Freaky Freud-day: Finding Freud in Poe’s “The Black Cat”

In Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, the cats are mistreated in the hands of the narrator, perhaps unleashing his inner emotions onto these cats. Freud explains his theory of displacement which is the expression of inner emotions, usually violent, on trivial objects that do not have severe consequences. At first glance when reading this story, it was easy to assume the narrator was an out of control drunk who murdered his cats and wife for an unexplained reason. When analyzing the story in depth, the hate the narrator possess is not towards his wife or even his cats, but rather towards himself. For instance, he kills the cats when it ignores him, but he also hurts them when they are kind to him. The narrator does not initially hurt his wife, but he eventually kills her because he feels that she is suffering by being married to him. His inner demons displace his disgust of himself onto those around him not only physically but emotionally as well.

The first instance of this displacement was with his first cat Pluto. As was said in the text, “One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer.” Only a person who hates himself would take offense to a cat, his own insecurities and built up anger would cause him to harm the cat. And the fact that he was out in town drinking heavily to the point of intoxication goes to show his desire to bury his problems. No sane person as the narrator claims himself at the start harms a cat for avoiding him.

He displaces his emotions again with the second cat this time. For example, the narrator writes “For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but — I know not how or why it was — its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. 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. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually — very gradually — I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing.” Now, when the cat takes a liking towards him, he rationalizes his hatred of himself and his actions onto the cat.  He looks at the cat with hatred because he cannot look at others and treat others that way. Just as he perceived the first cat avoiding him, he attacked it and when the second cat liked him, he wanted to harm it. This further adds to the idea that he actually hates himself and that the cats are the perfect trivial objects to displace his emotions upon.

For the last example, he describes his feelings about his relationships towards his wife before she enters the cellar with him, “From the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.” He believes that his wife by being with him, is suffering. That he believes that he is such a despicable person that his wife suffers every day by being with him. That is why when the opportunity presents itself, his mind displaces his feelings of hatred not on her but their relationship, thus killing her. By doing so, his mind is able to be feel at ease with avoiding having to face his insecurities head on. It is much easier to repress and displace these emotions onto other things than having to confront it and face it.

By killing the cats and his wife, the narrator loses his mind. He never truly expresses why he hates himself so much because he can’t bring himself to it. As Freud implied in his 5 lectures of psychoanalysis, we repress thoughts and ideas in our minds that we don’t want to face. Rather than facing them, our minds creates loopholes to allow us to avoid our problems in a way that makes sense to us. Freud’s belief in this idea of displacement is evident in Poe’s short story because of the narrator’s inability to deal with his problems. His constant repression led to killing people and animals to avoid facing this issue that bothered him so greatly. If the narrator was a patient of Freud’s, he would’ve one thousand percent told him he was repressing and displacing his feelings onto other things. Freud’s work and ideas can be applied in literature in every time period.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.