Exploratory Essay and Reflection

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The Descent Into Madness

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat”, the narrator goes through psychological suffering when him and his wife get a few pets in the house. The narrator supposedly likes animals from a young age, but it changes then they get the pets in the house and the narrator can’t help but think about hurting the animals and especially the cat, after all the animals have been mistreated by him from before. The narrator’s wishful impulses eventually get the better of him and it causes him to hurt the cat and ultimately, kill it. His repressed emotions towards the cat are also brought into light when the narrator drinks alcohol. The alcohol catalyzes his descent into madness and makes him give into his desires that were locked away in his unconscious. Due to these psychological reasons, which are mainly analyzed deeper in Freud’s lectures, the narrator is forced to commit these horrible actions in the story. The wishful impulses and his repressed emotion and pleasures are the main reasons for his murders and reaction to these murders in the end of the story.

The narrator’s wishful impulses are one of the main reasons why he killed the black cat in the story. This desire to kill the cat was due to him finding pleasure in torturing animals and outside his mentality, this was due to the alcohol he was drinking. “One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence” (Poe 7). The narrator being very drunk, made any excuse to take the cat and hurt it very badly, cutting out its eyeball and wounding the cat very badly. He indulged in his desire to hurt the cat by making the excuse of the cat not paying enough attention to him. These wishful impulses are explained by Freud as desires or wants that are in the mind and they are usually repressed. Most of the time, the person doesn’t really mean to do these things, but there is an emotion or experience in the unconscious mind that makes him/her very tempted to do that thing. “All of these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality” (Freud 2212). What Freud explains about wishful impulses is exactly what happens to the narrator. He finds great pleasure in torturing animals which is the wishful impulse, even if it doesn’t fit into his personality, or it isn’t really the type of person he is. The narrator mental state can no longer hold that impulse in the unconscious and ends up doing these horrible actions that embody his wishful impulses.

The narrator’s repressed emotions and past experiences cause him to commit these murders on both cats and in the process, his wife. Usually, the mind is able to repress the wishful impulses and stop the person from doing things that are deemed unacceptable in society. In the story, the narrator is an alcoholic, which removes that ability to keep his desires and pleasures repressed and tempts him to let his impulses out into the real world. When he hangs the first cat, that murder is repressed in his unconscious which is what temporarily prevents him from killing the second cat. But when the cat accidently bumps into him, making him almost fall, that impulse is let out from the conscious and causes him to finally go crazy and try to kill the cat. His wife is killed in the process which shows how far he has descended into insanity because of what he really desired. “The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness” (Poe 23). He completely loses control and the impulse has finally found its chance to escape the repression in the unconscious and manifest itself into reality. This phenomenon is explained by Freud when he describes the relationship between wishful impulses and their repression into the unconscious mind. “But the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious. It is on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated…” (Freud 2215). The impulse is always trying to get out into the conscious mind and are always waiting until the right moment to come out. This is what happened to the narrator when the cat bumps into him. This causes him to go into insanity, which also releases the wishful impulse from the unconscious. This eventually causes him to kill his wife with the axe and later finds out that when he buried his wife in the wall, he also buried the black cat with her without even realizing. It is at that moment that his wishful impulses and desires are finally met, but at the cost of his wife’s life and of two cats. His repressed emotions and experiences, along with his wishful impulses have all been let out into the real world. 

The psychological phenomena discussed are the major reasons why the narrator committed these murders. His wishful impulses or desires were to torture the animals and his mind failed to keep them in a repressed state. This inability to keep them repressed in the unconscious mind is due to the alcohol that he would consume, making him weak in the opportunity to fulfill his desire. The cat only has to do one thing that bothers him, and the impulse finds its chance to escape into the conscious mind, making him commit these murders. Even though this may not be part of his personality, when the wishful impulses are released into the conscious mind, it makes it almost unbearable to resist not making them a reality. These are all explained by Freud’s lectures. The narrator’s actions were problems in his psychological state and the alcohol along with the cat’s actions made him fulfill all of the desires and impulses that were locked in his unconscious mind.

Works Cited

Giordano, Robert. “The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe.” PoeStories.com, https://poestories.com/read/blackcat.

Rasch. “About Psychoanalysis.” Sigmund Freud: 5 Lectures about Psychoanalysis, https://www.rasch.org/over.htm.

Exploratory Essay: Reflection

The essay is an exploratory essay where a text is interpreted and analyzed to look at its themes and also to connect it to Freud’s lectures. There is evidence to back up connections between the short story and the lectures as well as quotes to back up points that are made in the essay. I wanted to show the connections between both and try to prove that certain psychoanalytic concepts are portrayed in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. I used evidence from both sources to prove my point and it motivated me to show the reader my point of view of both these sources and how they connect. I hoped to make the audience see the points that I am making and maybe make them agree with me on what I think is the connection between the two texts. This is why I used evidence and valid points from both sources to make the audience have the same train of thought as me. The intended audience of the essay are people who are curious to see the connection between “The Black Cat” and Freud Psychoanalytical concepts that are explained in his five lectures. It’s also intended for people who have a different point of view of the texts and maybe try to make them see what I think and if they agree with me. Those are the targeted audiences of the essay. My relationship between the me and the audience is an informative one, but also a persuasive one. I am trying to let the audience know about a certain topic and see if I can get them to share my opinion of the two texts. The medium being used is an essay which can be read, and this is how it is being transmitted to the audience. It is a physical paper and also an electronic paper which can be read online. It is also written in MLA format. This is what they paper is trying to achieve and my connection with the audience as well as how the content is being portrayed to the audience.

Literacy Narrative and Reflection

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Reaction and Thoughts on “Clinical Lesson at the Salpetriere”

This might just be a picture, but it portrays a lot more inside it and shows a lot of what would go on in Sigmund Freud’s lectures. In this picture, Freud is basing his lecture on this woman that he is using to teach the men in the room a lesson on psychoanalysis. More specifically, he is talking about hysteria and the symptoms that are associated with this mental problem. When I first looked at this picture, I felt very intrigued and curious to see what all those men are doing and why there is only one woman up there with Sigmund Freud. This caused me to raise questions like “Is she the lesson plan?’ or “Why choose a woman to teach the class with?” These questions also made me look deeper into the picture and encouraged me to find out what was really going on here and why Sigmund Freud chose to give the lecture in this very weird and unorthodox manner. Multiple emotions were drawn from me when I looked at this picture because I didn’t know whether to feel bad for the woman or to be kind of enraged at the men for treating this woman this way and using her more as an object than a human being. The picture not only shows how men treated women, and their sexism at the time, but also the fact that they thought only women were vulnerable to hysteria and its symptoms.

The questions that came into my head that I have already mentioned are not the ordinary questions that would come up in a picture from today, which I found to be both intriguing and disturbing in this photo. The woman seems to be the center of the lesson and it is extremely belittling of females because there is a considerable number of men staring at this woman, she probably didn’t give any consent for her to be studied in this manner. This also makes me think that this emphasizes the men’s masculinity and ego in a sense because they think that they can just educate themselves at the cost of this woman’s dignity and humility. It also shows that they had very little respect for women with problems like hysteria and used them as experiments or tools for education and the advancement of science. These are the things that I can infer just by looking at the picture as a whole.

One emotion that I felt when I looked at this picture was sympathy for the woman and wanted to really see what she was feeling at that moment. She probably felt very humiliated and embarrassed because all those men are staring at her and judging her most likely because she has a very special and mysterious condition that Freud is revealing and teaching about. The only people in the room concerned about her seemed to be the two women behind her because they had shocked and disturbed looks on their faces. That’s one way I felt about the picture from the woman’s point of view. Another thing I felt was a sense of enragement because of what the men accepted as being normal, as well as the thought of it being okay to treat a woman like she’s a tool in the classroom or for research without her consent. This is not the way a gentleman should behave, and it says something about Freud’s character. He seems to care more about proving his points on hysteria and furthering his research on the subject than caring about how this woman feels or how she should be treated. These particular emotions and feelings hit me right away when I looked deeper into this picture and it’s not very pretty to say the least.

Considering this is a picture, it’s impressive how much I felt from just looking at this one painting of Freud’s lecture. The idea that women can be used for educational and research purposes like that is very disturbing and raises the question “Why should women be the only ones studied for hysteria? Why can’t a man be looked at for the same symptoms?” This proves the fact that men at the time were very sexist and thought men to be superior to women which is unacceptable construct to go by in any society. The picture showed a lot of insight into how Freud and men, in general, viewed women and mental problems as well. This is a very wrong way of portraying hysteria and females in general.

Literacy Narrative: Reflection

This is a thematic essay that portrays my reaction and thoughts on the picture “A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière”. It has a theme and main points that support the theme which are then supported by evidence from the picture. The evidence also serves as details for the reader to be able to visualize the picture in their head if they’ve never seen it. The picture was very intriguing which is what got me to write the essay because I wanted to express how I felt about the picture and the inferences I made from looking at the details of the picture. This is what prompted me to write about Sigmund Freud’s lesson in the picture. I hoped to accomplish the reader’s full understanding of my thoughts on this picture and what I personally thought the picture portrayed. I also wanted to give the reader a new perspective and a different way to look at the picture, which could’ve been different from the way they were looking at it. This way, the reader has got some new insight into Sigmund Freud’s lecture. The audience of the essay was meant to be anybody who was interested in looking into one of Sigmund Freud’s methods or ideals at the time. It’s also directed towards people who haven’t seen the picture because the essay contains a lot of details on the picture, so that even if the reader hasn’t seen the painting, they can still have a vivid image of what it looks like. The relationship I was trying to establish was an informative one and to try to get the audience to know and understand as much as possible on what I thought of the picture. I assumed that the reader has never seen the picture and doesn’t know what was going in Sigmund Freud’s lecture. That’s why I added a good amount of details into the essay so that the reader can get a full image of what the painting looked like as well as what I understood and inferred from the picture just based on the details. This was the whole point of writing the essay from the beginning and what I had in mind from the first time I saw “A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière”.