The Human Mind is a Wicked Dome
You do not know a person. Since every person has some hidden purpose, they want to keep in their shadows for as long as they can. In the short story, “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe and excerpts from Freud’s Five Lecture on Psychoanalysis. This short story illustrates the many psychoanalysis concepts discussed in the lectures of Freud that the narrator is facing. Poe mentions the idea that a man will recreate his character based on his hidden desires. This is supported by the concepts of displacement, repression, and infantile sexuality.
Displacement can have certain emotions attached to someone/thing and using that same emotion in a different setting. Like your boss yelling at you and you feel angry and embarrassed. We can’t confront them with our emotions since that gets us fired, but we can’t also bottle up our emotions forever. That defines the psychology term displacement. “… happen only because the patient holds back or gets rid of the idea that he has become aware of, under the influence of the resistances which disguise themselves as various critical judgments about the value of the idea that has occurred to him.” (Freud 2219). Displacement occurs when the person remembers certain memories that will be harmful to them to recall. Since they know the idea is not good, they will try to mask that memory/emotion. This seems like the case for the anonymous narrator. He discovered another cat that looked like Pluto, but with coincidental markings of where the narrator harmed Pluto. When time passes by living with the new cat, the narrator feels, “By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it.” (Poe 6). In the beginning, the narrator was taking a liking to the second cat but soon after displacing his true emotions was being to fade. From love to hate, the narrator has a sudden change of feelings. He remembers the crime he has done to Pluto and the second cat is reminding him. By creating this facade of being affection and loving person, the narrator is starting to gradual changes his character based on his motives of harming others to conceal his past.
When going through trauma or embarrassing moments people repress those thoughts/ memories to forget it. Repression puts up a mental resistance in their mind, so they could protect themselves from such moments. “… that their repression of the idea to which the intolerable wish is attached has been a failure… it is on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated… it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable substitute” (Freud 2215). Repression plays a part with wishful impulses and people repress these emotions because it’s deemed negative or impossible to achieve. Yet when there is a possibility that their “wish” can come true their mind will do anything within its power to fulfill that repressed thought. After bringing the second cat home, the narrator noticed that its eye is missing. Just like Pluto’s and even though he despite that feature his wife adores it even more. The narrator mentions, “This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait,” (Poe 6). The narrator once had a feeling of kindness, loving and tenderness, however, he repressed those certain emotions. Most likely because it fills him with anger and hatred for the second cat because he ruined the life he was perfecting ever since marrying his wife. Until this point, the anonymous narrator is at his point of no longer hiding his true nature and sinful intentions.
These symptoms mentioned before wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t trouble in his childhood. Freud mentions that if a child doesn’t go through all stages of development, he is likely to express hysterical symptoms in his adulthood. “The child takes both of its parents, and more one of them, as the object of its erotic wishes. It follows some indication from its parents, whose affection bears the clearest characteristics of sexual activity… child reacts to this by wishing… are not only of a positive or affectionate kind but also of a negative or hostile one.” (Freud 2232). Children typically look for attention from the opposite sex during their early childhood days. They start by choosing an object (parents) to direct their sexual desires (object choice). Usually, children feel threatened by the same-sex because their parent is giving their attention to the same sex as the child. Before the narrator beings to talk about crimes, he briefly mentioned during his childhood that his parents gift him with many pets and that, “With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure.” (Poe 1). Although not directly mentioned, it seems like his parents weren’t around as much when the narrator was growing up. To fill the narrator’s loneliness, they bought him a variety of pets to keep him company. This might repress and stunt his growth of learning about the never-ending love of parents. When time passes by, the narrator is now a living ball of fury and malicious intent.
It can be that none of those concepts can figure out why the narrator kills his wife and Pluto. However, these concepts are just for readers to have a broader look at how these types of stories relate to modern society. Everyone changes based on how society views moments “good” or “bad.” Since because many people like following the crowd, they unconsciously repress emotions society marks “unethical”, displace feelings when they know it doesn’t matter to anyone and won’t get the attention they want/deserve.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe.PoeStories.com, 1845,
http://poestories.com/read/blackcat.
Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psych-Analysis[1909]. Translated by James Strachey, 1955,
