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Narcissism in The Great Gatsby

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Psychology has for long been considered a major tool in analyzing characters in pieces of literary art and an aid in the interpretation of a literary work as a whole. Freud said, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied” (qtd. by Philip R. Lehrman). Freud changed the course of psychology and created what is known as “Psychoanalysis”, a process in which the unconscious is revealed. Psychoanalysis is part of the mental science of philosophy. It is also described as 'depth psychology'. If someone asks what 'the psychical' really means, it is easy to reply by enumerating its constituents: our perceptions, ideas, memories, feelings and acts of volition - all these form part of what is psychical. (Freud “While literature is considered as a body of language – to be interpreted – Psychoanalysis is a body of knowledge, whose competence is called upon to interpret”, states Felman (5). Critics have found a way out of this in which they started to believe that “literature is a subject, not an object; it is therefore not simply a body of language to interpret, nor is psychoanalysis simply a body of knowledge with which to interpret, since psychoanalysis itself is equally a body of language, and literature also a body of knowledge” (Felman 6). This would solely lead to the thought of “exchange” between literature and psychoanalysis, in which “[i]nstead of literature being, as is usually the case, submitted to the authority and to the knowledge of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis itself would then here be submitted to the literary perspective” (Felman 6-7). In this paper I will focus on analyzing Jay Gatsby’s personality in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, who suffers immensely to achieve the “American Dream”. But before getting deep into showing why Gatsby fails to achieve that as a result of his narcissism and blind love for Daisy, a brief explanation of Freud’s theories is required. Freud spent eight years of his life studying medicine and then entered the field of neurology writing many papers on speech disorders and child cerebral paralyses etc. He then shifted his interest to Psychopathology (Butler-Bowdon 111)He is considered the “father” of Psychoanalysis in which he believed that the unconscious is the reservoir of all repressed memories which in turn affect our behaviors which take place in the conscious department of our psychic personality. Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs. (Freud 115) Freud approaches the human psyche by concentrating on the unconscious that is within each human being. Freud believes that our unconscious is all what happens without us acknowledging it at a certain time in our lives. It is something that we cannot control and are “obliged to assume” (Guerin 155). Sigmund Freud divides the human psyche into three categories where each category is dependent on or is in conflict with the other. The first of these categories is the Id, believes Freud, and is the reservoir of all our instinctual desires unrepressed and independent of any social conventions or morality. The second is the Ego which helps in regulating the desires existent in the Id so that they “may be released in nondestructive behavioral patterns” (Guerin 157). The society-protective category of the human psyche is what is called the Superego. The Superego manages to take into account the values that exist within society and helps in repres

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