My Exploratory Essay:

                                      A Black soul, Cats, Violence: Anxiety-induced Insanity

         ”The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated much of Sigmund Freud’s mechanisms on the human mind. Freud dealt with Psychoanalysis by considering the forces that alter one’s mental state. Similarly, in “The Black Cat,” Poe considered the psychology of a man who was once very fond of animals. He eventually went through many psychological changes in his life. It is essential to consider that in some way or another the narrator coped with intense anxiety and disruptions. Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts of wishful impulses, mnemic symbols, and repression, along with its connection with the unconscious, are efficiently illustrated in “The Black Cat” through the narrator’s behavior towards Pluto, through his constant irritability in the story, and through how his actions were influenced.

            Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of wishful impulses is illustrated in the “The Black Cat” in the narrator’s behavior towards Pluto. A wishful impulse is one’s desire to do something irrational although it doesn’t correspond to his or her morals. Freud says, “all these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality”(Freud 2212).  The narrator said, “Who has not, a hundred times, found himself doing wrong, doing some evil thing for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”(Poe 47). The narrator’s anger towards Pluto took full control of him. His assertion of doing wrongful acts justified his desire to do something bad to Pluto. He knew that by doing so it would get him in trouble with the law. Although the narrator was inclined to drink alcohol, he did not seem like a man who would kill animals, because he was once very fond of them. Freud asserted: “an acceptance of the incompatible wishful impulse or a prolongation of the conflict would have produced a high degree of unpleasure; this unpleasure was avoided by means of repression, which was thus revealed as one of the devices serving to protect the mental personality”(Freud, 2212). This justified the narrator’s statement: “I hung it there until it was dead. I hung it there with tears in my eyes, I hung it because I knew it had loved me because I felt it had given me no reason to hurt it”(Poe 47). The narrator accepted his desire to harm the cat and even elaborated on his motive. As he cried while hanging him, it was evident that he did not find pleasure in doing so, but he finally released an uncertain burden. This burden was the unconditional love that the cat gave him and the fact that he couldn’t give much love back to it.

          “The Black Cat” illustrated  Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts of mnemic symbols and repression through the narrator’s continual irritability. Freud said, “their symptoms are residues and mnemic symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences”(Freud 2206). He defined a mnemic symbol as something that caused a person to reflect back to something intense in their life. The narrator said, “I discovered that this cat, like Pluto, had only one eye”(Poe 48). The cat that the narrator encountered in his inn is a mnemic symbol of  Pluto. Before he saw that this cat also had one eye, the immoral actions he had committed against the first cat kept plaguing him.By seeing this second cat, it brought a sort of relief to him. This relief conveys the concept of repression. Freud asserted, “The same forces which, in the form of resistance, were now offering opposition to the forgotten material’s being made conscious, must formerly have brought about the forgetting and must have pushed the pathogenic experiences in question out of consciousness”(Freud 2212). People tend to disregard their thoughts from their consciousness and hold such thoughts in their unconscious. The narrator said, “Suddenly I realized that I wanted the cat”(Poe 48). Although he didn’t admit it, the narrator felt bad for what he did to Pluto and he repressed it. It seemed to him that if he owned this new cat, which primarily looked like Pluto (due to just black fur), then he could atone for his past sins by treating it well. The narrator was disturbed by the new cat and how it mirrored his sinful past.

         The narrator was also in conflict with repression.The narrator  said, “Months went by, and I could not drive the thought of the cat out of my mind”(Poe 48).  He tried to force the thought of Pluto out of his mind, but failed to do so, because of the guilt for what he did. The cat was like a dangerous man outside a house door knocking and the door was always being opened by the narrator. It was his unconscious. The narrator then said,”My growing dislike of the animal only seemed to increase its love for me. It followed me, followed me everywhere*, always”(Poe 48). The more he hated the cat, the more the cat loved him. In regards to mnemic symbols, as this new cat followed the narrator, this symbolized his evil deeds haunting him. Nonetheless, he developed much anxiety due to the mnemic symbol of Pluto and his dilemma with repression.

Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious in connection to repression is illustrated in “The Black Cat” through its influence of the narrator’s actions. His unconscious state suggested his hidden desires, fears, and ambitions.  The narrator said, “In sudden anger, I took a knife and struck wildly at the cat. Quickly my wife put out her hand and stopped my arm. This only increased my anger and, without thinking, I turned and put the knife’s point deep into her heart!”(Poe 48). Freud said, “Thus they have undergone repression, but have been able, in defiance of it, to persist in the unconscious”(Freud 2231); thus proving that the unconscious influenced his behavior. While he repressed much of his feelings for this new cat, his unconsciousness once again influenced his actions. His unconscious mind did not distinguish between right or wrong, and it drove him to lose complete control over his actions. Freud also said, “But the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious”(Freud 2215). Primarily, the narrator wanted to get rid of Pluto and it was in his unconscious state that he did so. This remained in his unconscious and in turn influenced his behavior whilst trying to attack the new cat.                                          

      Readers can psychologically analyze the narrator in “The Black Cat” by utilizing Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories of wishful impulses, mnemic symbols, and repression coupled with the unconscious. The narrator’s behavior towards the second black cat served as a mnemic symbol of Pluto, because every aspect of the cat reminded the narrator of Pluto. The reader saw Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts of repression and the unconscious through how the narrator mistreated the black cats. The narrator’s unconscious state of mind influenced his actions to kill Pluto, to kill his wife, and attempt to kill his new cat. Hence, ”The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe illustrated Sigmund Freud’s mechanisms of the human mind.