This is the Exploratory essay I did in class.

Biraj Dutta
Professor Von, Alyssa
FIQWS 10108/10008
20 October 2019

The Exploratory/Expository Essay

Have you ever had a crazy experience? and questioned yourself about whether you’re living the truth or it’s all a lie? It’s hard to define reality since we all have our own definition.
People like Sigmund Freud have played a major role and influenced generations of psychologists
with his writing pieces. Sigmund Freud was known as the father of psychoanalysis, where he
used many illnesses/disorders to shed light on the matters. Over a time period, the characteristics
traits of the subjects change. These specific fundamentals can be identified as “wishful impulse”
and “The forces of repression”, which In the story “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, which
exploits the ideas of how these ideas changed the character.
Whether its Freud’s 5 lectures on psychoanalysis or Poe’s “The Black Cat”. They both
share a common idea regarding their subjects and the importance of mental health. Although it
helps us understand their symptoms and rational behaviors. First, we have to understand the
stages of repressions. One of the stages is Wishful impulse, which is the attribution of reality to
what one wishes to be true . Then it follows by repression, which is the action of subduing
someone or something by force . In the short story, “The Black Cat” displayed signs of
“repression” and “wishful impulses”. The narrator was an alcoholic. He was slowly getting
angered and his addiction took the most out of him, and it came to a point, where he killed his cat
2
(Poe,6). After this horrific act, he ran into a stray cat, who looked just like his old cat with
gallows mark, it later followed him home (Poe,6). Under the circumstances It made him go
insane because it reminded him of his anger.
The story “The Black Cat” supports repression and how it changed the character by going
back to the beginning, where the narrator repressed his feelings towards a deadly goal, appall,
and hate towards creatures from an individual that cherished creatures and is content with life.
According to the short story “By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into
the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of
my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it”(Poe). It explains his
repressed feelings towards living beings and how he himself changed as a character in a period
of time. At the start of the story, he identified himself as someone who appreciates living things
but it wasn’t the case. He repressed his true feelings till the day he couldn’t hold done anymore.
In addition to the narrator’s feeling of repression Poe says, “My original soul seemed, at
once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin nurtured,
thrilled every fiber of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity”(Poe). This is an example of the wishful impulse. The narrator killed his cat Pluto because it aggravated him. It was like the cat was a symbol of hatred, so he tried killing the cat again, and pulled out his eyeballs. This is a sign mentally ill, patient. The narrator felt guilty from his conscious point of view, but it was too late. It only brought back more strong negative feelings, since his unconscious was taking over his thought process. The 3 feelings of murderous intents not only cost the narrator’s cat, but It was also impacted the life of his wife, which was cut short by the narrator himself.
The negative feelings that the narrator held within him was never gone, when he tried to regain his love for animals, he felt the hatred towards the cats once again and the feeling of love was started to fade away once again. His wishful impulse was to kill his 2nd cat. In the process
of killing his cat, the wife interfered and tried to stop her husband from committing such an act
the husband became upset and smashed his wife’s brain. This act can be seen as wishful impulse
and repressed feelings.
Decisions that you make today, will reflect your tomorrow. In “The Black Cat” the
character’s actions have reflected his thought process and his actions have impacted his own
wishful impulses and the repressed thoughts/actions that he was holding and how it came out to
affect his wife and cat. The whole story revolves around Freud’s ideas to show how the narrator
takes on the repression and wishful impulses that appear. The narrator’s mental disorder can only
be justified by Freud’s lectures. The father of psychoanalysis analyzed the narrator of the short
story “The Black Cat” by Mr. Poe, which only raises questions about complications of such acts.

Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis . New York,
Norton & Company, 1952.Poe, Edgar Allan. The Black Cat .