Distress and Psychological Distortions in Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island”

Abstract

The research in hand sets out to analyze, illustrate and exemplify the mental distortions, trauma, and the traumatic events through which not only the plot of “Shutter Island” was constituted, but also the identity of characters, as they will be duly psychoanalyzed through the course of this paper, was stoutly solidified through their impact. Trauma, via this study, is to be examined through the perspectives of leading predecessors such as Freud as well as pioneer thinkers including Ronnel, Althusser and scholars of sovereign order in human sciences so that a conclusive maxim of the nature of the trauma and its implications in “Shutter Island” will be attained, thereby allowing for a multifarious psychoanalytic quest as desired. Needless to say, mental disorders as diverse as psychosis, delusion, hallucination and amnesia, whose ubiquitous occurrence and recurrence would not cease throughout the story, will be discussed and lucidly illuminated, not regardless of how and why they have been given rise to, for ‘Shutter Island” is not but a conflation of two entities as cited above: trauma and the mental distortions.