A Study On Mental Processes Of Protagonists In The Memory Keeper’s Daughter From Freudian Psychoanalysis

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is the first novel of the American female writer, Kim Edwards. It has aroused nationwide attention since its publication. It is mainly about how the family meets its doom after David, a doctor, secretly gives his Down syndrome daughter away. David, the guardian of the secret, spends his entire life struggling to keep the secret; Norah, his wife, is the one he tries to protect at the very beginning but is reduced to be the direct victim of the secret in the end. The two characters, both bothered by the secret, are interdependent on each other in the novel. This thesis conducts a detailed analysis of the entire mental process of David and Norah by employing Freudianism.Firstly, applying the triple personality, this thesis tries to analyze the id, the ego and the superego of the two characters, and to explore their hidden mysterious world. David’s id is made up of the conflicted impulses to confess and not to confess. His sister’s untimely death and the fragile family relations at present constitute the reality, on which the guideline of his ego is based. The responsibility acquired in his childhood becomes the major part of his superego. For Norah, the pain of losing her daughter and doubt about David’s alienation become a significant shaping factor to her id that contains the impulse to pursue the truth and to retrieve her lost daughter. David’increasing alienation to her and the established fact of her daughter’s death provide her ego irrefutable standards to perform. The attempts to be a competent mother and wife constitute her powerful superego.Secondly, according to the theory of anxiety, this thesis respectively analyzes reality anxiety, neurotic anxiety and moral anxiety of the two characters, whose ego is pressured by different threats. Bothered by the existent secret, conflicted impulses and punishment for violating moralities, David endures three types of anxiety. Tortured by pain of loss and the aggressive id, Norah’s mind is filled with reality anxiety and neurotic anxiety.Finally, this thesis is proposed to analyze the defense mechanisms applied by the characters to resist anxiety, and to seek a way out to achieve psychological self-redemption. By resorting to rationalization and displacement, the two characters successfully find their way to escape from the reality. By burying himself in the world of photography filled with secrets, David rationalizes his own one. Additionally, by displacement, he shifts his hidden love for his daughter to Rosemary; Paul, career and other men in her love affairs become the objects for Norah to release her repressed id.