Dominating the Pleasure Principle to Protect the Self

Abstract

The research attempts to unveil the Ego’s use of defense mechanisms to cure the internal distress experienced by Skellig’s protagonist, Michael. Among the contentions expressed by the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, neurotic anxiety is triggered because of an unfulfilled impulse. In David Almond’s novel, Skellig, Michael feels dethroned by his newborn sister. Her precarious condition shakes Michael’s status and sense of peacefulness. The unwanted arrival and the intricacies ushered by the baby lead the protagonist to develop adverse urges for his sister. The Ego’s defense mechanisms, namely Repression and Projection, interfere in the character’s mind to silence his impulses. The mechanisms’ censorship of Michael’s pleasure principle paves the way for neurotic distress. Alerted by anxiety, the Ego decides to relegate the impulse to the dream area. Despite the dream’s fulfillment of Michael’s impulse, distress prompts the Ego to appoint other defense mechanisms with a lenient treatment of the wish, including Fantasy and Sublimation. The calculated approach uses imagination that proves socially adequate with reality because it displaces the protagonist’s unexpressed feud with the baby by a conventional impulse. Likewise, Michael is able to indulge in his daydreams and a fair few fantastical trances. Therefore, relying on a psychoanalytic reading, the present dissertation analyses the fantasy work, Skellig, to highlight how Michael’s Ego has come to select the fitting defense mechanism for his repressed pleasures in order to cure his emotional distress.