Psycho-analytical Quest For Ben,the Tragic Protagonist In The Fifth Child And Ben,in The World

Doris Lessing is one of the most significant British writers in the contemporary literature world. She is famous for her productive works and various writing styles during her nearly sixty years’career. In2007Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature and became this award’s oldest winner, which also aroused more widely attention of the critics and researchers for her. The multiple cultural background and multidimensional perspective of Lessing make her works have respectively broad themes. The researches on Doris Lessing in China are mainly concentrated on her masterpieces The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing with the theoretical view of post-colonialism, Feminism, Marxism, and Sufism; and it mainly focuses on the themes in abroad. This thesis selects her serial novels The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World as research objects, two of which both belong to the mid-term works in which period Lessing focused on the social reality. Although the two realistic novel series do not bring so much honor to Lessing, it also shows the author’s unique feelings to the work whose sequel is created after12years which is uncommon in the author’s writing career. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis to try to interpret the human nature from the point of the marginalized created by Doris Lessing.This thesis consists of six chapters.Chapter One introduces the life and works of Doris Lessing including her mainly writing stages and achievements she made, as well as literature reviews of The Fifth Child and Ben, in the World in China and abroad.Chapter Two discusses the basic theories of psychoanalysis applied in this paper, including Freud’s personality structure theory, Instinct theory and Libido etc.Chapter Three explores the roles of the personality structure in the growing process of Ben, including interpretation of id, ego, superego and the lack of superego.Chapter Four mainly discusses the role of characters played in contributing to Ben’s tragedy, including the theories of Oedipus Complex and Libido applied in the process of his growth.Chapter Five focuses on the influence of Freud’s theory on Doris Lessing and her works, as well as their similar understanding from both sides of the human nature and civilization.Chapter Six summaries the above contents and enhances the understanding of theories of psychoanalysis and deepens the research into the analysis of human nature through the psychoanalysis on this two novels.