Category: Psychoanalytic

Three essays down, three to go!

After writing more critical topic sentences and making my thesis more relevant to Louise’s death, Pennington deemed my essay worthy of portfolio consideration. Party, party!

This truly means that we’re now halfway through the assignments in this class, and I’m left wondering where the time has gone. I’m sure I say the same thing at this point in every semester, but it really feels like this semester has flown by. Dare I say that the end is almost in sight? With four and a half weeks left of a fifteen-week semester, I don’t think that’s a wild statement to make.

I think this essay has been my favorite to write so far, and that’s probably because of my interest in psychology. To be able to apply that field of information to literature was really fun, and I’m really happy with how my essay turned out.

It really looks like my portfolio is going to be one huge dedication to Kate Chopin, and honestly, I’m not mad about it. It’s been so interesting to dive into her works, works that were far-fetched for the late 1800s, and still be able to see their relevance today. I’m excited to dive even deeper while writing the next two essays and see what I come up with. And yes, James Brown, I do feel good.

A huge high five to all my fellow 305ers for making it this far and not losing our sanity yet!

The comments on my psychoanalytic first draft were (once again) better than I expected!

I have already done first revisions on this paper, and to be very honest, I don’t know if the first revision is much better than the first draft, but we’ll just have to see.

Dr. Pennington said that I needed to have a more critical focus throughout my essay because there was a tendency to talk about the story rather than applying the theory. Looking back at my first draft, I totally agree. However, I did have trouble trying to be more critical while writing my first revision. If the comments are the same on this first revision, then I’ll go in and ask Dr. Pennington for more clarification, but I do think I’m on the right track.

Since we’re just about at the midway point of the semester (what?!?!), I wanted to take a second to check in with how I’m doing so far. Now, I don’t want to jinx anything, but this semester is going really well? Is anyone else shocked? Because I am.

All of the dreadful horror stories told to me by previous ENGL 305ers aren’t coming to fruition. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m loving 305, but it’s definitely not the worst class I’ve ever had. I think the material is really interesting, and I do love the freedom we have to choose our own topics for the essays. Of course, I think the hardest two papers are the upcoming ones (Feminism and New Historical), but so far so good, and I want to hold on to the hope that things aren’t going to get worse. *fingers crossed*

Everything else in my life (other classes, piano, jobs, internships, clubs, etc.) is also going really well. I’m incredibly busy but still somehow manage to binge Netflix every once in a while. I just started “Dear White People” last night, and I already know I’ll binge the whole thing over the weekend, after I do my feminism proposal, of course.

Alright guys, gals, and non-binary pals, the time has come to talk about Freud. I know, I know exciting, right?

Okay, I actually have a lot to say in this blog post about my psychoanalytic essay, so strap in because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Coming into college, I wanted to be a psychology major. I have always been fascinated with how the brain works and why people do the things they do. However, I was mostly interested in abnormal psychology and realized that it wouldn’t make sense to take a bunch of classes I wasn’t interested in only to take one that I was. So here I am now, an English major, finding out that I have to write an essay using psychoanalytic theory, and I’m genuinely excited about it. Looking into characters’ minds to find all of their hidden, repressed desires? Sign me up.

It was pretty easy to decide that I wanted to do a Freudian analysis of a text, but the hard part was deciding which text I wanted to write about. Having already written an essay on The Awakening, I wanted to switch it up a bit. I found another story in the anthology written by Kate Chopin, and immediately loved it.

The only problem was that I didn’t see how I could use Freud to analyze the story. I read the story probably ten times before seeing a connection to Freud’s idea of the id, ego, and superego. Now, I saw a connection, but will Dr. Pennington see a connection? We’ll just have to wait and see.

“The Story of an Hour” is such an interesting story, even though it’s incredibly short, and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t read it. I thought it was going to be difficult to write an essay on such a short story, but I found more than enough evidence for my claims. The thing I’m worried about most is that I haven’t written an essay like this in a long time, so I’m not sure if I’ve done it correctly.

At any rate, I actually enjoyed writing the first draft of this essay. I really liked taking a close look at a specific character and trying to figure out how her brain works. I don’t know, okay? The psychologist in me just really liked it; there’s no other explanation.

I’m aware that this essay is the one that students struggle with the most, so I’m fully prepared for Dr. Pennington to tell me that my entire essay is wrong. For now, though, I will enjoy my last few days of ignorant bliss before turning in my first draft.