The character of Michael in The Godfather
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The character of Michael in The Godfather, is a good candidate for a detailed character analysis of the self-conscious, making him a good example of Freud's so-called structural hypothesis, which posits a theory of personality built on three principal components plus an ancillary feature: the ego, superego, and id, plus the libido. Freud says that personality emerges in three states of being: preconscious (Pcs), unconscious (Ucs), and conscious (Cs). The push-pull dynamic is elaborated in Freud's distinction between the ego, id, and superego. The Ucs, however, is the source of "the impetus to dream formation" (Freud, 1978, p. 397), and the role of the Ucs is decisive for Freud. Theorists building on Freud's pioneering work have carried the death-instinct idea to fundamental status. In Michael there is evidence of significant tension between ego and superefo enacted sociologically. The principal focus of ego-id-superego tension in Michael is sociological. Ego is the conscious projection of self into the world and self-preservation. To the degree all personality theorists owe a debt to Freud's work, Erikson's approach to human development can be said to derive partly from Freud's theory of the ego structure (Wallerstein, 1998). Undoubtedly Michael Corleone's environment and culture affect his psychosocial development as can be shown using both Freud and Erikson. The epic structure of The Godfather is consistent with Erik Erikson's schema for structur
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but also vis-a-vis those presumably closest to him emotionally.
In an essay on psychoanalysis originally written in 1926 for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Freud explains that the "most recent" view of the "mental apparatus" is that it consists of an ego, or the Cs sense of self and the environment, an id, or instinctive impulses, and the superego, or external influences on the id that are played out in ego experience (Freud, 2000). The impulses are first and always sexual for Freud, who "linked the etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it (Jay, 2000). Freud declares infantile sexuality an observable fact that persists in the Ucs in the developing human being and that the ego either does or does not come to terms with. Specifically, if in childhood, and for whatever reason, the ego fails to work out what Freud terms the Oedipus complex, or the Ucs libido-driven sexual rivalry with one parent for the other, and form a nexus with the superego (conscience or moral agent), then some neurosis is to be anticipated. That complex accounts in any case for feelings of guilt and anxiety that emerge despite actual incest guiltlessness.
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Approximate Word count = 5572
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)
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