A Psychoanalytical Approach To The Picture Of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, the only published novel by Oscar Wilde, never lacks criticisms from critics. Previous psychoanalysis of this work was always based on Freudian psychology of three dimensional personalities to analyze the protagonist’s imbalanced psyche development, and in the meanwhile they further traced Oscar Wilde’s own triple personalities. Freudian psychology emphasizes that libido is the dominating factor driving all human unconscious. However, Freud’s former disciple Carl Gustav Jung considers that human unconscious includes a wider spiritual field. Jung first puts up the concept of collective unconscious, the content of which are archetypes-the primitive images inherited from our ancestors. According to Jung, psychological archetypes are important factors influencing our interaction with the conscious world. To integrate the important archetypes from the unconscious into the conscious harmoniously is the process of Jungian individualization. During this process, the persona, the shadow, the anima/animus, the sagacious man and the Self are the principle archetypes people have to handle.This thesis attempts to analyze the tragedy of Dorian Gray from the perspective of Jungian individualization. From this perspective, the paper discusses the three crises which occur in Dorian’s individualization. First, Dorian’s over identification with the persona causes him to lose his true self completely into the unconscious, which finally leads him to be the prey of the shadow influence from Lord Henry. Second, Dorian’s self-denial of his anima signifies that the anima in his unconscious fails to function as the medium between the ego and the unconscious. Lastly, Dorian’s murdering his sagacious man embodied by Basil Hallward, whose kind and sincere advices should have saved him from the many crises and predicaments of individualization. Meanwhile, the wicked changes in the picture demonstrate that his shadow gradually conquers him and finally centers the imbalanced Self. In the end, Dorian fails to handle the conflicts among the principle archetypes in his unconscious, let alone to assimilate them into the conscious. Hence, he could neither make peace with his inner world nor with the world outside. His individualization ends in failure.