Sigmund Freud's Representation of Three Tall Women

A Deeper Understanding of Three Tall Women

According to Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis is a “procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way” (Fodor and Gaynor 147). It becomes a deeper contrast of a person’s mentality to consider the design of “interplay” within the “urging and checking forces” of the conscious and unconscious (Fodor and Gaynor 147). Freud’s representation of “Three Tall Women,” relate the characters by the “neuroses that sometimes result from the suppression of memories and desires too painful to deal with” (Freud, “The Dependent Relationship of the Ego). While not completely opposing religion as a factor in the conscious and unconscious, Freud does claim that the “Oedipus complex is at the root of religious feeling” (Palmer 113); so the idea of religion is not based on the desire of pleasing a God with the basis of good vs. bad, but instead, according to Freud, it is the sexual desires that come from being attached to a father figure. As characters B and C are introduced first as outside acquaintances, then as stages of character A’s past, the play is transformed into what may be perceived as Freud’s theory to the relation of the conscious and the unconscious, but could also be noted as the change a person undergoes throughout their lifetime in which religion, or the desire to maintain morality, is checked by outside influences.

The interpretation, backed by Carl Jung, argues that “religion need no longer be perceived as a conglomerate of guilt ridden repressions and ritualized obsessions, but as a natural and legitimate dimension of psychic activity” (Palmer 113). When Freud’s argument is counterbalanced, it can be found that the interpretation F...

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...ud may be correct on some terms, but the true unconscious desires do not come from a sexual want, but more from the want of a moral individuality, and characters C and B epitomize such a notion and deep understanding that exists in character A, but is challenged with the influence of society and the struggles of growing older.

Albee, Edward. Three Tall Women. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

Fodor, Nandor, ed and Gaynor, Frank, ed. Freud: Dictionary of Pychoanalysis. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1930.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Dependent Relationship of the Ego.”

Palmer, Michael. Freud and Jung on Religion. London: Routledge, 1997.

Personality Theories: Sigmund Freud. Boerce, C. George.. 25 November 2007 .