Analysis of 'Coraline' Through Psychoanalytical Theories

Coraline was written in 2002 by an English author named Neil Gaiman. Although this novella is a children’s book, one can’t help but see a darker side to children’s literature and thus one can explore a psychological approach to this story and spark an interest in a postmodern gothic genre, and begin researching the aspects that makes this book so ‘uncanny’. The particular affinity between these disciplines and children’s literature owes much to the ancient tradition of using stories to help children understand themselves and those around them. Psychoanalytical stories that can engage with children’s fears, anxieties, angry reactions, and ‘naughtiness’, but can also offer advice about managing them, can help the reader with psychoanalysis.

“There was nothing here that frightened her. These things – even the thing in the cellar – were illusions, things made by the other mother in a ghastly parody of the real people and real things on the other end of the corridor. She could not truly make anything, decided Coraline. She could only twist and copy and distort things that already existed.” 

This implies that the other world Coraline is seeing through the portal isn't a reality; it's just a ‘ghastly parody’, or a creepy replication of the real world. The concept of the uncanny has been researched by many prominent names, most notably Sigmund Freud. The ‘uncanny’:  in terms of Freudian terminology, this concept is derived from a German word, ‘unheimlich’, which literally translates to ‘scary, eerie or unhomely’. A way to describe this is expression is ‘strangely familiar’. Thus, to clarify, when one recognise the setting but there is a sense of something unusual and unfamiliar, then one is experiencing the ‘uncanny’ feeling. If we think of the literal translation of ‘unheimlich’, the ‘uncanny’ should be referred to things that are scary because they are unfamiliar to us. Freud, on the other hand divides the meaning of the uncanny in two courses, ‘on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.’ Thus, the meaning of ‘heimlich’ slowly presents an uncertainty that then changes the meaning to the opposite, unheimlich. In response to that, both paths end up creating to the same result: “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” 

In The Uncanny by Freud and his reading on The Sandman (1816) by E.T.A Hoffman, he places his focus on the eyes. He claims that the loss of the eyes are the biggest contributing factor in making a story appear ‘uncanny’ as the eyes represent one’s identity. Freud then takes it further and introduces the idea of doppelgänger, having a double of you. However, when one confronts their double, as an adult, this double makes an uncanny feeling. Though, the sensation of the ‘uncanny’ conjured by the doppelgänger can also be due to having an extreme amount of self-esteem, a ‘super-ego’, an idea that Freud explored thoroughly. A ‘super-ego’ symbolises one’s most idealistic, unrealistic and utopian dreams and their wildest of fantasies, and because of this, the idea of having one’s double becomes unacceptable since it wounds the ego. Thus, the ‘uncanny’ is everything and anything that one experiences as an adult that remotely reminds one of one’s earlier psychic stages, in terms of castration and doubles. 

The book Coraline embraces all of these ideas. With the concept of losing one’s eyes and having doppelgängers, the notion of the ‘uncanny’ is a thread interwoven throughout the story. The protagonists, along with the readers enter a dream or secondary world where they encounter and triumph over frightening figures and scenarios derived from dilemmas in their everyday lives. The importance of both evoking children’s fears in the fiction they read and providing reassurance that they will overcome them is central to one of the most influential studies of the relationship between children and reading.

References

1. Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny. London: Penguin Modern Classics.
2. Gaiman, N. (2002). Coraline. London: Bloomsbury.
3. Reynolds, K. (2011). Chapter 2: Why and how are children's books studied? Psychoanalytic and psychological approaches. In K. Reynolds, Children's Literature: A Very Short Introduction (pp. 42-45). New York: oxford Unuiversity Press.
4. Thorn, S. (2018, December 13). Sigmund Freud and his reading of ‘The Uncanny’ in The Sand Man (1816) by E.T.A Hoffman. Retrieved July 20, 2019, from Edublogs: http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/ll625sampleblog/2018/12/13/sigmund-freud-and-his-reading-of-the-uncanny-in-the-sand-man-1816-by-e-t-a-hoffman/#_ftn2