Psychologists have been focusing on how the repressed and subconscious emotions play an active role throughout life since the early twentieth century. The ‘Father of Psychology’, Sigmund Freud, theorized a system of categorizing individual’s mental life into three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the primitive part of personality that respond directly to the human instinct, while the ego is the decision-making component, and it develops to satisfy between the lust for the id and the external world, and the superego is the part of the personality that deals with moral judgment. Many authors have incorporated this theory into the portraits of the characters in their works.
The novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, for example, tells a story about the end of the innocence and the beginning of the savagery that a group of British children left stranded on a beautiful island after a plane crash, and they were immersed in freedom until the human nature took over. Golding utilizes Jack, Ralph, and Piggy, who are the main characters of the novel, to interpret Freud’s concepts of these three types of human personalities respectively.
