Murfin

so, i read the murfin thing. it wasn't great because i didn't agree with everything that he said. There were some things that definitely resonated with me though. The bit about Jung that said that stories like HOD are comments on the collective unconscious of society sounded right. By the way, my grandma is a Jungian analyst. The bit about the characters of books being representations/sides/repressions of the author's personality sounded right to me too. Unfortunately for Murfin, Freud is no longer widely used in the psychology community because of his crazy theories about kids and sex, and that really detracts from this paper because Freud is the paper's focus. I also think that he is right to point out that Freud and Conrad wrote about the "darkness" that is in all of us. Freud's was the unconscious/id and Conrad's was innate desires and evils. Murfin talked a lot about dreams and about books being like the dream's of authors. I'm not sure why he felt the need to make that connection, but he did and it's not great. Yes, it makes it easier to talk about psychology when you can talk about a dream, but it's not. Making up a story, especially one with so many metaphors and symbols as HOD, requires a great deal of conscious thought. so saying that the story is purely the unconscious representation of whatever is in the author is just not true. And that's what i have to say about that.