An Analysis Of Crisis In Individual Psychological Growth In Brave New World

Brave New World,written by Aldous Huxley,gains its reputation as one of the most well-known dystopia novels in the 20th century.This novel depicts to us a World State where people live in happiness in an innocent way with social stability and prosperity guaranteed.In fact,the social order which keeps the stability in the World State treats its citizens with disparity,or deprives their freedom of development,or refuses to admit their major role in the society,causing a severe threat to the individual psychological growth.This paper provides in-depth analysis of the crisis in the individual psychological growth in Brave New World with the help of the theories of modern social imaginaries and personality structure.The theory of modern social imaginaries is proposed in the work Modern Social Imaginaries by Charles Taylor,mainly referring to the ways people imagine their social existence,how they fit together with others,how things go on between them and their fellows,the expectations that are normally met,and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.According to his theory,in order to make social imaginary possible a wider background understanding is needed,whose dominant part is moral order which aims to describe a series of norms guiding us how to live together in a society and make practices possible in the form of the economy,the public sphere and people’s sovereignty in a way to infiltrate and transform social imaginary.Obviously,moral order plays an eminent role in the construction of social imaginary.Unfortunately,the moral order run in Brave New World just defies the three principles of “mutual benefit,freedom and equity” according to Taylor’s theory of modern social imaginaries.In the novel,the moral order operated in the World State helps construct the social imaginary of “community,identity,stability” through the following three aspects.First in the economy,it exploits the scientific technology to guarantee production and consumption.Second in the public sphere,it adopts the twisted secularization and loses the quality of norm that requires the authority to listen to its people.Finally,it breaches people’s sovereignty.At the same time,this study dissects the crisis of psychological growth the citizens suffer from in the moral order operated in Brave New World with the guidance of the personality structure theory by Sigmund Freud in which the personality is consisted of the “ego” pursuing the pleasure principle,the “id” adhering to the reality principle and “superego”conforming to the ideal principle.These personalities continue to develop in the course of individual psychological growth.However,with the moral order in the World State failing to realize the three principles of “mutual benefit,freedom and equity”,the social imaginary that it aims to build superficially maintains prosperous society which is,in fact,at the cost of the body and psychology of its citizens under absolute control,overwhelmingly hindering their individual psychological growth.In general,the purpose of this paper based on the theories of modern social imaginaries and personality structure is to analyze how the moral order against the three principles of mutual benefit,freedom,equity limits the psychological growth of citizens and eventually results in their psychological crisis in the three aspects of the economy,the public sphere and the people’s sovereignty.Conclusion can be made based on the study that some citizens in the World State succeed in breaking the fetters brought by moral order and striving for independence in psychological growth,while some other citizens lose the ability to explore mental growth independently.This paper focuses on and criticizes the moral order that confines and hinders the psychological growth in an attempt to arouse people’s thought on the significance of the moral order in accordance with mutual benefit,freedom and equality in the individual construction of sound personality structure along with the pursuit of psychological growth.