Writing As A Self-treatment

Dickens's painful experience of working in a blacking factory at the age of 11 prompted his ingenious creativity in his literary career. However, all through his life, he only confided in his close friend and autobiographer, John Forster his dark and humiliating experience. On the one hand, it seemed that he grudged telling the tragic episode and bitter memories of suffering that had been haunting him throughout his life; on the other, he was quite open about it. He lavishly presented that dire experience under the disguise of his boy protagonists. His ambivalent attitudes of silencing it in public while lavishly presenting it in fiction provoke a question at the heart of his trauma.How Dickens the victim successfully transferred his personal agony into his artistic creativity is a subject of academic value. The purpose of this thesis is to disclose that process by the means of Freudian psychoanalysis as well as Marxist analysis. With an in-depth exploration of Dickens's responses towards this traumatic incident during and after, the thesis shows the core of the trauma and explains how the defense mechanisms function to save and comfort Dickens the victim, maintaining his mental health at large. By further exploring the features shared by his boy protagonists: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip, the thesis manifests it that writing serves primarily as a mental therapy for Dickens to gain his salvation. A detailed analysis that follows demonstrate how psychological mechanisms like repression, fixation, sublimation and displacement function in each specific boy story to achieve that therapeutic effect.