Sigmund Freud's Life Of Pi

Life of Pi is essentially a story that strives to explain, prove, and show in detail the conscious and unconscious mind theory known as the Iceberg Theory by Sigmund Freud, a famous psychoanalyst. This theory includes three basic parts. 1, the id which essentially is the survival mode of the mind. The instinctive part. The part that is believed to be instilled in all human’s minds from day one and we fight this primitive part on a daily basis. How do we fight it you ask? Well the second part of the theory calls this fighter the superego. The superego we obtain through life experiences, society, friends, family, and a billion other things in this life. This part of the mind is what makes people strive to be socially accepted and behaved, and is the complete opposite of the id. The last …show more content…
It attempts to balance the superego and id and your personality, but when put in life-threatening circumstances the ego and id take the reigns in order to keep you alive. This is exactly what occurred in Pi’s head. “Tears flowing down my cheeks, I egged myself on until I heard a cracking sound and I no longer felt any life fighting in my hands...the flying fish was dead. It was split open and bloody on one side of it’s head, at the level of its gills.” (Martel 203) At this point in the book Pi’s superego is slowly fading, doing it’s best to fight off the id’s need for survival, but failing due to the extreme measures Pi has been put in. This sentence marks an important change in the way Pi’s mind functions and his thinking methods. He desperately doesn’t want to