The Remnants of Psychoanalysis

“The Black Cat” written by Edgar Allen Poe is a short story with very interesting concepts that are not fitted for the kindest of souls. The story begins with the life of a narrator who married quite early and loved pets as a child. Fast forwarding to his adulthood, the narrator begins to display violent mood swings due to his alcoholism and self-deception, ultimately leading him to kill his pet and murder his wife. The style in which the narrator conveys his story reveals many different things about him. He calls the incidents that have happened as though it was a series of household events, which have terrified, tortured, and destroyed him. However, he is incapable of showing remorse and he fails to see the consequences of causes and effects. In this short story, the conflict between Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of repression which is shown both internally and externally and the concept of wishful impulses are revealed through several unthinkable actions the narrator displays.

The psychoanalytic concept of wishful impulses is shown through the narrator’s actions. According to Freud, a wishful impulse is an individual’s unconscious desire to do something, but they are not able to act upon it because it does not comply and coincide with the norm or to his/her morals. In “The Black Cat”, we see that the narrator was very violent and that these violent acts were the cause of his wishful impulses being triggered, granting him no control. The narrator states, “—through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse” (Poe, Page 1). The narrator tells us exactly what the impulses he had dealt with. It was through his “Intemperance” or his lack of moderation when it came to consuming alcohol, that his impulses were triggered. The narrator also says, “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others” (Poe, Page 1). The lack of control for drinking alcohol further developed the narrator’s unusual change in personality, which is quite disturbing considering the fact that even though many people are bound to turn to alcohol as a way to feel a little bit better, it should never come to a point where you should lose self-control and disregard how you should treat others. Through a Freudian lens, Freud states that “All these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp to the subject’s other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality” (Freud 2212). As Freud stated, the narrator’s intemperance was a wishful impulse in which triggered the change within the narrator. His lack of control made it easy for the jaws of evil to take hold of him, lashing into violent acts which were unsuited with the proper standards of common personality.

Repression can clearly be seen in this short story and splendidly through the actions of the narrator. By paying close attention as to how the author articulates the beginning of the story, we are able to see some causes of internal repression. The narrator says, “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul” (Poe, Page 1). The fact that the narrator tells us, readers, that he wants to unburden his soul, shows us a sign of repression. As the story progresses, the narrator also tells us readers about “… the spirit of PERVERSENESS… to do the wrong for the wrong’s sake only” (Poe, Page 2). Due to his mindset, the narrator believes that this spirit of perverseness is the origins of being a human being. Having established this mentality, the narrator evades taking responsibility for his actions and manages to comment on his wrongdoings while being aware of them. These examples prove to be the causes of the narrator’s internal repression because they all lead to the narrator’s unthinkable actions.

All these occurrences of repression take place not only internally but also externally. Freud stated in his second lecture of psychoanalysis that, “In order to affect a recovery, it had proved necessary to remove these resistances” (Freud 2212). External repressions are caused by these resistances that Freud spoke of and in Poe’s short story, the narrator displays these actions through his interactions with the two black cats. Furthermore, the two black cats in the story actually resemble the narrator’s consciousness in which he represses. The narrator tells us that, “It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets” (Poe, Page 1). Here, we get a sense of what the cat was symbolized in the story. The cat “Pluto” followed him everywhere he went because of his drinking. The narrator chose to live an unhealthy way of living and turned to excessive drinking and violence that the cat resembled as the part of his consciousness that he kept repressed. In regards with the second black cat, the narrator says, “The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness” (Poe, Page 4). The narrator in this story clearly has no understanding of his own mindset that all he does is lash out because of his ignorance and killed both cats, thus showing how repression was being expressed externally.

The development of Freud’s psychoanalytical concepts of wishful impulses and repression as it is expressed internally and externally is clearly shown by the actions of the narrator in Poe’s short story. The narrator’s actions of illustrates and develops a relationship with Freud’s concepts, proving that his theory on wishful impulses and repression is true. The actions we do whether it complies with our society’s morals or not should be carefully watched over for it may lead to many unhealthy repressed emotions.