Å"castrated† from her. The realization of the temporality of this kind of possession may have triggered the need to permanently have control over the possession of the penis in the form of a phallic figure. This may explain the p oisoning of Homer, a â€Å"big, dark, ready man, with a big voice†, in the ultimate attempt to obtain the â€Å"penis† and finally, however perversely, resolve the penis envy. Emily herself is transformed—and tragically— into somewhat of aShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of The Poem Southern Gothic 1566 Words   |  7 Pagessetting in Southern Gothic writing styles. (O’Connell 63) Southern Gothic writing elements consist of â€Å"horror, romance and psychological and domestic dramas† (63). The setting of Southern Gothic was always dingy and dark which explains the tone of most southern states at this time. Southern Gothic writing styles were known to be grotesque, violent and gloomy with dark psychological twists that were to be carried on into the 20th century. 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