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.
