Young Goodman Brown
The Man with the staff and Young Goodman Brown
Sigmund Freud, who was born in Vienna, Austria, developed theories about how the unconscious mind affects the conscious decisions in our daily lives during his lifetime. The Second Lecture' is one of five lectures given by Freud, which is about the new concept of hysteria, the conflict of psychology, and resistance and repression. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804, and he was brought up in the stern Puritanical family. His family background like this affected his melancholy character and his work. Through Young Goodman Brown', Hawthorne showed that the human being, who keeps the original nature of good and evil, is afraid of their existence and the border of virtue and vice.
Basically, the unconscious of Brown has a wicked character, which is controlled adequately by his id, ego, and superego. The experience of Goodman Brown throughout the night is the thing in his unconscious and it becomes to come out by talking with the man the staff when Goodman Brown is in a hypnotic state. His unconscious shows what he really wants. It is id. In other words, his conscious can be ego, which controls his unconscious. In conversation with the man and Goodman Brown, the man elicits the conscious among the unconscious, and in the process of eliciting, there are some inevitable clashes between the conscious and unconscious because eliciting means a conflict between id and ego. In the story, Goodman Brown has known that he is doing something wrong. The reason why he didn't reject decisively the man's offer is so simple because his id wants to go with the man against his ego. His id resists his ego and ego represses his id by repressing him not to go. We can see Goodman Brown in the state of resistance and repression. For example, in the paragraph 15, Goodman Brown said that Friend, having kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came. I have scruples...
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