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Sigmund Freud's Representation of Three Tall Women Essay

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A Deeper Understanding of Three Tall Women

According to Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis is a “procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way” (Fodor and Gaynor 147). It becomes a deeper contrast of a person’s mentality to consider the design of “interplay” within the “urging and checking forces” of the conscious and unconscious (Fodor and Gaynor 147). Freud’s representation of “Three Tall Women,” relate the characters by the “neuroses that sometimes result from the suppression of memories and desires too painful to deal with” (Freud, “The Dependent Relationship of the Ego). While not completely opposing religion as a factor in the conscious and unconscious, Freud does claim that …show more content…

The play expresses the idea of virtue and C’s hope of avoiding the fate of A, which in turn shows that there exists a strong desire to maintain a life that consists in pleasing an authoritative figure or higher power (such as God). It may be discovered, with the help of the analytical mind of Carl Jung, that the “study of religious experience [can] be regarded…as the study of the fundamental, natural and therapeutic psychic process, in which the individual seeks self-knowledge, self-regulation, and self-fulfillment” (Palmer 109). Freud teaches us his idea of the ego, superego, and the id. The ego consists of the conscious thought, which is understood as the “cartoon character [that] has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other” (Freud, “The Dependent Relationship of the Ego). Literally speaking, character A was faced with the battle between devil and angel, good and evil, and it is the branches of herself in B and C that such a contrast is shown.
Character C is the object of the angel and represented by innocence, the character traits of a child, because she is the “little one,” the character with the least amount of experience in the world (Albee 39). While Freud may claim that this character represents the id in that she takes the majority of her influence from the unconscious part of her mind that says what she wants, Jung looks at the character with the idea of an archetypal self. Based on Jung’s study, “archetypes

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