Ebenezer Scrooge
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This paper is an analysis of Ebenezer Scrooge, the protagonist of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol from the perspectives of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Scrooge serves as a classic example of Freud's melancholic and Jung's introverted thinking type. Scrooge's "cure," occurring as he takes himself through his own version of dream therapy, provides an excellent example of both therapists' views about the nature of dreams. Scrooge's dreams are filled with rich Freudian possibilities for analysis and offer an example of Jung's opinion of the predictive nature of dreams. This analysis allows us to examine some of the ways in which Freud and Jung's theories of the psychology of the human mind come together and differ. Published in 1843, A Christmas Carol introduced Dickens' literary case study: a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster . . . He carried his own low temperature always about with him . . . (6). We meet this cheerless soul on Christmas Eve, begrudging his clerk a whole day off for Christmas, rebuffing his nephew's annual invitation to Christmas dinner, and coldly refusing to contribute even the smallest sum to "buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth" (11). Ignoring all signs of the holiday season, Scrooge trudges sourly home that night. As he enters his house, he experie
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gregariousness were extinguished by his abandoned isolation, even when his young sister rescues him one Christmas. The fact that Scrooge's dream contains only the rescue and not the actual holiday at home indicates that there had already been too many Christmases alone to be effectively counterbalanced by this lone exception.
Freud speaks of patients whose development has been inhibited, "who fall ill as soon as they pass beyond the irresponsible age of childhood, and thus never attain a phase of health - that of unrestricted capacity in general for production and enjoyment" (66). Scrooge seems to have had a few happy years around the time following that Christmas at home, particularly when he apprenticed with Fezziwig and promised his heart to Belle, but the seeds for his melancholia were already sown. A Freudian analysis could even argue that it was his engagement to Belle, his attempt to break free from the shadows of abandonment and the hatred of himself that this abandonment engendered, that actually triggered the depression which eventually culminates in his Christmas Eve crisis. Belle tells him, "That which promised happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are two . . . You may - the memo
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Approximate Word count = 2293
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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