The Things They Carried: A Psychoanalytic Study
The Things They Carried was published in 1990 by Tim O’Brien, approximately fifteen years after the United States departed from South Vietnam and twenty years after O’Brien left. Although at the time of publishment O’Brien hadn’t been in Vietnam for nearly two decades, the memories and stories he depicts within his novel are fresh and filled with colorful dialogue. The Things They Carried allows readers to view a minuscule portion of the brutality within the Vietnam war and also survey the impact it had on a person’s state of mind. Even though many of the characters in O’Brien’s book have impulses and motivations which can only be explained by the theories of Freud, two intertwined main characters best display actions in line with psychoanalysis.
In order to begin a psychoanalysis, it’s important to know …show more content…
It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the thing men have always done” (O’Brien 68). This direct quote illustrates a good contradiction between the id and the ego as two of the characters in the chapter, Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon, succumb to their id, or their desires, in the events in Vietnam. In order for the mind to maintain balance, what Freud’s daughter, Anna, called ‘defenses’ have been put in place. According to Anna Freud, “It [the term “defense”] occurs for the first time in 1894 … to describe the ego’s struggle against painful or unendurable ideas or affects” (Freud, A. 1). These defense mechanisms are denial, displacement, intellectualism, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, suppression and sublimation. By knowing the defenses, readers can witness the implementation of them within the major characters of Lemon and
The Things They Carried was published in 1990 by Tim O’Brien, approximately fifteen years after the United States departed from South Vietnam and twenty years after O’Brien left. Although at the time of publishment O’Brien hadn’t been in Vietnam for nearly two decades, the memories and stories he depicts within his novel are fresh and filled with colorful dialogue. The Things They Carried allows readers to view a minuscule portion of the brutality within the Vietnam war and also survey the impact it had on a person’s state of mind. Even though many of the characters in O’Brien’s book have impulses and motivations which can only be explained by the theories of Freud, two intertwined main characters best display actions in line with psychoanalysis.
In order to begin a psychoanalysis, it’s important to know …show more content…
It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the thing men have always done” (O’Brien 68). This direct quote illustrates a good contradiction between the id and the ego as two of the characters in the chapter, Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon, succumb to their id, or their desires, in the events in Vietnam. In order for the mind to maintain balance, what Freud’s daughter, Anna, called ‘defenses’ have been put in place. According to Anna Freud, “It [the term “defense”] occurs for the first time in 1894 … to describe the ego’s struggle against painful or unendurable ideas or affects” (Freud, A. 1). These defense mechanisms are denial, displacement, intellectualism, projection, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, suppression and sublimation. By knowing the defenses, readers can witness the implementation of them within the major characters of Lemon and