Sigmund Freud In Brave New World

The Unconscious Within Brave New World Have you ever ventured into the unknown, or believed that there is a little voice in the back of your head that is telling you right from wrong? You probably have, and this part of your mind is constantly battling against itself trying to have one specific part assert dominance. If you have never heard of these parts of the mind they are called the id, ego, and the superego: a set of names for the parts of your unconscious that ultimately run your mind. These concepts are the work of a man named Sigmund Freud, one of the world leaders in the studies of psychology and neurology. His studies have been analyzed and reviewed for decades and utilized in different novels and such along the way; one example

Throughout his novel, Huxley utilizes many of Freud’s ideas such as the id, ego, and superego, as well as the unconscious, but one of the most prevalent topics in the book is psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is Freud’s main problem of the conscious, and there is a conflict between the forefront and background parts of what is seen as reality (Owen 9). Huxley, knowing that Freud's specialties lie in this part of the brain, demonstrates these concepts through the characters and their personalities. He used this idea of psychoanalytic thought and incorporated it when creating his main and alternate characters, giving each one a specific portion of the psychoanalytic puzzle. In his novel, there is a great example of this when the students are in the conditioning factory discovering and learning about how people are created and conditioned. “Nothing like a little oxygen shortage for keeping an embryo below par” (Huxley 14). This quote shows how the embryo, which will later become a person, is being made to fit into a specific place in society later in life, never having its own control to make its own decisions. To make this clear, Brave New World’s story is truly based on physiology, and it relates to the specific experiences of the characters in the novel. It gives the characters a better character understanding and meaning (Owen 12). In comparison to this, Owen says, “Psychoanalysis is built on the belief that introspection is a powerful force: that thinking has power” (Owen 7). This idea puts people together as ultimately one gigantic person, not as individuals, where if the group goes, everyone goes. Again Owen gives another good explanation of this use: “In some sense, Brave New World is the perfect logical conclusion of the modern era, in which introspection is abandoned wholesale in exchange for