Abstract

Psychoanalysis, or at least the traditional version proposed by Sigmund Freud, is viewed by many modern psychologists as a highly controversial, sexist “pseudoscience” (1). There are many reasons for this, including dubious, untestable ideas, unethicality of some of the claims, and lack of scientific support, all of which are quite justified (2). However, while some of Freud’s proposals may very well be considered far-fetched, many of his fundamental ideas are still applicable to multiple fields, and are the foundation of most modern theories around personality and the psyche. This paper will attempt to explore potential uses of psychoanalytic theory in the interpretation of literature, particularly personality of characters in fiction. It will be using Nalo Hopkinson’s short story ‘Slow Cold Chick’ (from the anthology published as Skin Folk) (3) as an example. It will do so from the perspective of psychoanalysis being a real social science, much like psychology. This means viewing it from the perspective of provable hypotheses, and as such, the paper will be referencing many famous academic papers around the area of personality and psychology. The paper will primarily focus on how our unconscious thoughts affect our decisions, using proven examples such as cognitive biases¹, and how this influences an individual’s personality.

Whats in a person?

There are various theories on personality. Some are rooted in sound evidence and studies, while others are merely speculations. While there is no solid definition of personality (6), psychologists agree that analysis of personality involves answering the following two questions (6): “what are we like (usually in comparison to others)?” and “why are we like that?”. The first of these two is relatively easy to answer (6) and can be done through a multitude of ways such as self-reflection, asking a close friend, taking a reputable personality quiz, or the like. It is the answer to the second question that psychologists don’t agree upon (6), and is precisely the question that psychoanalysis tries to answer. Sigmund Freud is often attributed as the founder of psychoanalysis with his highly controversial book (1) The Interpretation of Dreams (7). The book introduces the concepts of the “probing the unconscious”, specifically through assigning meaning to dreams (1) and other streams of preconscious thought (the “ego”) (7). Moreover, the book also introduces a highly socioculturally unethical argument of the Oedipus and Electra complexes², referring to unconscious sexual attraction to the opposite gendered parent in a developing child (4 to 7 years old). This causes what Freud called “castration anxiety” in males, and “penis envy” in females (6)(7), in other words, the desire to replace the same gendered parent. He proposed that this is the reason the males identify more with their father, and females with their mother, they learn from the same gendered parent in hopes of replacing them one day. Now this probably sounds quite far-fetched and unreasonable, and that’s exactly why it received so much criticism (1)(8)(9).

While the theory may be unworkable for scientific usage, the fundamental concepts are perfectly sound for literary criticism. By utilizing Freudian notions of the behaviour of thoughts at the conscious (the “superego”), the preconscious (the “ego”), and the subconscious (the “id”) levels (6)(7)(see 15 for explanation of these), we can possibly derive new meaning from text, and alternative interpretations of the decisions of characters. This paper will focus on applying the idea that subconscious and preconscious mental processes affect conscious, rational decision making, and will use psychoanalysis to analyze themes from Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Slow Cold Chick’ (3) to demonstrate this.

Cognitive Bias and Consciousness

Psychologists define rationality, specifically epistemic rationality as the ability to form beliefs that align with truth, and also avoid those which are conducive of error (12). It has been proven time and time again that our minds are not perfectly rational (13). Imagine this case: A large company is building a new transportation system. In the middle of building the system, it is found that ultimately, the company will lose money. However, the company keeps investing because they are “too far into it to quit”. (Sunk cost fallacy³). Or another case: A rare virus has a 0.1% infection rate. A test for this virus has a 10% false positive rate (and thus a 90% accuracy rate). If an individual tests positive for the virus, what is the probability they have the virus? Someone without knowledge of statistics would probably say 90%. After all, the test is 90% accurate, right? It turns out that this is incorrect. If you did the math, you would find that you were significantly off; the actual chance of the tested individual having the disease is 1%. (Base rate fallacy⁴). The point is that our minds are flawed due to unconscious errors in thought, which in turn affects our conscious thinking and “rational” decision making. These are called cognitive biases (4), and are undesirable most of the time due to the errors it can produce (but apparently also sometimes advantageous, see 14). They can be overridden through conscious thought if the decision maker is aware of the bias. While these biases themselves aren’t actually important in our discussion of ‘Slow Cold Chick’, the point is that our unconscious thoughts very often affect conscious decision making. In the case of literary works, viewing texts by analyzing the thoughts of characters can possibly lead to a deeper understanding of the unconscious motivations behind their decisions, which in turn can bring out new themes in a work.

In psychology, psychoanalysis is typically performed in sessions where the patient expresses free thoughts and feelings to the therapist. The therapist will try and piece together unconscious conflicts using many techniques, some of which are described in Freud’s previously mentioned book The Interpretation of Dreams (7). In addition to the ones described in Freud’s books, some newer techniques were added by other therapists over time⁵. We will be using the techniques described to analyze the character of Blaise.

Freud’s ideas of the three levels of consciousness⁶ are instrumental to his explanation of personality. In order to perform psychoanalysis of Blaise in ‘Slow Cold Chick’, we will firstly attempt to infer unconscious aspects of Blaise’s character (her “id”) through elements given to us by the author. In the story, we see that Blaise is struggling with trying to hold in her identity and emotions. At the start of the story, Blaise is angry, supposedly at her telephone: “‘Oonuh couldn’t wait just a little more?’, she asked resentfully of the silent instrument” (3). We can infer that this is a paid phone in which there is a set time limit depending on the amount of money you pay, evident by Blaise’s repeated reference to the fact that she will get paid on Friday, and the use of the third person pronoun “they” in the first sentence, implying that neither Blaise nor whoever she was talking to was the one who hung up. Also the use of the phrase “cut off” only makes sense in this context. In the next lines, we are told that she “couldn’t ask her mother to put milk or water in the cornbread” (3), establishing Blaise’s mother as the other person on the phone, and also establishing the reason behind her anger: she wanted to ask her mother whether milk or water should go into the cornbread, but was interrupted by the cutoff time on the phone. The emotion of her anger would be associated with the psychoanalytic notion of the id, part of her unconscious impulsive desires present from birth.

Venus, Vulcan, and a Chicken

We see in the story that both the Venus-built lady (later introduced as Sharon) and Johnny are both allusions to Roman mythology, with Sharon being compared to the Roman goddess of love and fertility (Venus), and Johnny being compared to the Roman god of fire and metalworking (Vulcan). These are pretty evident in the descriptions given of the characters: Sharon is directly stated to be a “Venus-built lady”, and Johnny is described as having the “texture of chipped rock” (3) and is also said to be a metalworker. Keep in mind that these are the descriptions of the two from Blaise’s perspective, they may or may not be completely accurate, and the important notion is that Blaise’s perceptions of these characters will be influenced by her unconscious thoughts. If we examine the descriptions closer, we can gain some more insight into the psychology of Blaise. For Sharon, we see that Blaise describes her using adjectives such as indolent, beautiful, and self-possessed. She also uses phrases appealing to the physical and sexual desires, especially focusing on the mouth, things like “nasturtiums that pursed into succulent lips”, and “so low that the lady could have plucked them with her mouth”. Further phrases such as “gingered brown hair flung itself in crinkled dreadknots down her back, tangled as lovers' fingers”, “skin had the glow of full-fat chocolate”, and “flower-breathed words” reveal to us even more of this sexual vocabulary.

From here we can make an inference: perhaps Blaise is sexually attracted to Sharon? This certainly seems possible given the repeated references to possibly sexual symbolism. After comparing how Blaise views the males in the story, her next door neighbour and Johnny, we see that this could very well be the case. Johnny is described to be physically appealing. We see Hopkinson use diction such as “tanned shoulders”, “corded muscles”, and “wiry strength”. However, Blaise describes him as “Not handsome, but striking”, indicating that she is not romantically attracted to him. This also explains why she is so angry when her neighbour comes under the pretense of “wanting company” but really after her body. In addition, Blaise also acts embarrassed upon physical contact with Sharon (“Sharon slid an arm around Blaise’s waist. Blaise relaxed into the touch, then caught herself. Ears burning, she eased away”), and seems to repeatedly make remarks about Sharon’s scent and demeanor (“a part of her still aware of Sharon’s rosiness and duskiness”) . Just by looking at Blaise’s (likely unconscious) perceptions and interactions with these three individuals, it is becoming increasingly likely that Blaise is attracted to other individuals of the same sex as her.

Next, let’s take a look at the cocatrice and the other animal (a ferret) which are mentioned in the story. Blaise’s cocatrice first emerges from out of a rotten egg. The chick quickly grows until it is about the size of a spaniel, and is capable of killing and eating a ferret. Freud proposed that there were five psychosexual stages in the development of personality (6), and that problems during any of the stages will lead to specific behavioural and personality characteristics, some of which are problematic⁷. The development of the cocatrice seems to start off normally, then halt after the oral stage (first stage). It starts from licking some pepper sauce (oral), then skips the anal stage. The phallic stage is hard to judge. The gender of the chick is not specified, so it is unclear whether or not the chick will develop an Oedipus or Electra complex. However, the main developmental task for this stage is identification with one of the parents, leading to the development of the superego (6). The chick evidently does not have a moral compass, neither does it have control over its animalistic, violent, and sexual desires. It killed Blaise’s neighbour and his ferret without second thought. However, note that these stages are not important or crucial for psychoanalysis, which focuses on the effect of unconscious thought. Additionally, there is very little scientific base for these stages and they have not been observed or confirmed in children (19). Regardless, Hopkinson makes it fairly clear that the cockatrice represents Blaise’s conflict with her sexual desires and aggressive drive (in Freudian terms, called the “id”) (6). We can see this in the fact that it incinerated Blaise’s neighbour and his ferret, which was what Blaise’s instinctive and basic desires wanted to do. On some level of her consciousness, she wholeheartedly wanted to get rid of him for good (“Why couldn’t he ever take a hint? She wished he’d just dry up and fly away."). She would have killed him herself if her “ego”, the preconscious governed by the reality principle, were not there to keep her “id” in check. This explains why the chick, with no development of moral compass or any level of consciousness beyond the “id” due to fixation in the anal and phallic stages, took action and incinerated the neighbour and his ferret.

We see that the connection with Blaise and the cockatrice is also true for the neighbour and his ferret. If the cockatrice represents Blaise’s sexual and aggressive drive, then it is reasonable to think that this extended metaphor is applicable to the ferret as well. The ferret is described as being furtively “slinky”, reminiscent of “a furry penis with teeth”. This sexual imagery is used to reinforce the metaphor that, at least at the most basic, primitive level of thought, Blaise’s neighbour is interested in sexual desires around Blaise’s body. In terms of the symbolism side of things, a cockatrice is a mythical creature said to be capable of killing by a stare. According to bestiaries from the late-medieval period, weasels are the only animal immune to a cockatrice (20). As ferrets are a mammal closely genetically related to weasels (21), this is likely not an accident by Hopkinson. The weasel that is supposed to be the nemesy of the cockatrice, the only animal it cannot kill with a stare, is swiftly dealt with.This shows the degree of Blaise’s feelings and anger she has kept inside.

Given this point of context, we can see the seemingly random events of the ending and resolution of Blaise’s conflict come together into a meaningful message. After telling Sharon and Johnny the events behind the cockatrice, she takes them to her apartment, where Johnny faces the cockatrice in an attempt to kill it. This is symbolic of the struggle Blaise has been facing. The cockatrice, a physical representation of her homosexual desires, is undergoing a one on one struggle with a male. A handsome, Vulcan-like male at that. The rest of the ending is thus fairly self-explanatory. When the cockatrice starts dying, Blaise “felt warmth begin to drain from her body”. Sharon replies with: “You want to kill your every desire dead?” Blaise realizes that she is empty without the cockatrice, empty without her desires. Later in the end, Blaise finally tells it what she wants: “I want to be able to say […] ‘I like you’”. Blaise swallowing the cockatrice and getting her “fire” back is representative of her new confidence in her identity. She remarks that she feels “Strong, sure of herself”, and also makes a comment about the way Sharon’s position healing Johnny’s blisters “emphasized the fullness of her body”, another reference to her homosexual identity.

Defense mechanisms

Freud’s version of psychoanalysis is also very concerned with what he called defense mechanisms, which can indicate possible points of fixation⁸. There is a blatantly obvious use of one of these mechanisms in the story. When on her walk to the animal shelter in an attempt to rid herself of the cockatrice, she is interrupted by Sharon asking her to help with garden work. Here’s the excuse Blaise uses to help them instead of dealing with the cockatrice: “The problem was too big for her to deal with for a moment. With an ‘Um, okay,’ she chose denial”. We see two of Freud’s main defense mechanisms in play here, denial and rationalization, which often go together. By agreeing to help her neighbours when she still has the cockatrice to deal with, she is denying the fact that she has a problem, refusing to believe that there was bad news. She rationalizes this decision with the fact that the problem is too big for her to deal with for the moment. Of course, the irony and logical fallacy in her argument is that the bigger the problem, the sooner she should deal with it. As we continue with the day spent helping Sharon and Johnny, we see that Blaise uses the defense mechanisms of denial and rationalization once again. She makes the assumption that the cockatrice is asleep: “The shelter would be closed, but probably the cockatrice was asleep by now”. She assumes that because of the absence of dire outcomes from the cockatrice since the time she came to help Sharon, the cockatrice would be asleep. This is full of logical errors. She makes an incorrect causality attribution ⁹, and also makes an argument from silence¹⁰. We can see that she is using these defense mechanisms in order to avoid the cockatrice. A Freudian psychoanalyst would say that her unconscious “id” is trying to get her away from unreasonable desires (in this case, her attraction to members of the same sex). This could possibly be due to fixation at the phallic Freudian stage⁷, when she did not correctly develop an Electra complex^{11, 7} for her male parent. We can further develop on this by taking into account Blaise’s relationship with her mother at the beginning of the story. She is clearly ‘identifying’, as Freudians would say, with her mother, as she is trying to make cornbread like how her mother made it. Another clue is that she was previously talking with her mother on the phone before it cut off, about an unstated topic. The subject matter of the talk is not important, the main idea is that she has a relationship with her mother, presumably a fairly good one. What’s important to realize here is that, in the Freudian view of a psychologically healthy adult, Blaise is perfectly normal (at least before she starts sexually describing Sharon). This furthers the idea that Blaise is holding her true desires in, possibly masking it with attempts to become ‘normal’, so much that she is developing an Electra complex, and identification with the same-sex parent. The symbolism behind Blaise hiding the fact of cockatrice from Sharon and Johnny at first is also an indicator of this.

You are what you eat

In addition, we see food playing a big role in the extended metaphor of the cockatrice and of Blaise’s internal conflict. At the beginning of the story, Blaise is trying to make her mother’s cornbread, establishing the previously stated attempts to become “normal” and the late development of an Electra complex (which according to Freud, is indicative of a mentally “normal” female). Cornbread reflects this as a relatively normal food, at least compared to the roses and dirt that the other characters eat. If we examine the foods in which the characters eat and compare it to their personality, we see something interesting. Blaise’s neighbour is shown eating a “cheap chocolate bar” and is “lanky and pimply”. Sharon eats roses and has “aloe scented breath”. Johnny eats rock and dirt and has a “voice like gravel being ground”. We can see a pattern: you are what you eat in this fictional world. Looking at the objects Blaise eats, the cornbread she is trying to replicate from her mother represents, as stated above, her attempts to become ‘normal’ as it is a relatively normal food. This is reinforced even more by the previously mentioned ideas about the connection with her mother through a developing Electra complex. At the end of the story, we see that she swallows the cockatrice. This is indicative of the change that occurred throughout the story. At the beginning, she is trying to fit in, holding back her true desires. At the end of the story, she now consumes the cockatrice, albeit unwillingly, but it shows us that she has now come to terms with her actual desires. Following the paradigm of ‘you are what you eat’, we see the shift from the previous state of the Electra complex and trying to be ‘normal’ (eating cornbread to be like her mother) has now disappeared and Blaise has learned to embrace what she actually wants (eating the cockatrice). In addition to performing psychoanalysis on the characters in the story itself, we must also examine the story through the lens of the author using the literary work as a means of unconscious expression, much like a dream¹². Therefore, we must consider the author’s intent behind writing the story. In an excerpt¹³ from Nalo Hopkinson taken from Skin Folk (the collection of stories where ‘Slow Cold Chick’ was originally published with), Hopkinson tells us that “it seemed that all I could see was the sex and the violence. ‘Slow Cold Chick’ is the result of my effort to restrain those twin energies”. This is consistent with our predictions of the cockatrice being a physical representation of Blaise’s sexual desires. Sexual topics are also a big part of other stories in Skin Folk as well.

Literary analysis, at least from a psychoanalytic perspective, is just predictions, which is why it is so comparable to psychoanalytic therapy. We look for things such as patterns, literary elements, etc. from the text in hopes of deriving meaning from the text. We hope that it is what the author intended, but even if it isn’t we still succeeded in gaining something from the text. Psychoanalysis in therapeutic psychology is really the same thing. Freudian ideas such as “probing the unconscious” is really just sugar for guessing meaning out of a series of random thoughts from the client. It is guessing because after you have derived meaning, no matter how sure you may be that you are right, correlation is not causation¹⁴, so you can never get to be 100% sure of the root cause just from probing thoughts alone. This is incidentally, one of the reasons why psychoanalysis is not used scientifically anymore. However, as we have seen in this paper, the psychology of both the characters and the author is very important in determining the themes and meaning of a story. ‘Slow Cold Chick’ could and has been (see 22) interpreted in many different ways by different people, using differing forms of literary analysis.

All in all, we see that although the use of psychoanalysis is limited in the scientific realm, it is still very useful for literary analysis of fictional characters. As we have shown with analysis of ‘Slow Cold Chick’, we cannot deny that the Freudian notions of the unconscious mind affect our conscious perceptions and decisions. This is made especially apparent with the appearance and symbolic significance of the cockatrice and it’s development, which we earlier inferred to be lacking a superego. By performing psychoanalysis on the author and characters, and analyzing the specific choices of symbols and diction used by Hopkinson along with using some logic, we were able to piece together a fairly complete picture of Blaise, her life, and her change throughout the story. This leaves us with a more complete understanding of the emotions, themes, and pictures Hopkinson expresses throughout the story. Hopkinson teaches us to embrace our desires, even if we need to swallow a cockatrice to do so. In a world where eating roses makes you pretty and eating rocks makes you tough, remember that you can’t settle with just cornbread.

References

1. Michels, Robert. Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry: A Changing Relationship. 1999.

2. Brunner, Jose. Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis. 2001.

3. Hopkinson, Nalo. “Slow Cold Chick.” Skin Folk, 2001, Grand Central Publishing, pp. 61-68

4. Haselton, Martie G. and Nettle, Daniel. and Murray, Damian R. The Evolution of Cognitive Bias. pp. 2

5. Sadock, Benjamin. and Sadock, Virginia. and Ruiz, Pedro. Kaplan and Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2017.

6. Boyes, Mike. “Personality.” Psychology 203, University of Calgary, 2020.

7. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899.

8. Rycroft, Charles. A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, 1995.

9. Daly, Martin. and Wilson, Margo. Homicide, 1998.

10. Arkes, H. and Hutzel, Laura. The role or probability of success estimates in the sunk cost effect, 2000.

11. Bar-Hillel, Maya. The base-rate fallacy in probability judgements, 1980.

12. Steup, Matthias and Zalta, Edward. “Epistemology.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2005.

13. Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational. 2008, HarperCollins.

14. Caplan, Bryan. Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irrationality. 1999.

15. Maroda, K. The Power of Countertransference: Innovation in Analytic Technique. 1991

16. Jung, Carl. “The Psychology of the Transference.” The Practice of Psychotherapy.

17. Barr, Alison. “An Investigation into the extent to which Psychological Wounds inspire Counsellors and Psychotherapists to become Wounded Healers, the significance of these Wounds on their Career Choice, the causes of these Wounds and the overall significance of Demographic Factors.” The Green Rooms. 2006.

18. Boyes, Mike. “Psychotherapy.” Psychology 203, University of Calgary, 2020.

19. Fisher, Seymour and Greenberg, Roger. The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy. 1977.

20. Bane, Theresa. Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore. 2016.

21. Harris, S and Yalden D. Mammals of the British Isles: Handbook. 2008.

22. Various authors, https://sexandthesupernatural.wordpress.com/category/nalo-hopkinson. University of Iowa class blog. Retrieved May 31, 2021. • No ideas were taken from this site, I’m simply linking for demonstration of multiple possible interpretations of Hopkinson’s work, specifically ‘Slow Cold Chick’

23. Walton, Douglas. Informal Fallacies: Towards a Theory of Argument Criticisms. 1987.

24. Burns, William. Spurious Correlations. 1997.

25. Pinker, Stever. How the mind works. 1997.

Footnotes

Most of these notes are small summaries. Direct quotes are wrapped with “”. The reference source number can be found in parentheses after the quote/paraphrase.