Psychoanalytic Perspective Of The Bridges Of Madison County

The Bridges of Madison County tells the story of a lonely Italian war bride who engages in an affair with a National Geographic photographer from Bellingham, Washington who has come to Madison County, Iowa in order to create a photographic essay on the covered bridges in the area. Critics discuss the novel in the perspective of feminism, stylistic literary translation and some other aspects. The present thesis intends to analyze the novel in the view of psychoanalytic theory by Jung, i.e. personal unconscious and collective unconscious and to elaborate that the characters'personality which resulted from the interaction of personal unconscious and collective unconscious.Kincaid and Francesca lived life respectively in their own ways before they met. The yearning for another life has been hidden under their unconsciousness. Jung calls them personal unconscious in his theory, which means anything that is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. Then the hero and the heroine get acquainted and were passionately in love with each other, under the function of two archetypes, anima and animus. Yet in a world where personal commitment in all of its forms shattering and love has become a matter of convenience, their remarkable love was destroyed because of some realistic reason. The potence of persona compels Francesca to abandon the great passion and stay in the family. Similarly, you could see the psychological influence of shadow on Kincaid, who separates himself with the world in isolation, living a drifting life. The contents of collective unconscious are called archetypes. The above archetypes are part of the contents of collective unconscious. The collective unconscious makes Jung stand out from all other psychologists, which is a reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with "psychic inheritance." And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly. The above archetypes are the ones which are crucial to form our personality and behavior. So this thesis will mainly talk about the embodiment of them on the characters in the novel. They are: anima, animus, persona and shadow.