Our Town by Thorton Wilder

368 Words2 Pages
Psychoanalysis of Our Town The novel, Our Town by Thorton Wilder, shows you how to use psychoanalytic theory which was a theory created by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud created this idea in the 1920’s. It was the theory of the conscious and unconscious which is made up of three things, the Id, Ego and Superego. The Id is instinctual nature of the human race. It is usually portrayed as the devil. However the Superego is the complete opposite. It is the mortality or principle of humans. Between the two would be the Ego, which is the mediator of the two. Carl Jung, Sigmund Fred’s pupil, learned this theory as well by studying beside him. But even though he was Freud’s pupil, he disagreed with some of the ideas and had his own opinion of this theory. Carl Jung instead believed in a archetype or prototype of the psychoanalytic theory. An archetype is the represented images or repeated patterns in mythology, literature and religion. He believed people were all combined into a collective unconscious shared by all humans. Jung’s three groups to this idea are Images or Symbols, Characters and Situations. The qualities Jung used instead were Primordial, Universal, Recurrent, and Motifs that were sometimes reoccurring. Primordial is the instinctual nature of the human race. A great example of this is babies. Instinctively when their first born they already know how to breathe , suck, and blink. Human instinct examples are found multiple times in the book, Our Town. One example is when George tells Emily that he is fond of her and is not going to go to college so that he can be with her. This shows his instinct of how humans fall in love and their feeling that bring upon their infatuation of objects and people. Our Town has examples of Jung’s other quality, Universal. “Up here is Main Street. Way back there is the railway station; tracks go that way.”
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