A psychoanalytic expedition into the dark core of the ... - JPCS

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies
ISSN No. 1948-1845 (Print); 1948-1853 (Electronic)
the better part of the development of the human species in Civilization and its Discontents. If used to
reread Conrad’s metaphorical language of the tale of Kurtz told through Marlow’s voice, Freud's
analysis might prove useful in psychoanalyzing the modern mind of the Enlightened European. As the
19 th century European literary novel meets early 20 th century psychoanalytic theory, this encounter
might reveal to us the precise nature of the collective pathology of the Modern European mindset in the
very terms through which it began to understand its own psychology. Though a tempting prospect, in
order to avoid the danger of superimposing a structural coherence onto a literary narrative, this essay
will not attempt to undertake what could be called a Freudian reading of Conrad’s novella. It will,
however, try to tease out some Freudian themes within this work of fiction. It is hoped that a
psychoanalytic exploration would enable the excavation of some of the darker secrets that lay hidden,
repressed in the neuroses and psychoses that raged within the enlightened mind of modernity.
It would be obviously problematic to attribute dynamics of the Freudian psyche onto the lives of actual
individuals, but insofar as Heart of darkness is a work of fiction, it might afford us the luxury to
examine is as a specimen representative of the topography of the modern European mind. Given that
most of the narrative is a long drawn out confession on part of the main narrator named Marlow, the
monologue could be read as an outpouring of the repressed conscious (and here we might imagine a
psychoanalyst seated among his silent audience). The metaphor of the exploratory expedition which
might represent the colonial project as a whole could also be read as a kind of self-exploration of the
darkened contours of colonial psychology. Moving one step further from Marlow's confessional
monologue, if the novella as a whole were to be considered as a transcript of the modern mind, then the
characters that we find therein might be taken as representing psychological constructs that might relate
A psychoanalytic expedition into the dark core of the enlightened mind,’ Asif Ali Akhtar
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