Why I Choose this Lense

It’s funny how powerful thought is on the human condition. Throughout my young adult life, I have experienced great highs and terrible lows of my own. I have also watched how ominous past experiences have tugged at the emotions, expressions, and actions of my parents, siblings, and other loved ones.

I come from an emotionally complex and challenged family. My family dynamic at home has been ever-changing and by watching my parents and brothers go through their deepest, most desperate deserts, I have discovered myself and developed an understanding and appreciation for each of their journeys, and how it has shaped them to the people they are today.

I consider myself to be a very internal person. I have always been naturally secretive and limited the people I confide in and the manner in which I express my truest, most honest self.

Through my internal and external experiences though, I feel I have gained an empathy for others and my own faults and imperfections. I feel that I can consider past experiences, tragedies and triumphs that lead to a person’s actions and personalities but understand that it is ultimately their thoughts that dictate their being.

Based on my own past experiences, I have felt a certain weariness with the same old issues that I’ve always seemed to have - the same boring flaws and anxieties that I’ve been gnawing on for years, which leave them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain I might have buried long ago. I strongly believe that this feeling is part of the human condition and that every person can relate to the struggles of their internal demons. I want to explore this concept more deeply and relate the literary text of Beloved to my own life.

I believe that the unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions, those wounds, fears, guilty desires, and unresolved conflicts we do not want to know about because we feel we will be overwhelmed by them. I also believe that the beginning in childhood, wonderful and all-awesome moments as well as unhappy and painful events are repressed into the unconscious mind so that the person is not overcome by those disturbing experiences. Psychoanalysis uncovers information that has been repressed and allows one to understand how behavior has been influenced by the repression of events and memories from one's past.

In this project I want to uncover which ways characters exhibit evidence of the unconscious and how might the author’s constructed text be a representation of the unconscious.