Psychodynamic Study on the Works of Cecelia Ahern

Abstract

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theory originally developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which Freud throws light into the “personality” of a human being. He gives a tripartite structure that involves a conscious (superego), pre-conscious (ego), and super-conscious (the ‘id’). These concepts and their explanations form the fundamentals of the psychoanalytical theory. This thesis will focus on “Resistance and Repression,” which is one among the many theories of psychoanalysis established by Freud. ‘Repression’ or also referred to as ‘Suppression’ by later psychologists, is the process of deliberately pushing out a painful thought, memory or feeling out of consciousness and becoming unaware of its existence, to which ‘Resistance’ acts as a safety measure by the mind in not giving entrance to certain painful memories into the conscious. This phenomenon plays a major role in the psyche of an average person as a “defense mechanism” to escape the anxiety that is caused by certain unacceptable concepts to the conscious mind. This thesis brings into light the psyche of the protagonist of Cecelia Ahern’s novel “Postscript,” who, throughout their life, represses painful events of the past, thus altering their decisions in life to a great extent. This work focuses on the behavioral patterns of the characters in the selected novels of study and the corresponding psychological traits that give an in-depth understanding of repression and its corresponding theories and their role in human life.