Psychoanalysis of Christian Grey

Abstract

In the recent times, literature has witnessed the rising of a very different and vague genre called Erotic Literature. Though there have been traces of such works since the emergence of novel, for example, John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) or more popularly known as Fanny Hill, in 1791, Marquis de Sade (French) published Justine or Misfortunes of Virtue and in 1869 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch published his infamous novella Venus in Furs and so on . Later in the nineteenth century, psychology developed as a concrete science and the intricacies of the human mind were meticulously deciphered. The implications of this new science were largely visible in the world of literature and Psychoanalysis became one of the major sources of interpretation of text and striking connections were unveiled. One of the most recent pieces of work that certainly created a ripple in the contemporary literature of the world is the trilogy of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L James which became an enduring structure in bondage, discipline, dominance, sadism, submission and masochism (BDSM) fiction and romance. In this intriguing novel, the protagonist Christian Grey is a young entrepreneur who is interviewed by Anastasia Steele, the female protagonist, as the novel proceeds a relationship blooms between the two which eventually lead to the unravelling of the 50 shades of Christian Grey. Grey turns out to be a sadist and Ana his new found girl. His peculiarities in performing the sexual activities and his perfection at BDSM compelled some of the critics and psychoanalysts to diagnose him with a mental disorder that is sexual sadism. Similarly, Karl Jabag claims to find symptoms of post-traumatic stress due to his disturbing past. His unnatural obsession with sadistic action convey the character's relation with terms like oedipal complex, denial, sublimation, internal conflicts, pleasure principal and so on, and thus making him a dear character to do a case study on for psychoanalysts by profession or by passion.