You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
IN THIS PAPER I SHALL CONSIDER A WORK OF LITERATURE IN LIGHT OF a psychoanalytic understanding of developmental processes. The work, The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers, is about a 12-year-old girl. The novel is set in a backwoods Alabama town and is peopled by characters seemingly remote from common experience. Yet the haunting power of this work, about a girl on the threshold of adolescence, depends on its evocation of affective states and of conflicts that are almost universally characteristic of this stage of development. In examining these phase-specific conflicts within the framework of psychoanalytic theory, I shall try to illuminate the power of the novel, and hope that the analysis of the novel may in turn deepen our understanding of the processes of development during this period.
Adolescence has been described as "the second individuation process" (Blos, 1967) comparable to the first which takes place