Psychoanalytic criticism commenced in the performance of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who colonized the approach of psychoanalysis. Freud advanced a language that described, a model that explained, and a theory that encompassed human psychology. His theories are directly and indirectly connected with the nature of the unconscious mind. In one of his studies, Freud stated, “Behavior and personality were derived from the constant and unique interaction of conflicting psychological forces that operate at three different levels of awareness: the preconscious, the conscious, and the unconscious” (Cherry). In Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad, Conrad portrays Marlow as a character who encounters the stations of the mind. As Marlow encounters the three stations along the Congo River, Marlow encounters three regions of the psyche. Conrad develops the three physical stations as the psychological stations of the Superego, the Ego, and the Id.
Although, before grasping the concept of the stations that Conrad is moving the readers through, it is essential to understand the relation between psychology and the Heart of Darkness. As critic Jadvyga Kruminiene once explained, “It is an intentional product of an individual personality, a poet or prose writer; on the other hand, it is originated from the unconscious and ignores human consciousness by ‘insisting on its own form and effect’ (Jung 1993, p.66). There is something “supra-personal”, that “transcends our understanding to the same degree that the author's consciousness was in abeyance” (ibid.,p.75) during the process of his/her creative activity.” In other words, Kruminiene connected his perspective through the theory of Jung. Although, according to Freud’s structural theory of the mind, the Id, the ego, and the superego function in different levels of the consciousness. There is a constant movement of memories and impulses from one level to the other. As the critic stated, it is originated from the unconscious and ignores the conscious. In connection to the novella, Heart of Darkness, it focuses on the three stages of the psyche, which is assumingly ignored by the critic and his focus on Jung’s attribution.
The Heart of Darkness is set in the backdrop of the Congo River, in the African jungles. Joseph Conrad, the author of this novel, had piloted a small steamboat up the Congo River amidst a dense land which was being heartlessly exploited as the private property of King Leopold. Although Conrad wasn’t to meet any Kurtz, the entire experience of the journey left him morally, mentally and physically crippled. Thus, this novel possesses many auto-biographical elements as Conrad has included many inferences based on his own experience in the African jungle. And this also strongly impacts the psychological nuances which the characters in the story go through.
Throughout the voyage of the Congo River, Conrad reveals the depth of mind that Marlow experiences. Critic Harry White and Irving L. Finston stated, “At the point in the narrative where Charlie Marlow begins his voyage upriver to meet Kurtz, Conrad pushed the novel beyond his own remembered experiences by imagining Marlow journeying to a particular region deep within the heart of Africa to which the author had never traveled” (White, 2). Going along with the region of depth, Conrad has developed not only a journey within the heart of Africa, but also the region of the mind. White and Finston are able to analyze the novella to the bottom core, to understand the intensified thinking of Conrad. Although Conrad does not explain the meaning toward every passage to the readers, it takes critical thinking and observations to understand the true message that is being told: not only to understand the region within the heart, but also the region within the mind.
The Id is virtually about self-gratification and basic desires, without any sort of permeate or check against unreasonable urges. The Id is kept in balance by the Ego, which strives to satisfy desires in partial ways without ultimately going out of restraint. The superego functions as a sort of moral circumference, guiding actions by social rules. Throughout the novella, Conrad walks Marlow through each of the Freudian psychodynamic approaches. Conrad additionally uses the stations that Marlow encounters to represent conflicts within the mind.
As Conrad gravitates Marlow through the stations, he is also exposing the readers to the personalities that Marlow is going through. As critic Michael Levenson told, “Heart of Darkness served as a paradigm of the psychological novel, almost a defining instance. Its political concerns appeared as the predictably deceptive surface that one had to penetrate in order to disclose dark truths about the human personality, truths most often associated with the insights of Nietzsche and Freud. Within this conception Marlow's journey only incidentally involves movement through physical space; in essence it represents a “journey into self,” an “introspective plunge,” “a night journey into the unconscious” (Levenson, 1). With that being said, it is proven that there are other critics who analyzed the novella to be psychological. Allowing the readers to grasp the personality that Conrad is giving toward Marlow, it also strongly connects to the Id, ego, and superego. The personality of a newborn is started off with (inate) with the Id, and then is later developed into the ego and superego. In contrast with Marlow, his personality intertwines within all three of the psyche regions. Levenson also includes the insight of Freud, and the role that he plays with interpreting Heart of Darkness.
Upon arrival, Marlow detects the Outer Station as an outright disaster, with trash everywhere and a group of Natives who are suffering from starvation while hopelessly being tied against a tree. By contrast, the Manager is superbly dressed and maintains a facade of control. This station and its manager seem to essentially function as the superego, attempting to control the Natives and present an air of order. Although, society’s rules refuse to translate into the Congo the way they would have elsewhere. While there is a sense of order, it is crystal clear that something is amiss. Exclusively, with the manager’s reluctance to trust the Central Station, even though they should be able to communicate with one another. The Central Station is buried deeper in the jungles and controlled by a manager who has a clear resentment for Kurtz and his success. While there are attempts to take away authority, the manager has a firm grip on every movement around him. The station functions as the ego in Marlow’s voyage-maintaining order while suggesting an underlying darkness. The ego can oversight the Natives without descending to the levels of the Outer Station, but there is still insufficient sense of complete sanity.
While the journey through the Jungle advanced (progresses???), Marlow became traumatized by the surroundings and visuals that he would observe. As critic Kolocotroni and Vassiliki announced, “The ground-breaking novella Heart of Darkness (1899), Conrad too harnesses the haunting force of personal and collective memory in the creation of cautionary and compelling tales of exploitation and ruin. For both, humanity is its own agent, beset by secrets and incomplete repressions, while maintaining through the groundwork of memory a constant vigil over the prospect of past and present brutality” (Kolocotroni, 2). As Marlow gravitates his head slowly to observe the awful insight, he silently questions humanity. As repression is included, it is an unconscious mechanism that is employed by the ego to keep (the???) disturbing or threatening thoughts from becoming conscious. As Marlow is in his ego stage, he is forcefully pushing the descriptive visuals that he has glimpsed at so he does not have it continuously running through the conscious of the mind.
When Marlow arrives at the Outer Station in Africa, he is in the superego of the mind, marked by (the???) morals and one’s impression in society. Marlow realizes the evil of exploiting the Congo natives when he observes the dehumanizing slaves, stating, “They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom”(Conrad 20). He then meets the chief accountant, very concerned with his image, surrounded by slavery and death but still wearing the superego “high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket” (Conrad 21). At the Outer Station, Marlow is still morally upright and aware, despite the decay of civilization around him.
As Marlow travels up the Congo River to the Central Station and enters the ego state of his psyche, his morals fade. The ego is the transition between the superego and the id, concerned not with society’s impression of one’s actions, but how to carry out the id’s impulsive desires in a logical way. The Ego is psychologically defined as, “The personality component that is conscious, most immediately controls behavior, and is in most touch with external reality” (Simply psychology). The Ego consciously makes decisions for the whole mind. The Ego also helps attribute to controlling the Id, or the primal urges. It controls the moral standards of the mind and is self-controlled. At the Outer Station, Marlow reveals to his readers, “I went to work the next day, turning, so to speak, my back on that station. In that way only it seemed to me I could keep my hold on the redeeming facts of life” (Conrad 20). In Marlow’s perspective, turning his back on the station, or self-control, helped him to remain human. If he had not turned his back of self-control, he would have become abandoned and vacated of life as the manager was. He would not have found it possible to distinguish the good in life. At this point of his journey, Marlow is finding difficulties with keeping control of his urges, but is possible to overcome it because he is still in the Central Station, where his Ego still has control of his Id. Furthermore, while traveling, Marlow and his crew encounter cannibals. His moral judgment falters when he sees the cannibals as “fine fellows” since “after all, they did not eat each other before my face” (Conrad 36). Throughout their time around the central station, Marlow becomes obsessed with meeting Kurtz, a sort of mystery in Marlow’s eyes. The hazy fog that appears as Marlow and his crew near the Central Station is a metaphorical transition. When the fog disappears, so does their concern with civilization’s rules, bringing their psyche closer to the id.
Being closer to the psyche of the Id, it is possible to make a connection to another critic who emphasizes the fog. As John Peters stated, “Said believes that the fog in this scene obscures the truth. Of the white fog incident of “Heart of Darkness,” H.M Daleski argues that
the difficulties of pushing up the river and down into the unconscious are in part rendered in terms of sight, that artistic imperative of the preference [to The Niagger of the “Narcissus”].Just before Kurtz’s station is reached, the steamboat is enveloped in “a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night’ (Conrad 101), with the result that the travellers’ eyes are ‘of no more use’ to them than if they had ‘had been buried in miles deep in a heap of cotton wool’ (107). (Daleski 52).
Furthermore, the fog is used to cover and close the mind, which does not allow you to see or understand which state of mind that you are in. Considering a tremendous storm, the difficulty to see where one is driving or to understand the direction that one is heading to is completely vanished. Confusion begins to run through the mind. With that being said, the Id is being driven to strive for the desire to get through it. During the fog, Marlow is in the Id trying to push through the fog to view past it.
In the jungle’s heart, there is neither civilization nor rule, making it an ideal domain for the id. Freud says the id represents unrepressed human instinctive desires, also a lustful and irresistible state, tempting human nature. While in the heart of darkness, The superego and ego, focused on image, protect the id. When Marlow finally reaches Kurtz, it immediately becomes clear that he has reached a place of confusion and chaos. Kurtz has been allowed to become a kind of oppressor who is worshipped by the Natives, and has been allowed to run completely free of the rules of his old society. From the heads placed outside his door to his fanatical narcissism–“My Intended, my station, my career…”(Conrad 63), his inner station is the id. Reaching back to basic human principles, it has lost all sense of law and order, resulting in chaos. Without moral guidelines or any sort of reminder of the society Kurtz left behind, it becomes a place where he can be worshipped and get as much ivory as he wants. By traveling from the Outer Station to the anarchy of the Inner station, Marlow’s journey is also into the human mind itself, and the “heart of darkness.”
Understanding the multiple ways that the Heart of Darkness could have been interpreted, there was a large approach to the psychological perspective. According to critic Stephen Ross, she stated, “There, he called Heart of Darkness a “psychological masterpiece” which relates “the things of the spirit to the things of the flesh, . . . the invisible life to the visible, . . . the sub-conscious life within us, our obscure motives and instincts, to our conscious actions, feelings and outlook” (Garnett 132). The following year, another early reviewer pointed to this important feature of the novella by complaining of the “wearying” effect of its “entanglement of psychological with external phenomena” (New York Times Saturday Review 296). In other words, Heart of Darkness has been understood by an enormous amount of critics and psychologists as a psychological masterpiece. Rather it is regarding Marlow and the psyche stages, or repression and regression. There are multiple ways to grasp the message that Conrad is giving off.
Freud’s concept of the human psyche illustrated that the majority of what humans experience in their lives, the underlying emotions, beliefs, feelings, and impulses are not available to them at a conscious level. Freud believed that most of what drives humans is buried in the unconscious. Marlow had plunged into the depths of his soul and seen a glimpsed truth. He had not only discovered himself but also “all the hearts that beat in the darkness” – what he saw is universal. He had identified the source of darkness in himself and in the consciousness of his civilization; and at that moment finding for the first time the heart of darkness. Marlow’s discovery of the heart of darkness gave “light” on his life and the title illuminates the story for the readers. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a powerful exploration into the complex unconsciousness of the human mind.