An Analysis Of David Copperfield Under Freud’s Psychological Theory

The critical realism was popular in the 19th century in Europe, it was the inheritance and development of realism. Its profound comprehension in social relation and the deep revealism in realistic contradiction reflected the darkness and evil side of capitalism in the 19th century. Critical realism used humanity-based humanism as its ideological weapon, and guided people to walk towards kindness, justice and philanthropy. Charles Dickens was a brilliant representative of British critical realism. In his writings, the characters usually had distinct differences between hatred and love. His humorous stories implied profound and serious themes. Dickens used his sharp observation and proficient skills and detailed writing style to present the complete appearance of Britain in the 19th century. David Copperfield, as the representative work of Dickens, described the European society in the 19th century fundamentally and comprehensively, it was an excellent work of critical realism. The whole novel uses the first person to narrate and it integrates many life experiences of Charles Dickens as well. David Copperfield is an important work of Dickens. Even though many people have already made specific analysis on David Copperfield from different aspects, almost no one analyzes it from the perspective of Freud’s triple personality structure theory. This paper tries to use Freud’s triple personality structure theory to give new interpretation to David Copperfield. The first part of this paper mainly introduces Charles Dickens’s life experience and writing style, and introduce the work David Copperfield and literature review. The second part of this article is the introduction of Freud and his theory, and discusses the connection between psychological theory and literature. The third part of the paper, according to the triple personality structure theory of Freud, a complete personality structure was divided into id, ego and superego. In the individual growing-up process, id, ego and superego do not appear at the same time, in contrast, it presents a kind of abbreviation relationship among the three personality aspects. In other words, ego comes from id, and superego comes from ego. David’s growing-up and development presents the characteristics of Freud’s triple personality structure theory. This paper starts with the internal relevance between Charles Dickens and David Copperfield by using the internal relevance between Freud’s psychology theory and literatry work. It takes the childhood experience of Charles Dickens as its beginning, and combines the works of Charles Dickens in his adult time with the experience of marriage, by using id, ego and superego, which are the three elements of Freud’s triple personality psychology, this paper emphasizes on the analysis of id, ego and superego in the hero of David Copperfield. It illustrates how Charles Dickens reflects his own experiences onto the hero David from the perspective of psychology. In addition, it sums up the ego return of Charles Dickens in David Copperfield as well. The last part is conclusion, this paper tries to do research on Charles Dickens’s work creation from perspective of psychology to explore the psychological motivation of his novel creation as well as the relevance between psychological changes in subconscionsness and Charles Dickens novel text by taking David Copperfield as a typical example.