first draft

The psychology of Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland is a wonderful story I had even seen. The whole story is so magical. And every chapter has a special little story talks about what happen in the wonderland for Alice. Alice see many unbelievable things in the wonderland. Like she can have a conversation with the animals and the food there can make her body size become bigger than before or smaller. The whole story has a obvious thing, Alice has vary self-conversations. As we known, no matter what Alice saw in wonderland is her dream. Her unconscious mind through her dream to express her deepest feeling. So the whole strong is easy to connect to the psychology.

In the story, she really like to talk to herself. When her faced everything make her feel upset, she would comfort herself. In some aspect, we can consider her  behavior relate to defense mechanism in psychology. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies brought into play by various entities to cope with reality and to maintain self-image. Freud proposed that the ego protects itself with defence machanism-tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality. But in 1977, George Eman Vaillant categorization, defenses form a continuum related to their psychoanalytical developmental in 4 levels.

In chapter one, Alice first down in the rabbit hole. She drank the drink in the table and she become smaller than before. Then she want to go into the garden but she found out she left the key in the table. She was smaller now and she can’t get the key from the table. So she began to cry. But soon, she told herself there’s no use for crying and she should leave it off this miunte. From this her behavior, we can know that Alice is try to keep her nagative feeling under her mind and let the positive feeling come out.  This is repression in denfese mechanism. She don’t want the nagetive feeling to bother her  and this feeling if exsist in her mind will make her feel unhappy. So she choose to oppress her feeling and tell herself to let it go.

Also follow this conversation, the book mention, “Alice sometime scolded herself so severely as to bring the tears into her eyes. And once she trying her own ears for having cheated herself in a gameof croqest she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two peaple. “ From this few sentense, you can analyse Alice was imagine herslf playing the two person croquest game and she want to through this to express her bad feeling. And crying is the best way for her to give vent to her feeling. This is fantasy in denfence mechanism. Fantasy  means people try to imagine something that is not exist  and they want to through the imagination to slove the inner and outer conflicts.

Finally, we can figure out there are so many different ways when people fece their nagetive feeling  in their life. And they will have different reaction to protect themslves and hide their nagetive feeling in their unconscious mind. But they are not really forget this negative feelling. Alice’s behavior is a good expression for the defence mechanism.From the beginning she down to the rabbit hole  until the end she wake up from everthing she saw in wonderland become a pack of card. She have  a lot of different experience in wonderland and she face a lot of touble too. And she through different defence to help herself to go through each of them.