Throughout the Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud, Freud’s ideas of drastic measures in your life can initiate the idea of repression which means the memories are sent back into the unconscious mind. These ideas manifest in a “Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, through a strict closed father and an introvert daughter .
Sigmund Freud’s ideas on repression was said to be the idea of pushing back traumatic experiences, that turn into memories onto the unconscious mind. Freud explains his reasonings on how a specific memory stays in your mind but since the person may not know how to deal with it yet, it’ll become forgotten and repressed (taken back). This displays how Freud utilizes his patients to explain the repressed memory and how it was miscommunicated once brought into the consciousness. These ideas initially aren’t forgotten they just trying to get back to where they were in the conscious mind.
Freud tells us an incident with a patient he cured with repressed memories, the patient claimed that she had completely forgotten everything once she was cured. “The patient was a girl who had lost her beloved father…Not long afterwards her sister fell ill and died,…When the girl reached the bedside of her dead sister, there came to her for a brief moment an idea that might be expressed in these words ‘Now he is free and can marry me’” (Freud, 19). Not only is it understood that the girl had been already making ideas of marrying her brother in law, but it’s as if she had been thinking about it for a while and her idea became repressed. The repressed memory that had gotten stuck is a representation of how not only the girl suspected her idea, but her consciousness was not aware of it. Due to this occurrence, the girl went into treatment because it was not her, it was an impulse of that moment in her.
In “A rose for Emily”, Emily’s relationship with her father was cold and there was not really a sense of communication, it was more controlling. Through the towns point of view, Miss Emily always stood near her father, didn’t really associate until her father passed away. Miss Emily had sort of rebelled, we can say after her father died, “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as casual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days…” (Faulkner, 3). Throughout the story Miss Emily seems to be lost and perhaps trying to accept that her father was gone, the idea of her father still being alive is that she is repressing the absence of her father, not trying to deal with it in that moment. As some people would have grief and sustain the pain of someone being gone, Miss Emily didn’t. This is where Freud’s idea of repression comes into our understandings. Soon enough she meets a man, Homer Barron. This man had snatched Emily’s heart and they were more of coerced relationship, she bought him expensive gifts to show her love for him. Until Homer revealed his attraction to men, Emily unknowingly had her first impulse, causing her once again to act on repression, but this time Miss Emily’s exhaustion of being left alone causes her to react on her repressed memory, which led her to act on her wishful impulse. Resistance comes up to hold and detach that repressed memory for a while until it goes back into your conscious mind.
These ideas of Freud are brought into the attention because, in a Rose for Emily, we see how miss Emily’s father was reserved that he didn’t have any type of actual communication with his daughter. Which led miss Emily to become introverted person, despite the lack of communication and nurture, her father was everything Miss Emily had. Throughout the story and in the lecture, both women were affected in different way, but both had the repressed memories. One caused to say something she hadn’t meant to say and the other acting into nothing being wrong and ignoring the situation.
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. A Rose For Emily. Vol. 4, April, 1930.
Freud, Sigmund. “Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis.” 1910.
