The Purpose of Psychology in Creative Writing
As a self declared author and an avid reader, I have explored many worlds and unknown places and tried with little success to create my own. For years I have been drawn to books and captivated by their stories. I take pride in my ability to find amazing works and read all of them without hindrance. However, recently I have discovered what makes a book so enticing that it could captivate millions of people all over the world. It takes is the proper use of psychology. Being able to create a world and characters that reflect true emotions of believable or unbelievable behaviors and feelings can be aided and perfected with the use of psychology. Psychology can assist the readers and authors in discovering truths about themselves by means of self-analysis, seeing through a different perspective, using symbols and underlying messages to teach, and explore to best and worst of human behavior.
A book that is able to combine all those factors is truly a masterpiece and there are countless out there. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Bronte, and The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis are all distinguished works capturing the good, the bad, the disturbing, and the crazy of human behavior. All of which are symbolic and give us a new world and perspective to see through. They are known throughout the world and have been for many years. However, what has become an increasingly hard feat is to create a piece embodying all the characteristics of a great novel in our day and age. One such book is The Hunger Games created by Suzanne Collins, which is about a teenage heroine named Katniss Everdeen.
Katniss is a survivor. The first time I read her story, I saw her as a very simplistic character with very little depth. However, after learning about the connections between English and Psychology I read the book again and came to the realization that she is in fact a very complex character. Katniss has very simple views and beliefs about herself and the world she lives in. It is this initial view that leads many to misjudge her character. Despite all her suffering she successfully provides the basic needs for her family. Food, shelter and protection are Katniss’s primary focus; they form her identity and give her purpose. She is born into a gruesome world and from the start she is put into circumstances that would cause many to falter and in her world, means certain death. She prides herself on being independent and the proctor of her mother, sister, and the people she feels an obligation or loyalty towards. Yet even thou she has a solid foundation for what she believes and what her thoughts are focused on, her actually behaviors counter everything she herself values.
Katniss has strikingly little self-awareness, she doesn’t seem to grasp that her actions counter her beliefs. She puts such an importance on survival, but on many occasions she unnecessarily puts herself in life threatening situations out of unknown obligations that she herself is unconscious of. By chance she overhears a conversation regarding herself and is shocked by how she is perceived. This revelation begins her process of self-analysis and introspection.
She is confronted with the idea that she is cold and passionless. Underneath everything she only cares of the survival of her sister and of herself. At first it is a hard truth to except but as she realizes the underlying truth of this perception she also understands that this is not who she truly is. She reaches a moment were she is so confused by her own emotion and how she feels, the only thing she can think of doing is to shut everything out. Over the years, Katniss has developed the survival skill to shut her emotions away, which lead most to believe she was cold and uncaring. In the pinnacle moment when she sees her sister die she was forced to come to the absolute realization that her purpose has been destroyed. Confronting her emotions basically left her mentally incapacitated for many months. Katniss’s world and identity has been shattered and needs to be reshaped. This process started with suicide attempts but ultimately culminated in a stronger person.
When the reader is first introduced to Katniss, we see a young girl bent on survival at all cost, which is a dramatic change to the conclusion of her story where she tries to kill herself. Katniss attempts are stopped and she is ultimately imprisoned for her own safety. When it all fell apart she felt her only solution appeared to be suicide. How does a person radically change from one value set to another? It is my impression that because Katniss had such little self-awareness or understanding of her own feelings, when such an unexpected tragedy hit, she crumbled. The reader realizes that Katniss never put an importance on her own survival even though her outward actions appeared to demonstrate the opposite. Ultimately her true driving force was the survival of her sister. She unconsciously connected her survival with her sister because if she died then so might her sister. Katniss was the provider and the proctor and if she was absent her belief is that her sister would be uncared for and eventually die.
As a result Katniss’s story ends with her devastated and trying to find her way back with the help of a few friends and some much need counseling. It is a bittersweet end for Katniss, she is finally able to understand herself and is aware of her true thoughts and feelings but lost much in the process. The gains the reader utilizes by reading this book or any other book is exceptionally explained by Karen Horney, “The analyst/author’s general task is to help the patient/reader to recognize himself and to reorient his life as far as the patient/reader himself deems it necessary.”(Horney113) To use self-analysis in reading is to create a safe environment for one to explore another persons or characters experiences and personal hardships and relate to them. By doing so one can come to whatever revelation they are ready for.
-Charly Booth
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