- Psychoanalysis investigates the human mental functioning and aims at the treatment

of people with neurotic disorders. In this regard, psychoanalysis is defined by the

ACPE inc (Accreditation Council for Psychoanalytic Education) as “a specific form of
individual psychotherapy that aims to bring unconscious mental elements and
processes into awareness in order to expand an individual’s self-understanding,
enhance adaptation in multiple spheres of functioning, alleviate symptoms of mental
disorder, and facilitate character change and emotional growth” (ACPE inc).

- This method of psychotherapy is conducted by a therapist who encourages the

patient to express his/her repressed feelings and conflicts through free-association.
The pioneer of psychoanalysis is considered to be Sigmund Freud (1856-1936), an
Austrian neurologist who developed the analysis of the psyche in the course of ten
years of clinical studies. Moreover, his investigations continued until he died and other
psychoanalysts also contributed to the development of psychoanalysis later. As the
founder of psychoanalysis, Freud claimed exclusive authority regarding what could
be regarded as psychoanalysis, which later led to a contradiction between Freud and
other theorists such as Carl Jung and Alfred Adler (Geçtan 16).

- Psychoanalysis is significant for an understanding how human psychology works

and what motivations are influential behind decisions and behaviors of people. In that
sense, the theories of Freud have influenced many fields of study ranging from
primarily psychology to art, philosophy and also literature. Psychoanalysis is not only
a way of treatment for mental disorders but also an inquisition of the human psyche.

- The close relationship between psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic literary criticism

comes from the fact that texts are the products of the human mind and they are about
the human beings themselves and their relations to each other in regard to their mental
life. Psychoanalytic literary criticism is a critical theory which uses various concepts of
psychoanalysis to understand and interpret the literary texts. Psychoanalysis makes
possible the interpretation of a literary work through its author, its content or its
reader. This diversity is the result of what subsequent psychoanalysts after Freud
brought along with themselves. Indeed, the relationship between literature and
human psychology dates back to early literary critical theory.
- As early as the fourth century B.C., Aristotle used it in setting forth his classic
definition of tragedy as combining the emotions of pity and terror to produce catharsis.
The ‘compleat gentleman’ of the English Renaissance, Sir Philip Sidney, with his
statements about the moral effects of poetry, was psychologizing literature, as were
such romantic poets as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley with their theories of the
imagination. (Guerin 126) As it is obvious, literature cannot be thought separate from
psychology even earlier. In their preface to Freud’s Metapsikoloji Ayşen and Emre
Kapkın as the translators state that the creative authors offered some insights about
mental process; though improperly, before Freud had a systematic and theoretical
explanation for the structure and process of the mind (Kapkıns 17). Furthermore, both
literature and psychoanalysis make use of each other to understand human being: the
matter of interest for both. “The psychoanalytic approach to literature not only rests
on the theories of Freud; it may even be said to have begun with Freud, who was
interested in writers, especially those who relied heavily on symbols” (Murfin 504-
505).

- Freud himself was the first person who applied his theories to literature with his
“short essay on Die Richterin (“The Woman Judge”), a novella by the Swiss writer
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and he added a comment on another Meyer’s tales, Die
Hochzeit des Monchs (“The Monk’s Wedding”)” (Trosman 84). He also
psychoanalyzed Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. After Freud,
concepts of psychoanalytic theory have been used by many other literary critiques and
psychoanalysts such as Ernest Jones, Otto Rank and Conrad Aiken to understand and
interpret the literary texts.

- Freud was attracted by literary works while he was studying on The Interpretation
of Dreams. Because the literary texts are highly similar to the dreams which need
interpretation just like the literary texts need interpretation to be understood. The
dreams tell what cannot be uttered during the day by disguising our unconscious
feelings with a manifest content which stands for the events structured in an
acceptable plot line while there is also a latent content which stands for the hidden
meanings behind these events in a dream.
- By the same token, the literary works as well have both a manifest content created
with symbols and metaphors, and a latent content needing an inquisition and
interpretation. Freud realized the special case of writers who are, in a way, proof of
the fact that people are dual in nature. “Such writers regularly cloak or mystify ideas
in figures that make sense only when interpreted, much as the unconscious mind of a
neurotic disguises secret thoughts in dream stories or bizarre actions that need to be
interpreted by an analyst” (Murfin 505). In that sense, literary texts with their symbols
and metaphors can be seen either like the dreams of their authors or the dream of a
person without a name. That is, literary works can be interpreted as the projection of
the unconscious wishes and unresolved conflicts of the author; or they can be
interpreted as the dramatization of the any individual’s possible unresolved conflicts
with the society– so to speak characters’ in the texts or the readers’. For this purpose,
different teachings by different psychoanalysts have been used by critics after Freud
such as Ernest Jones, Otto Rank and Conrad Aiken to understand and interpret the
literary texts. The use of psychoanalysis is not only limited with the interpretation of
the texts. Besides, we can also say that some of the writers and playwrights have
utilized psychoanalysis as the symbolism of their works in forming the structure and
creating the plot itself. Such writers offer a psychoanalytic model of life and struggle
of the people throughout their life within a more complex world of interests.

- The scope and the content of the psychoanalysis have changed over time; as a result
of this, the function of the psychoanalytic literary criticism. In addition to Sigmund
Freud, such figures as Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) with his analytical psychology,
Alfred Adler (1870-1937) with his individual psychology and Melanie Klein (1882-
1960) with her object relations theory have contributed to the development of the
psychoanalytic criticism thanks to their theories which made possible to understand
the human psychology not only on the grounds of the authors’ personal psychology
but also through the psychology of the characters and the readers. In my thesis, I will
utilize basically Freudian personality theories to analyze the selected plays.
 Psychoanalytic Theories of Sigmund Freud

- “The mind, Freud posited, may be seen from five metapsychological viewpoints:
Topographic, Dynamic, Economic, Structural, and Genetic” (ABE 20). “His theories of
the mind emphasize the early development of sexuality in the infant child, and the
adult psychological illnesses that emerge in the conflict between individual sexual
desires and society’s demands not to indulge in these unruly urges” (Thurschwell 2).

- Essentially, the foundation of Freud’s theories is based on his concept of

“unconscious”. He revealed that human psyche includes some mental portion which
can be observed and understood neither by the person himself/herself nor by others
around immediately. He later on called that part of the mind as unconscious. Under
the light of his clinical studies he established his first model of personality in the first
place; the topographical model, to explain the function of those distinct portions of the
mind. That model was primarily based on unconscious which is the reservoir of the
feelings unknown to the conscious.

- If to broaden the definition, . . . we call a psychical process unconscious whose

existence we are obliged to assume —for some such reason as that we infer it from its
effects—, but of which we know nothing. . . . If we want to be still more correct, we
shall modify our assertion by saying that we call a process unconscious if we are
obliged to assume that it is being activated at the moment, though at the moment we
know nothing about it. (Freud 70, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality”) With
those words above, Freud points out the fact that there are some motivations in the
unconscious, which are influencing people with their behaviors and decisions even
though they are not aware of them.

- To Freud, unconscious contents are highly influential with the formation and the
development of the personality. However, unconscious is not the only psychic portion
of the mind; the topographical model included three parts of the mind: unconscious,
conscious and preconscious. The main concern of that partition was not anatomic
rather it was to determine the distance of psychic activities to the conscious level
(Geçtan 22).
- To distinguish the portions and the levels of psychic zones, Freud makes an analogy
between the structure of human mind and the iceberg most of which lies beneath the
surface. This diagram helps us explain the relation of these parts of the mind to each
other.

- The greater part of the mind is structured by the unconscious which is present in the
depth of our mind even though we are not aware of its presence. In other words,
unconscious is the psychic zone which is separated from conscious while consisting
pre-conscious. According to the topographic model, Sigmund Freud, in his 31st
Lecture titled as The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, determines . . . two kinds
of unconscious—one which is easily, under frequently occurring circumstances,
transformed into something conscious, and another with which this transformation is
difficult and takes place only subject to a considerable expenditure of effort or possibly
never at all. . . . We call the unconscious which is only latent, and thus easily becomes
conscious, the ‘preconscious’ and retain the term ‘unconscious’ for the other. (Freud
71)

- Unconscious functions as a chest located into the depth of our mind which keeps such
some guilty and repressed emotions hidden as desires, fears and regrets resulting from
past experiences. It is full “. . . of those painful experiences and emotions, those
wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about
because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them” (Tyson 12; 2006). Unconscious
constitutes some motivations and desires that govern the behaviors and decisions of
the individual; however, s/he demonstrates some other reasons for behaving in that
way, which are most of the time rationalized.

- That most of the individual's mental processes are unconscious is thus Freud's first
major premise. The second . . . is that all human behavior is motivated ultimately by
what we would call sexuality. Freud designates the prime psychic force as libido, or
sexual energy. His third major premise is that because of the powerful social taboos
attached to certain sexual impulses, many of our desires and memories are repressed
(that is, actively excluded from conscious awareness). (Guerin 128)
- Believing that neurosis and mental disturbances originates from childhood
experiences, Sigmund Freud directs his studies towards the psycho-sexual
development of an infant. Moreover, as Anthony Storr points out he “advanced the
idea that neurosis in later life came about because the child’s sexual development had
been partly arrested at some immature state” (Storr 20). For that reason, Freud
attracted attention to the experiences an individual goes through during his/her
childhood. Tomy Philip referring to this point states that “Freud is often considered
the first psychological theorist to have emphasized the developmental aspects of
personality and the decisive role of the early experiences during infancy and childhood
in laying down the basic character structure of an adult person” (180).

- Freud, who focused on the role of sexuality throughout his studies and researches,
categorized the psycho-sexual stages of an infant according to the erogenous zones
which are dominant during different time periods. According to that premise, the
stages are successively the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage and lastly the
genital stage. Each stage of psycho-sexual development suggests the gratification of
biological needs. To Freud, the infant is capable of getting sexual pleasure beyond the
mere satisfaction of the hunger, thirst etc.

- Particularly the first year of the baby is focused upon mouth (Storr 20). For that
reason, it is named as oral stage. The principle activity during that stage emerges as
sucking his/her mother’s breasts. Those who are not satisfied enough during that
stage may suck their fingers in later stages or they display that fixation through
abundant drinking alcohol or smoking.

- The second stage is the anal stage which prevails roughly from one to three years old.
During that stage, the destructive and sadistic feelings develop through the experience
of excretion. Additionally, the infant learns the notion of control over the objects and
others through her/his relation with the feces. The toilet training during that stage
may determine some personality traits of an infant in his/her adult life. If the infant is
trained strictly, then s/he may exhibit the traits of obsessive-compulsive disorder or
of a stingy person. In case of a loose toilet training, the opposite personality
characteristics may be observed.
- The third stage is the phallic stage which Sigmund Freud emphasized and referenced
most in his studies. The focus of the child centered upon clitoris and penis as the
erogenous zones. S/he gets satisfaction by masturbating during that stage. The
discovery of the genital organs and playing with them in a fantasied way brings about
the Oedipus complex in boys and Electra complex in girls. Freud attributed the
Oedipus complex to both sexes; it was Carl Jung who called that complex Electra
complex for girls. Thus, “Oedipus complex consists of a sexual attachment for the
parent of the opposite sex and a hostile feeling for the parent of the same sex” as Tomy
Philip asserts (185).

- If to begin with Oedipus complex, the child sexually desires his mother as the love
object and he sees the father as an obstacle on his way to reach her. This idea leads him
to raise virulent feelings and hatred against his father. Indeed, realizing that girls are
deprived of a penis once they used to have, the boy is afraid of being punished by his
father through castration on the account of his wish for his mother and his
masturbatory activities. Therefore, he does not want to share the same destiny with
girls. The ‘castration complex’ starts up the process of repression of guilty feelings
stemming from his desire to his mother and his hatred against his father.
Consequently, this castration complex brings along the process of identification; that
is, with the fear of being castrated, he redirects his wish for possession of his mother
towards other objects and decides to identify himself with his father rather than being
the rival against him.

- Bennett Simon and Rachel B. Blass point out that In terms of the Oedipus complex
the major conclusion drawn from these conceptualizations was that the conflict
inherent in the complex is to be resolved through an intensified identification of the
boy with his father. Through such an identification (a) the boy can in an indirect and
sublimated way have the mother, and (b) the ‘ego ideal’ (the precursor of the superego)
is formed. Hence the father’s prohibitions and threats are internalized and the
incestuous wish is repressed. (Simon and Blass 161)
- As for the Electra complex, it is the female version of Oedipus complex. Like a boy, a
girl makes her discovery of her genital and realizes that she is devoid of a penis. As a
consequence, she cultivates a wish to have a penis and the feelings of jealousy which
is named as ‘penis envy’. She puts the blame on her mother for her deprivation of a
penis while she directs her love from her mother to her father who has the missing
organ. The first love object of a girl is her mother just like a boy’s. Thus, even though
she flourishes hostile feelings against her mother for the deprivation, she still wants to
have penis to regain her mother in her unconscious.

- Mahrukh Khan and Kamal Haider explain the issue stating that “. . . without a penis,
she can't sexually have mom, as the childish id requests. Thus, the young lady diverted
her craving for sexual union upon dad; along these lines, she advanced toward hetero
womanliness that finished in bearing a child who replaced the inattentive penis” (2).
At that point, she starts to dream that her father will impregnate her providing a child
as the substitute of the penis. The resolution of the conflict is realized after the girl
comprehends the impossibility of a sexual affair with her father due to the social norms
and she “. . . then started to relate to and imitate her mom out of trepidation of losing
her affection”, transferring her libido to other objects and people (Khan and Haider 2).

- Phallic stage of development is followed by a latency period or post-oedipal period

before the last stage of development. That stage concerns the repression of the sexual
desires as the word ‘latent’ suggests; that is, the child digresses from the sexual issues
by orienting his/her interest at social activities, schooling and intellectual self-proving.
Terry Eagleton explicates the post-oedipal period: [I]t is the structure of relations by
which we come to be the men and women that we are. It is the point at which we are
produced and constituted as subjects; and one problem for us is that it is always in
some sense a partial, defective mechanism. It signals the transition from the pleasure
principle to the reality principle; from the enclosure of the family to society at large,
since we turn from incest to extra-familial relations; and from Nature to Culture, since
we can see the infant's relation to the mother as somehow ‘natural’, and the post-
Oedipal child as one who is in the process of assuming a position within the cultural
order as a whole. (135-136)
- The genital stage is the last one with regard to Freudian psycho-sexual development.
This stage concerns the period beginning with puberty and during that stage the
sexual matters reappear. The adolescent have the ability to gratify his/her sexual urges
with an opposite sex in the proper sense. Through with this stage, as Tomy Philip
asserts, “[s]exual attraction, socialization, group activities, vocational planning and
preparations for marrying and raising a family begin to manifest” (187). All in all, the
core of Freud’s studies with reference to psycho-sexual development constitutes the
phallic stage since that stage provide materials to dig into the main motives for the
repression. That is to say, repression became the following matter of concern for Freud
after the concept of unconscious; which can be explained as the process of keeping
some anxiety-provoking ideas and thoughts out of awareness in the reservoir of the
mind; unconscious. On the other hand, the problem with the unconscious is that it is
neither a rational nor an organized structure. It has become clear that there is neither
organization nor coordination in the unconscious and each of the drives is
independent from each other while two opposite drives may stand side by side
(Kapkıns 19).

- The contents of the unconscious bother the person in different ways. Even though the
undesirable ideas and feelings are blocked through repression, these ideas and feelings
emerge through different processes and incidents such as dreams, some clinical
symptoms like hysteria, and slips of pen and tongue. Hence, Freud firstly focused on
the repressed material to treat his patients; however, it was not enough to explain the
motivations behind the behaviors of the people. After realizing that topographical
model of the mind is not sufficient and clear enough to explain the mental process and
the primary source of mental activities, Freud developed the structural model of the
mind. Concerning this, Freud begins his lecture “The Dissection of the Physical
Personality” by asserting that it became possible to identify some problems of
psychoanalysis about the repressed and its symptoms only through focusing on the
repressing forces rather than focusing on the repressed. (57).
- Nonetheless, to define the new model of the mind has not been an immediate and
direct process; he studied on the theory of instincts which would help to understand
the dynamic relations in the structural model of the mind. Theory of instincts covers
the Dynamic Model in that it “. . . posits the existence of aggressive and libidinal
instincts, also known as the drives [, and the Economic Model in that] . . . these same
drive energies are studied as quantitative forces that may be increased or decreased
for tension reduction or expression” (ABE 20). Engin Geçtan, in his book Psikanaliz ve
Sonrası (1988), defines instincts as the psychological representations of internal stimuli
which consist of physiological needs (24). “Instincts are energetic, bodily drives to
certain kinds of action. All instincts originally have biological sources – the aim of
every instinct is satisfaction, which it attempts to find in objects – the people, things,
body parts etc. one looks towards to satisfy erotic desires” (Thurschwell 81).

- In his article “The Two Classes of Instincts”, Freud mentions . . . two classes of
instincts, one of which, the sexual instincts or Eros . . . [which] comprises not merely
the uninhibited sexual instinct proper and the instinctual impulses of an aim-inhibited
or sublimated nature derived from it, but also the self-preservative instinct . . . The
second class of instincts was not so easy to point to; in the end we came to recognize
sadism as its representative.

- On the basis of theoretical considerations, supported by biology, we put forward the

hypothesis of a death instinct, the task of which is to lead organic life back into the
inanimate state. (3974) Life instinct (Eros) consists of sexuality, hunger and thirst;
accordingly, it aims the continuation and preservation of life and species through the
gratification of biological urges. Freud called the source of the energy of Eros as libido
or the libidinal energy. On the other hand, the death instinct (Thanatos) aims to end
the life since human being has an unconscious death drive. As a derivation of death
instinct, the individual sets forth aggressive tendencies and those tendencies may be
both self-destructive and destructive against others. The main reason behind that is
the tendency towards pleasure and death is the ultimate point which eliminates the
stimuli leading to seek pleasure. That is, life instinct pursues of pleasure and avoids
from un-pleasure while death instinct looks forward to ending this seeking of pleasure.
- As Pamela Thurschwell says “[d]eath is the ultimate release of tension; it promises
the ultimate experience of statis and complete calm. Reenacting unpleasurable
experiences comes to seem like rehearsal for our own deaths” (Thurschwell 88).
Therefore, individuals reflect their unconscious wish for death through sadism which
is destructive attempts against others as the reflection of self-destructive urges to outer
world, and masochism which is self-destructive urges of the individuals against
themselves. “The two instincts can also fuse together which results, at the psychic
level, in sexual sadism. De-fusion can result in the discharge of death instincts toward
objects, which then takes the form of aggression, destructiveness, or sadism.
Masochistic tendencies result if the ego is the object of discharge” (Lapsley and Stey
5).

- Finally, developing this model of the mind helped Freud to answer some important
questions concerning the dynamic relations of parts to each other in the structural
model. According to the structural model of the mind, there are three agencies; id, ego
and superego. Freud divided the structure of the mind in order to understand and
define how the mind operates and how the functions of the agencies of the mind
influence the development of the personality and the decision making process.
Besides, this structural model of the mind aims to find out the origin of the mental
illnesses through analyzing the conflicts of the agencies. Nonetheless, the new model
does not eliminate the former; rather the two are interconnected. That is, these three
systems in structural personality model and two psychic zones of topographical model
– pre-conscious is included within the unconscious – are intermingled as it is shown
in the diagram before.

- Freud explains the developmental stages of these three parts in a sequence. Among
these three agencies, Freud begins to depict firstly the id which is the primary agency
of the personality and exists in born. It is the reservoir of the biological urges such as
sexual satisfaction, thirst and hunger. It consists of the instincts which are death and
life instincts and functions for the fulfillment of pleasure principle. It is irrational as it
operates according to the pleasure principle and it pursues pleasure and immediate
satisfaction.
- On the other hand, it has neither organization nor understanding of time and place.
“The id is devoted solely to the gratification of prohibited desires of all kinds—desire
for power, for sex, for amusement, for food—without an eye to consequences” (Tyson
25; 2006). Freud defines as . . . a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations [and] . . .
as being open at its end to somatic influences, and as there taking up into itself
instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in it [and] . . . filled with energy
reaching it from the instincts . . . [and as a place where] [c]ontrary impulses exist side
by side, without cancelling each other out or diminishing each other: at the most they
may converge to form compromises under the dominating economic pressure towards
the discharge of energy. (“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” 73-74)

- The id has no conscious of morality, sociality and ethics; the main concern is to satisfy
the needs and desires of the person immediately regardless of any social norms or
rules or restrictions. Since the id serves for the pleasure principle, it rules out the social
restrictions and requirements; which generally ends up with destruction: destruction
in every sense in case unchecked. However; for this reason, id is not the only
component of the human psyche. In that sense, the other two agencies – ego and
superego –are to balance and restrict the actions and attempts regarding the desires in
order to prevent the possible damage to the self and the society.

- As the second agency of the mind, the ego is the rational part of the psyche which
balances between the id and the super-ego. Moreover, some part of it is conscious
while some part of it is unconscious. It functions in accordance with the reality
principle; that is, it tries to realize instinctual demands of the id taking the conditions
of the external world into consideration so that satisfying process of the urges can
result in non destructive way. The ego controls the approaches to motility under the
id’s orders; but between a need and an action it has interposed a postponement in the
form of the activity of thought, . . . it has dethroned the pleasure principle which
dominates the course of events in the id without any restriction and has replaced it by
the reality principle, which promises more certainty and greater success. (Freud 75-76,
“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality”)
- In this regard, although the id does not concern about the reality principle and the
outer threats on its own, it is blocked by the ego to protect the self because of the
discommodity of the conditions. As Freud states in his article Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, [u]nder the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure
principle is replaced by the reality principle . . . [but the reality] . . . principle does not
abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands
and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number
of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a
step on the long indirect road to pleasure. (3717) In other words, ego mediates between
what we want and what the society wants us to do. “It is the center of reason, reality-
testing, and commonsense, and has at its command a range of defensive stratagems
that can deflect, repress, or transform the expression of unrealistic or forbidden drive
energies” (Lapsley and Stey 1).

- The only concern of the ego is not to serve only for the demands of the id but also to
another agency of the mind, super-ego which also suppress the id. To clarify further,
“. . . it serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and
demands into harmony with one another. These claims are always divergent and often
seem incompatible. No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task. Its three tyrannical
masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id” (Freud 77, “The Dissection
of the Psychical Personality”). As one of the two regulating agencies of the mind; the
third component, “. . . the super-ego bids the psychic apparatus to pursue idealistic
goals and perfection . . . [and serves as] the source of moral censorship and of
conscience” (Lapsley and Stey 1). The ego seems to be the origin of the repression;
however, it is the super-ego which represses or dictates the ego to repress as a
restrictive agency.

- Explaining the patient is unconscious of the case of resistance, Freud comes to the
point that “the ego and the super-ego can operate unconsciously, or—and this would
be still more important—that portions of both of them, the ego and the super-ego
themselves, are unconscious” (“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality” 69).
- While the id is inborn, the super-ego is not; the formation of the super-ego originates
from the phallic stage as a result of the oedipal complex with the identification process
of the ego with another ego under the influence of the parental relation of the child.
“The ego and superego then develop out of the id as a result of object identifications
and the resolution of internal conflict” (ABE 20). For that reason, this agency of the
psyche has the characteristics of the parental authority; thus, the internalized moral
and social norms of the society and the parental authority. To put it differently, the
superego is assumed to be our conscience in that it is the mechanism of observation
and this observation is associated by judging and punishing. Therefore, the super-ego
functions as the morality agency of the psyche which observes, and as a result of that
observation it punishes the individual for his/her unruly deeds that do not fit the
social norms and rules. From that perspective, the superego constitutes the
characteristics of the authorities such as parents and the school teachers.

- “The super-ego applies the strictest moral standard to the helpless ego which is at its
mercy; in general, it represents the claims of morality, and we realize all at once that
our moral sense of guilt is the expression of the tension between the ego and the super-
ego” (Freud 61, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality”). At that point,
punishment is closely related to our conscience. On the other hand, the super-ego is
autonomous with its actions and its supply of energy is different from the id’s. If to
look at the whole picture in terms of their relation to each other, “. . . none acts
independently of the others and a change in one always involves changes in the other
two. In this way, the ego is, to a large degree, the product of conflicts between what
society says we can’t have and what we (therefore) want” (Tyson 25; 2006).

- Freud mentioned about the function of the ego as the mediator between the id and
the superego. The id wants immediate satisfaction of the instinctual needs while the
super-ego does not approve these needs within the frame of the social norms. [The
ego] is the sense-organ of the entire apparatus; moreover it is receptive not only to
excitations from outside but also to those arising from the interior of the mind.
- We need scarcely look for a justification of the view that the ego is that portion of the
id which was modified by the proximity and influence of the external world, which is
adapted for the reception of stimuli and as a protective shield against stimuli,
comparable to the cortical layer by which a small piece of living substance is
surrounded. (Freud 75, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality”)

- The demands of these agencies contradict and the ego tries to mediate between them.
The ego tries to find the best solution to the conflict arising between the id and the
super-ego while the former seeks for immediate satisfaction for its image of desire and
the latter stands for the wrongfulness of that search for the pleasure. The id imagines
-as it works in accordance with the pleasure principle- and thinks what it wants and
the super- ego objects it. In that way, the urges and the unruly wishes are repressed
and are not allowed to reach to the level of consciousness. However; [R]epression
doesn’t eliminate our painful experiences and emotions. Rather, it gives them force by
making them the organizers of our current experience: we unconsciously behave in
ways that will allow us to “play out,” without admitting it to ourselves, our conflicted
feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress. (Tyson12-13; 2006)

- As Terry Eagleton points out, “[e]very human being has to undergo this repression
of what Freud named the ‘pleasure principle’ by the ‘reality principle’, but for some of
us, and arguably for whole societies, the repression may become excessive and make
us ill” (131). Repression of the urges and wishes is not a solution because; as Freud
posits, there is always return of the repressed. The possibility of the threat which
suggests de-blocking of the barrier instructed by the ego creates anxiety in the mind;
as a result, the ego develops some defense mechanisms to eradicate the intra-psychic
conflict within and without the structure. “Vaillant (1993) described defense
mechanisms as ‘regulatory selfdeceptions’ that function like the ego’s version of the
body’s immune system, protecting the mind from vulnerabilities to potentially
overwhelming negative emotional states, the way white blood cells act to stave off
infections” (Rivas 5).
- Moreover, George E. Vaillant expresses the role of the defense mechanisms stating
that “. . . defense mechanisms can allow a person to ignore the affect (isolation,
intellectualization), to ignore the cognitive representation of the affect (repression), to
reverse the direction of an impulse (make the self the object; projection), or to make
the object the self (suicide or the passive aggression)” (Vaillant 92). Nevertheless,
defense mechanisms may not help the individual alleviate the problem; on the
contrary, it may cause greater problems rather than solving them if a person turns to
defense mechanisms more than enough. Ego defense mechanisms can be consulted
and adopted by both normal and neurotic people since they are the modes of
continuation of the self and the life. Moreover, they protect not only the self from the
internal conflicts and the external threats of society; but also the society and the order
serving for the purposes of super-ego.

- According to Vaillant (1986), Freud identified five important properties of defense

mechanisms: (a) defenses are major means of managing instinct and affect; (b) they are
unconscious; (c) they are discreet from one another; (d) although offen the hallmarks
of major psychiatric syndromes, defenses are reversible; and (e) defenses can be
adaptive as well as pathological. (qtd in. Munteanu 25) Sigmund Freud defined
primary defense mechanisms as a result of his studies; however, his daughter Anna
Freud enlarged the concept of ego defense mechanisms explaining them
systematically in her book Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1946). Although there
are other several types of ego defense mechanisms, I will mainly utilize repression,
denial, reaction-formation, projection, and rationalization throughout my analysis of
the selected plays. Among several defense mechanisms, repression is the very basic
and the most important one in that it is already the reason of several defense
mechanisms and in that it accompanies some of them. As I explained above, the notion
of unconscious is established upon the idea of keeping the anxiety-provoking ideas
away from the conscious level, and of repressing them to avoid the disturbing feeling.
- “From 1911 to 1919, Freud reconsidered the process of repression in terms of the
threefold metapsychological viewpoint, and he described a ‘primal repression.’ From
1920 to 1939, with the second topography (instinctual theory), repression became one
‘defense mechanism’ among others, but at the same time remained a ‘separate’
process” (Mijolla 1482). As a defense mechanism, repression is the process of
repressing the repressed. However, Baumeister et al put forward that “. . . repression
is not a defense mechanism per se, and indeed defense mechanisms are called into
being because of the inefficacy of repression.

- In this view, repression is simply the blotting of threatening material out of the
conscious mind, and if that could succeed, then there would be no need for defense
mechanisms” (Baumeister et al. 1084-1085). For that reason, some other defense
mechanisms accompany repression to balance the mental state by lessening the
anxiety through preventing the anxiety-provoking thoughts and feelings from
surfacing. Denial is one of the immature defense mechanisms in that it proposes
psycho-pathological qualities, presenting solutions far from being useful to the person
for his/her mental disturbance. It suggests the refusal of the reality by the ego in case
it cannot overwhelm it because of its disturbing affects. The person behaves as though
an event which is painful has never existed at all.

- “The functionality of denial is to erase unreal perceptions. In contrast to repression

the denied content is indeed erased and not intermediately stored and retrieved later
on” (Gelbard and Bruckner 4210). Indeed, the process of denial sometimes may include
distortion of the fact by cultivating wish-fulling ideas and desires. Another defense
mechanism of the ego is reaction-formation. That mechanism proposes the exact
opposite reaction towards the repressed disturbing wishes located in the unconscious.
The attitudes of the person, on the other hand, emerges in a very exaggerated form,
hinting the idea that s/he attempts to exceedingly atone his/her feelings of shame and
guilt caused by the repressed material. Anna Freud defines reaction-formation as “the
reverse of the repressed instinctual impulse (sympathy instead of cruelty, bashfulness
instead of exhibitionism)” (Freud 89).
- Projection is one of the defense mechanisms which is utilized by the ego upon
disturbed by ideas, thoughts or desires by the existence of which the person is
bothered. Elaine M. Rivas explains the mechanism as such: “Projection encompassed
mental maneuvers which involve misattribution of hostile or otherwise threatening
feelings, attitudes and impulses to other people or the outside world” (8). That is, an
individual projects those unacceptable urges and thoughts onto other people even
though they do not in fact exhibit such traits, which provide him/her with relaxation
dismissing the anxiety. Another defense mechanism the ego adopts is rationalization
that Catherine B. Silver and Seymour Spilerman define as “paying attention to
irrelevant details as a way to dismiss emotional content” (190). The person consult
rationalization when s/he wants to escape from the real and unacceptable reasons for
an incident or action by suggesting excuses.

- The significant point with rationalization is that the person is not totally unconscious
with regard to the action; that is to say, s/he realizes that s/he acted unwittedly. Under
the light of all information mentioned above, it can be concluded that the ego which
tries to balance between the id, the superego and the external world thanks to the
defense mechanisms to protect the unity of the self and of the mental apparatus.
However, some of the defense mechanisms work out properly concerning this purpose
of the ego while some of the defense mechanisms may not help to cope with the
disturbances; sometimes causing more problems.