Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious Minds of the Scarlet Letter’s Main characters

Teaching literature to university students has been for years a mere literary analysis of the characterization, settings, plot summary, themes and structure of the narrative; however, other deeper levels which should be investigated are ignored by the teacher and the student. The author psyche before and during accomplishing his literary product, the characters’ psychological state and the relation between the author and the characters are subjects to be investigated. Thus, the present paper aims at exploring Nathaniel Hawthorne’s the Scarlet Letter with the use of Sigmund Freud’s three elements of the psyche the id, the ego and the superego. The main characters of the novel are analyzed from a Freudian psychoanalyses perspective. These analyses expose the inner psychological state of the characters and how they develop until they reach their final picture by balancing their id, ego and superego by the end of the story. This study is qualitative; it proves that the text of the novel is rich with examples to explore many psychological theories, mainly the three elements of the psyche. With reference to the author’s personal life and experience with his puritan ancestors, a clear relationship links the author to his characters, and this could be detected by Freudian psychoanalyses of diction or the lexemes repeated in the novel.