Freud And The Catcher In The Rye

Throughout the story, Holden sometimes slips away from the issue at hand, and begins to tell a story of a little fantasy or a flashback. This is his form of escaping the clutches of reality when it overwhelms his conscious. An example from in The Catcher in the Rye, would be after Holden got robbed of his 5 dollars by Maurice and Sunny, then soon after he refused to comply with their commands, he got punched by Maurice in the stomach. When this occurred, he imagined he had been shot. Continuing his fantasy, he also pictured going down to Maurice 's room and vented, “As soon as old Maurice opened the doors, he’d see me with the automatic in my hand and he’d start screaming at me, in this very high-pitched, yellow-belly voice, to leave him alone.

As the novel goes on, we see a great issue between Holden and his troubling relationships with women, and pretty much everyone else. Holden sees women as easy to fall in love with for whenever they do something pretty, even if he thinks most of them are “stupid. Yet, even with his saying this, Holden cannot admit that he has some kind of feelings for Jane, an old friend whom he often thinks about throughout the book, and always wants to call but is never in the mood. If put through the eyes of Donald Hall, Literary and Cultural Theory, and his key principles based on Freudian theory, the reasons he does these things would be much clearer. He believes, in regard of Holden’s outburst with Sally confessing his love to her at an odd moment in chapter 17, that, “Holden has finally met a female willing to be with him and the very act enhances his feelings of rejection by his own mother.” Whenever Holden feels as if he might be getting somewhere with someone, he repulses, so this may be the reason why he had never called Jane, because he was not “in the mood” to get rejected by someone he cares about and have to experience those feelings all over again or even more than he already does. Lynette C. Magaña with Judith A. Myers-Walls and Dee Love, Provider Parent Partnerships, “Different types of Parent-Child Relationships,” provide a list types of relationships children may have with their parents and how it affects them. In here, they mention “Avoidant Relationships” in which the