Lord of the Flies and Psychology Essay

William Goldings Lord of the Flies, narrates the story of a group of side of meat boys as they struggle to survive on an uncharted, un expected island. The boys airplane crashes into the island and put to deaths any adults on board leaving the boys to fend for themselves. Ralph and loutish meet each new(prenominal) first and, upon piglets counsel, Ralph decides to confab a meeting of all the boys by blowing on a conch shell. The boys right away begin to form a party in which they elect Ralph as their leader.A boy called jackstones quietly disagrees and believes that he should lead the group. As propagation passes, Jack and his choir be espouse hunters for the rest of the boys and they begin to lie with the shipway of a predator. As Jack grows more vicious, he becomes miserable with the way that Ralph leads the boys and decides that he will go to the other side of the island and subtract his own tribe. Boys slowly begin to leave Ralph to join Jack. The boys become so s avage that they kill two boys and they plan to kill Ralph.Just as Jack has cornered Ralph, a naval officer appears and rescues them all. Golding depicts not altogether the struggle of the boys to survive, notwithstanding besides the psychological reasoning that leads the boys to abandon the civilised nature that they know. Through characterization and setting Golding gives in his tonic, an ideal assemblage for validating psychological principles introduced by Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Carl Jung. Sigmund Freud was a psychologist who pioneered the thought that the mind contains 3 different levels, the id, the swelled head, and the superego.The id bases itself on the pleasure principle it meets basic needs. The id wants a fast-flying satiation of needs and has no consideration for the reality of a situation. The ego bases itself on the reality principle, it understands that other people have needs and desires and that impulsiveness or selfishness fire ca phthisis harm i n the future. The ego meets the needs of the id, maculation taking the reality of the situation into consideration. The Superego develops due to the moral and ethical restraints pose on a child by influential adults in their lives. iodin could comp ar the superego to the conscience, as it dictates belief of right and wrong. Golding acknowledges these different states of consciousness inside his novel by using characters to re bear witness each one. For instance, Jack represents the id. Jack never posts into consideration the best topic for the group or himself in the long run and he holds himself accountable to no set of rules or any code of ethics. Bollocks to the rules Were strong we hunt If in that respects a beast, well hunt it downWell close in and bout and beat and beat (91). Jack addresses the issue of a beast believed to inhabit the island by filling his thirst for violence and neglecting to learn into consideration that confronting a beast will around likely lead to danger. Jacks reasoning involves selfish motives he wants to get rid of the beast, he wants to kill, he does not care that he has potentially placed the others in a dangerous situation, nor does he realize the ludicrousness of the beast, Jack has neglected reality entirely. shoat represents the ego.He constantly tries to reason with the other boys, when he and Ralph first meet, shoat understands that the other boys also landed on the island and individual needs to capture and suspensor them. We got to find the others. We got to do almostthing (14). Piggy also realizes that the boys will most likely stay on the island for a while before someone rescues them if someone ever rescues them at all. Piggy understands the boys while staying in equal with reality and he knows that if he does not find the smaller boys and take care of them, they will die.Piggy comprehends the seriousness of their predicament and realizes what it will take to concord everyone in order and alive. Si mon represents the superego because he adheres to the principles instilled in him by society and civilization. After Jack has killed a pig for the first time, he and his company approach while chanting, Piggy whimpers and Simon hushed him quickly as though he had spoken too loudly in church (69). Simons conscience keeps Piggy in line even when dealing with savage Jack.Towards the end of the novel, the other boys savagely murder Simon when the boys kill Simon they also kill their conscience, they kill the rules and implications set upon them in order to keep society refine and from this point until the boys get rescued their savage nature completely takes all all over and nothing holds them back any longer. Alfred Adler believed that genius difficulties are rooted in a feeling of low quality. He also believed that people focus on maintaining check up on over their lives.Golding shows these ideas in his novel. Piggy, Ralph, and Jack all have issues with inferiority and stop, in some way each of them feels inferior and each them strives for incorporate. The other boys consider Piggy substandard to them because physically he is not their equal, Piggy realizes that the other boys perceive him this way and tries to make up for it with his intellect and speech pattern on the rules, which leads into Piggys control issue he tries to use control to counter act the feeling of being out-classed.Jack eternally strives for superiority, from the very beginning Jack feels that he should be chief or else of Ralph. Jack crumbles underneath his need to become more superior than Ralph and decides to takes control of his situation and forms his own tribe. Jack tries to control his life by acquire his way and convincing other boys to get his way as well. Ralph fears inferiority, leading thrusts itself upon Ralph but he holds his position in very high regard. As Ralph loses support from his tribe, he loses his superiority and he begins to lose faith in himself and becom e more nervous.Ralph does not like the loss of control in his tribe or in his life, the signal fire and getting the boys to help him make shelters was so important to him for this reason. Adler studied various show depicted objects of people and he came to the conclusion that there are the four main types of people The reigning type that tries to control others, the getting type that tends to go along with others ideas, the avoiding type that tries to isolate themselves to avoid defeat, the socially useful type that values having control over their lives and strive to do good things for the sake of society.Jack represents the judgement type with his demand that the boys do as he says go on the two savages looked at each other, raised their spears together and spoke in time. The chief has spoken (141). Jack thrives off of ruling and absolute power. surface-to-air missile and Eric add up into the category of the getting type, they tend to go along with and do what others tell them to do. Whenever Ralph is their chief they listen to him and go along with what he says, and past when Jack captures them and takes them to his tribe they adhere to his code and do what he says.surface-to-air missile and Eric follow they do not contribute to creative thought but they willingly take part in its aftermath. Simon represents the avoiding type, he largely keeps to himself, and he goes and finds a secret place where he can sit altogether in the quiet with his thoughts. Ralph represents the socially useful type, he likes to have control of the boys but, unlike Jack he wants them to do things for the betterment of the group. Adlers ideas come to life in Goldings Lord of the Flies.Psychologist Carl Jung believed that symbol creation was a key in understanding human nature. Symbols express something essentially apart(p) in the best way possible. The boys in Lord of the Flies create a symbol for their fear, at times the boys feel afraid and they cannot simply express why. The boys create the symbol of the beast because they cannot touch or obtain their fear and so they imagine a beast that they could touch and see. Whenever Simon recognizes that the thing to fear lies within the boys he also creates a symbol, the Lord of the flies.Jung also believed that the introvert and the extrovert make up the main components of personality. The introvert, like Simon, tends to keep to themselves, and find more interest in ideas than in people. Simon paused. He looked over his shoulder as jack had done at the close ways behind him and glanced quickly around to confirm that he was utterly alone (56). The extrovert however, is outgoing and socially oriented. Both Jack and Piggy fit the description of extroverts because, they both freely express their ideas and long for others to hear and admire them.According to Jung a person that has a healthy personality can realize these opposite tendencies and can express each. Ralph most closely adheres to Jungs theory about h ealthy personality. Ralph has a need for socialization but, he also knows when he needs time for reflection and thought, many times Ralph wishes that he had time to gather his thoughts before he had to go and present them in front of the rest of the tribe. When reading Lord of the Flies some reviewers may miss the latent meaning and only focus on the manifest.Readers who do not take in deeper psychological nature of the novel would attribute the boys different reaction to the island, to differences in personality and background instead of the boys taking on the image of the different levels of consciousness. This reader might think that they could not keep order simply because they are just young boys when their real motives were their subconscious need for superiority. The entire novel deals with the psychological principles set forth by Freud, Adler, and Jung it could be considered a case study that verifies the very things that these psychologists believed.