The Member Of The Wedding Essay

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Carson McCullers uses Frankie Adams as a projection of her own mind through her work The Member of the Wedding. McCullers uses sublimation to project her mind onto the character of Frankie. In the scene where Frankie imagines that she sees her brother and his wife in a dark alley, McCullers is projecting her own anxieties onto Frankie, who then projects them onto the two colored boys standing in the alley. Frankie uses displacement to transfer her fears and anxieties onto the two boys. The different characters that stem from Frankie’s unconscious mind represent the id, ego, and superego in this scene. In The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers represents her psychological anxieties through sublimation onto Frankie Adams. Frankie then uses this as displacement onto the other characters. Sublimation is “the transformation of unwanted impulses into something less harmful” (Changingminds.org). McCullers uses sublimation to express her subconscious through the character of …show more content…

The mirror stage allows the child to develop a sense of self of self as a whole (Tyson 27). “The infant now develops during this stage a sense of itself as a whole rather than a formless and fragmented mass,” which is what Frankie lacked in the early stages of her life (Tyson 27). Frankie never developed a sense of self because the mirror stage strengthens the attachment between a mother and infant. The lack of her self-understanding as a whole leads up to Frankie’s longing for a mother figure. Following the mirror stage is the symbolic stage, in which the father enters the relationship. This lack of a mirror stage has lead to Frankie’s misunderstanding of the stages and issues with her mental growth. The symbolic stage either never occurred for Frankie because of her lack of a mother and thus confusion about a father, or it occurred too early for Frankie and has caused her trouble identifying who she

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