‘A Happy Person Never Phantasies’: Repression and Projection of the Self in John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things

Abstract

This chapter applies the models of repression and projection presented in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung to show how fairy tales and fairy-tale monsters, especially in a distorted form, are derived from reality and how they serve as an empty stage onto which fantasies and desires, as well as problematic aspects of the Self are transferred through the process of repression and projection. By projecting these aspects onto an ‘Other’—an Other world, as well as the figure of the Other—they are no longer experienced as belonging to the Self. Therefore, it becomes easier to work these denied parts of the Self over, and the process of becoming conscious is evoked. Focusing on John Connolly’s novel The Book of Lost Things (2006), the distorted fairy-tale elements—the fairy-tale world as well as the reworking of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’—are analyzed to highlight how the process of repression, projection and becoming conscious works in relation to monstrous fairy tales and fairy-tale monsters.