A Comparative Study of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle

 

Freud evinced his theories of latencies and reoccurrence of traumatic memory in the individual’s life. It is Toni Morrison's Sethe who presents to the world in story structure the consequences of dehumanization and trauma. Trauma assumes a solid part in Sethe's choice to snatch her four kids and race to the shed to slaughter them after she understands her lord has come for them. It is there that she slaughters the child, who comes to be known as Cherished. The other three are saved simply because of Sethe's absence of time. Minutes before the killing of Beloved, Sethe and her family had been outside, working and settled. Her choice was unexpected and responsive. Toni Morrison had direction when taking the Margaret Gather episode into the domain of story through her novel beloved. It is through the novel, explicitly through the characters Sethe and Beloved, that Morrison draws in the perused to perceive trauma as an experience and not similarly as an outsider. A psychoanalytical methodology will exhibit how the composing strategies in Morrison's Beloved uncover and connects with the pursuer in the mental construction of trauma and its progress from the oblivious to the waking state, or the cognizant self. Utilizing this approach, this exposition will notice and feature the redundancies created by the vicious occasion, the language utilized by the oblivious to convey the occasion, and the requirement for witness and declaration to start the goal of the occasion and the acknowledgment of the occasion by the cognizant into memory, bringing about an assembled self.
a.         Psychological Trauma
The oblivious is accepted to be the main Freudian commitment to therapy, and it must be associated with the possibility of suppression which fills in as a cover for the oblivious wishes and inquires. Hence, the side effects uncover the quelled oblivious. Toni Morrison centers around friendly trauma brought about by racial restraint that dark African residents experience the ill effects of in America. Sethe the hero was brought into the world in the south to an African mother she never knew, she is offered to the Earns who practice a considerate sort of subjection on her, particularly, when Mrs. Collect named her vicious brother by marriage after the demise of Mr. Earn where youngsters are not permitted to be with their mothers and used to call all people of color Mamma to call all individuals of color Mamma.
 On the other hand, in “Beyond the Principal” Sigmund Freud introduced the "pleasure principle," which he related to Fechner's principle of stability. The evocation of traumatic neurosis, children's games, repetition during the transference, and fate neurosis suggested a "more primitive," "more elementary," and "more instinctual" tendency than the pleasure principle, independent of it and manifested by the repetition compulsion.
b.         Identity
Sethe’s failure to remember the African language spoken by her mother is a deliberate part of her attempt to repress her memory of her mother. Importantly, the lost language as a metaphor represents the kind of cultural devastation suffered by the slaves. Therefore, her language takes a negative shade as it cannot be restored or remembered. If one is unable to recollect his or her own mother tongue, it becomes clear that one’s cultural identity is lost as language is one of the most essential ways of showing identity. Thus, the language here stands for shattered cultural identity. On the other hand, in “Beyond the Principal” by Sigmund Freud, the two sources of pain' here demonstrated still don't almost cover most of our difficult encounters, however regarding the rest one may say with a reasonable demonstration of the reason that their presence doesn't reprimand the incomparability of the delight rule. A large portion of the ‗pain' we experience is of a perceptual request, insight both of the inclination of unsatisfied senses or of something in the outer world which might be difficult in itself or may excite difficult expectations in the mystic contraption and is perceived by it as danger'. The response to these cases of motivation and these dangers of peril, a response in which the genuine action of the mystic mechanical assembly is shown, might be guided effectively by the joy standard or by the truth guideline which changes this. It appears to be subsequently pointless to perceive an even more expansive impediment of the delight standard, and in any case, it is absolutely the examination of the clairvoyant response to the outside risk that may supply new material and new inquiries in respect to the issue here treated.
This coincides with the usage of literary imagery functioning because the dream image is beloved. The imagery has the intent to be paradoxical, functioning on a fictitious stage within the characters and, via their memories, attractive to the readers’ personal awareness. The imagery is exceptional in the beginning glance however then similarly builds upon itself to reveal the violent act through ordinary events. Morrison repeats the traumatic event of mother-child separation via the literary image she creates upon Sethe’s first assembly the physical shape of liked. it's far this picture with a purpose to be shown to have a comparable function to that of the mental manner inside displacement. (16)
Sethe reacts to seeing his beloved by running to the back and urinating, her bladder so full and spilling everywhere with such speed, her thoughts on the fear of the embarrassment if Paul D were to see her (Morrison 48). The violent act of setting apart Sethe from her mother turned too demanding for Sethe to process in real-time. The emotions of the separation, being too painful for the waking nation, have been located in the unconscious via the defense of repression, but the trauma returns to conquer the reality that it become now not a direct enjoyment (Carruth 62). This separation of mother from a baby is repeated inside the novel and visible thrice in Sethe’s direct bloodline: her grandmother’s suicide, her mother’s placing, and Sethe’s daughter’s childlike. In her work on trauma, Carruth writes that part of the shock of the violent occasion is missing the reveling in, and that's what Morrison communicates here. Functioning further to a dream photograph, the literary image of urination engages what is thought and every day to talk an occasion that changed into too violent for the aware thoughts to understand thru simplest something applicable so instead disguises itself with the mundane. The narrator does now not give judgments to the reader, who ought to consequently have interacted with the literary picture to interpret its that means. loved is the preferred object brought forth from the subconscious via the number one method with the aid of presenting a satisfying photograph of the union of mother and child. however, the choice isn't always exactly met. Sethe moves far from liked by way of the normal activities of urinating, an act that separates the two. In this literary photograph, the demanding event of the separation of the child from the mother is repeated through the displacement of Sethe. The repressed trauma of the mother-child separation returns to Sethe through yet another hidden manner, expressed through the imagery work of the beloved herself. cherished is an accumulation of desire and ache. Her presence is both fulfilling and horrifying. Inside cherished, more than one thought is mixed into one image, which is built via several impressions of the annoying experience. Loved features as a single dream literary image that embodies numerous fragments from the subconscious together with the demanding activities. beloved herself is in fear of understanding she could end up fragments (Morrison 109). It is as if she is in some way too privy to the condensed ache and preference which has created her. This literary method has a characteristic that aligns with condensation. so that you can interpret this photograph of cherished, the reader has to work constantly backward, gathering what records are known approximately Sethe through her tales and the snapshots Morrison presents regarding Sethe’s trauma. This amalgamation of desires and thoughts is visible inside like when Sethe takes Denver and their beloved to the clearing. it's miles there that loved kisses Sethe. This kiss comes after something attempts to strangle Sethe, leaving neck bruises that she bears the instant like kisses her (Morrison 79-82). hence, in this literary picture, we see a mother and younger woman in a clearing, the marks of a terrible fright on Sethe’s neck, and one of the younger women in front of the mother leaning in and kissing her mouth. Sethe responds to this reunion (the mouth of trauma and hers finally assembly) by grabbing cherished by the hair to separate herself from her beloved. Sethe reacts this way due to the fact that “the girl’s breath was exactly like new milk” (Morrison 82). This literary image is another technique of repeating the traumatic occasion of the separation of mother from child.
We see this further when Denver speaks to beloved. “I saw your face. You made her choke." liked replies, “I kissed her neck. I didn’t choke it. The circle of iron choked it” (Morrison 85). these statements show that she has intimate information about the trauma Sethe experienced as a slave which is going past the know-how Sethe’s child daughter should have possessed. Carruth writes that trauma exists with a referential return. This return happens via the single photo of cherished. The reader engages not best in Sethe’s very own private violent event but additionally inside the violent occasions that preceded it. It is made clear that Sethe’s personal trauma is tied up with the trauma of her mother. closer to the quilt of the story, Sethe’s identity as a daughter starts off evolving to emerge. Her separation from her mother denied her the affection a daughter is entitled to and this denial of affection is visible repeating itself within the acts of her beloved (the dream photo), who insists that, Without Sethe’s try to love cherished as her daughter, Sethe “never waved good-bye or even looked her way before running away from her” (Morrison 188). Sethe believes that her mother should have attempted to run without saying goodbye. Morrison uses this literary imagery: “beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother” and “loved ate up her lifestyles” (Morrison194). loved turns into paradoxical and repeats the desire for the mother-child bond as properly because of the pain that results from its denial.
The argument of this essay is supported by the work and theories of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Carruth, and Toni Morrison. While reading the novel Beloved, the reader takes part in the progression of Sethe’s trauma as it reveals itself to her waking state. Using Freud’s working psychoanalytical theories involving the unconscious and the means it uses to form psychological structures capable of finding a place within the waking state, or the conscious, and comparing them to Morrison’s literary methods, this essay will observe how trauma maintains itself to engage a listener through the storytelling process. The working definition of trauma, which supports this research paper, is taken from the work of Cathy Carruth on Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). Carruth defines trauma as an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events and a response that occurs in the uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena. These events are too horrific for the mind to place in waking memory; hence, they reside in the unconscious (Carruth 57-58). As stated in the introduction, the originating violent act is seen as the removal of the child from the mother, the first step in dehumanizing. Trauma tells its story by hiding itself in image and language because the true story is not fully known by the conscious. “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that it's very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Carruth 4). Freud’s theory of unconscious employment of the defense of repression involves unconscious knowledge of and perception of an event. This conscious failure to perceive the event results in it being stored in the unconscious. Morrison engages the reader as an experience in this process through her writing about Sethe’s trauma as it makes the journey from the unconscious to the waking state.
Accompanying this process of the violent act moving from the unconscious into the waking state are the images and language which maintain this progression of trauma from the unconscious. This is similar to how the dream is maintained through image and language. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud writes that the dream must take its construction from the outer world and take its material from that which we have already experienced (Freud 5-6). For example, if a person is feeling that they may not achieve a work demand, they may dream of sliding downhill as they work to walk upwards. Freud also writes that dreams are presented in visual images and replace the thought with hallucinations and that, although the dream’s intention is to communicate, it has not discovered the source material, it has only imitated or elaborated on what resides in the unconscious (Freud 15-16). To further this, he theorizes that dreams are unfinished and unresolved thoughts consisting of fragments of the source material are an unrecognizable reproduction of a sensation residing in the unconscious (Freud 26). The dream then, as a story, uses imagery created through the piecing together of known fragments from the outer world in a similar fashion to Beloved, the apparition who appears at Sethe’s home. The psychoanalytical theories at work in this essay that explain how the unconscious communicates are the primary process, repetition compulsion, the secondary process, displacement, and condensation. Being animated by the drives, specifically the drive of the id, the primary process acts on urges for basic desires and pleasurable things (Carruth 56).
These basic urges are seen throughout the novel when Beloved demands water, sweet things, and sex. Repetition compulsion arose through Freud’s observance of “the mind’s unavoidable return to the traumatic experience through the dream-image” (Carruth 59), which led him to further his work on the primary process, wherein that which was too horrific to experience in real-time kept returning. This led to further theorizing on the death drive (the desire to return to an inanimate state) and the development of the secondary process. It is in this process that truth or reality gains the voice that is able to take the dream-image beyond the primary desires of the id for pleasure and into the process of repetition compulsion (Carruth 59-60). Moreover, while observing the suffering of traumatic effects in individuals, Freud noted a tendency to return to the origin of trauma through repetitive reenactments, wherein the catastrophic events repeat themselves. The repetition of these painful events was not initiated by the individual; it was the trauma itself repeating the violent event through the unknowing acts of the person against their will (Carruth 1-2). Repetitions from trauma consisted of a complex relationship between knowing and not knowing for the individual.
Freud’s work is further supplemented through understanding the repetition of compulsion: a state in which a person is subject to the repetition of a painful event until it is able to rewrite itself in a form that will be accepted by the conscious. In order for trauma to exist, it must first not be known consciously. The violent event was too severe or happened too quickly to be processed by the conscious, so it is rejected from being held in the memory of the waking state (Carruth 3-7). The secondary process involves the further participation of the ego. The unconscious uses the dream to communicate that which has been repressed and remains within the unconscious through constructing something unrecognizable using material taken from the outer world. In this way, that which was too horrific for the waking state to place in memory becomes less horrifying. The return of the traumatic experience in the dream is not the signal of the direct experience but rather the signal of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct in order to attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place. Not having truly known the threat of death in the past, the survivor is continually forced to confront that threat. For consciousness then, the act of survival, as with the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with both the necessity of and the impossibility of, grasping the threat to one’s own life (Carruth 62).
Furthermore, Freud’s theory of displacement explains how the violent event is shifted and moved out of its original form into something unrecognizable or more pleasurable. Through new imagery, trauma is disguised using the unknown or the ordinary and is able to fool the defense of repression, which aims to keep from the conscious that is too painful. Another Freudian term relevant to this article is condensation, wherein what is too painful for the waking state is hidden. Similar to displacement, condensation aims to fool the defense of repression using a different tactic. Condensation is the taking of multiple thoughts stemming from the unconscious and placing them together so that they take one form or symbol, such as a ghost-like we find in Beloved: the ghost of slavery that haunts one house and its community. The novel Beloved, through possessing the above-mentioned psychological traits, engages the consciousness of both Sethe and the reader, first through the primary process and then through the secondary process, which includes the use of repetition compulsion displacement, and condensation.
In order to understand the importance of Cathy Carruth’s work in her book Unclaimed Experience to this essay, it is necessary to provide a brief summary of its main points. Her work is built upon the understanding of the repetition compulsion: a state in which a person is subject to the ongoing repetition of a painful event until it can rewrite itself in a form that will be accepted by the conscious. Trauma is a break in the mind’s experience of time and therefore cannot reach the waking memory, as memory is dependent upon the concept of the past. This, both known and unknown, trauma may be viewed in the form of a narrative that reveals the violent event in repetitions through images and language.