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 experiences a thrilling and horrible moment. He sees, instead of the large knocker on his own front door, the face of his long-dead partner, Jacob Marley.
Unsettled and disturbed, his night is filled with dreams. He visits his own past, examining it perhaps for the first time for clues to the man he will become. He travels across his present, journeying to hearths whose invitations he has never accepted before. Finally, he dreams of the future, a vision t...