The Psychological Process Of An Adolescent Wanderer

Salinger's masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye has been regarded as a reflection of the psychological transformation of the post-war generation, representing the major thought of the"counter-cultural trend."It reflects the inner conflicts of American adolescents after World Warâ…¡a nd has great influences on Americans.Equipped with Karen Horney's neurotic theory, the thesis analyses the social surrounding Holden inhabits and his growing experience, makes a journey into the inner world of the protagonist Holden Caufield, reveals that the root of Holden's neurosis is the insane society he inhabits, and finds that the author prescribes a therapy to cure the neurosis of the adolescents.As a psychoanalyst, Horney stresses the cultural's influences to people's emotion and attitude. She expounds that a person's living environment determines his emotion and attitude. The living environment includes the macro sociocultural environment and a person's individual environment. The two mingles with each other, at the same time, the individual environment also embodies the sociocultural environment. Horney makes a thorough elaboration about the neurotic formation and mechanism. She stresses the influences of a child's environment. In a family, if a child cannot get enough true love from his parents, he will have a sense of insecurity and the basic hostility. This kind of hostility is easy to be projected to everyone and every thing in the world. The hostility leads to the anxiety. The anxiety makes a person full of inner conflicts. In order to relieve anxiety and inner conflict, he has to adopt some defensive strategies to have dealings with others, including compliance, detachment and aggression.Holden is such an adolescent whose trouble is caused by all kinds of social pressure.Holden has a sharp conflict with the"phony"American society. After the second world war, it is an overwhelmingly suffocating era in American history with the universal conformity and the mad pursuit of materialism as its distinctive characteristics. The economic growth and prosperity could not conceal the spiritual emptiness of Americans. The lack of sincerity and trust among people led to the political and ideological hypocrisy, falsehood and uneasiness. The mainstream culture lays heavy burdens on the individuals. Holden seems to stand for young people of that age, who feel themselves beset on all sides by pressures to grow up and live their lives according to the rules, who are disengaged from meaningful human connection and conform to a bland cultural norm that restricts their personalities.Under the pressure of the society, with little love and care from his family and school, Holden feels alone and desperate. He is cynical and sensitive. He is hostile to the world. He hates the hypocrisy of the world. He hates the system of the school and he hates everybody and everything hypocritical of the world. His hostility leads to his anxiety. He worries about his own fate, the adulthood he is going to enter and the loss of innocence. Anxiety wages his inner conflicts. Gradually he develops the compliance and detachment defensive strategies. In order to gain love and sincerity he craves for, he has to fawn upon others without any principle. He is detached from the world in order to be away from the insane society and avoid being hurt. He flunks out of school and wanders from one place to another in New York. Eventually, he plans to escape from the obscene society and the world of alienation. But this plan never materializes, instead, he lands in the sanitarium. Eventually, through the protagonist's sudden realization, the author points out a therapy for the adolescents who are suffering the psychological trouble. That is they should face the reality in a correct attitude, experience the life actively, resist the old sociocultural conformity and struggle to pursuit the essence of life and the perfection of personality. To some degree, the work acts as a kind of therapy for the social neurosis.The novel is the reflection of the psychological transformation of the American adolescents in the postindustrial society; it is the repressed adolescents'mute reproach on the insane society; it is their sincere call for love and authenticity; it is a therapy prescribed by the author for the insane society and the adolescent neurosis.