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Abstract
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This study is about the effects of Sigmund Freud’s concepts of defense mechanisms and maturation on psychological development of the main characters in Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Freud’s take on defense mechanisms is still relevant today, and contemporary psychiatrists like George Vaillant have tried to categorize them, placing Freud’s defense mechanisms on a continuum related to their psychoanalytical developmental level. This research underlines that nearly all the main characters of the novels under this study, namely, Mr. de Winter, the second Mrs. de Winter, Jane Eyre, Mr. Rochester, Catherine, and Heathcliff, are stricken by the death of their parents, and encounter traumatic experiences of stress and anxiety as they grow up. Researchers like Ahmed, Amaliyah and Prastiwi, Hadiyanto, Conwell, and Harju have studied few of the defense mechanisms, such as denial, identification, repression, reaction formation, and rationalization, that the main characters unconsciously use in these novels. These researches, excellent as they are, however, fail to see whether the main characters’ defense mechanisms are mature, adaptive, and healthy, or immature, maladaptive, and unhealthy. Unlike these researchers who have studied defense mechanisms and their negative effects as abnormal responses of ego, in this study I will draw on Vaillant’s concept of maturation of adaptive mechanisms, pointing out the understudied defense mechanisms like repression, projection, identification, reaction formation, distortion, sublimation, withdrawal, rationalization, and fantasy that the main characters use as normal reactions to deal with distressing situations that have positive effects on the main characters
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