Psychoanalysis of repetition: Return of the symbolic and the real in Edgar Allan Poe's tales

Although psychoanalysis has been partly replaced by the branches such as neurobiology and hypno-psychotherapy, it has been one of the prominent criticism and analysis techniques used in academia since the end of the 20th century, and this new tradition still maintains its popularity. Besides, psychoanalyzing the society, media and politics has become widespread today. With Jacques Lacan?s amalgamation of Freudian and post-structuralist theories and his creation of a new movement, it has also begun to be used in other schools of criticism like post-feminism and gender studies.Psychoanalysis as a literary criticism not only brings out the mental structures of the characters in novels and short fiction, but also aims at unfolding the reasons regarding the style and narration, which stem from the unconscious. What it actually does is neither a thorough analysis of the writer nor the restoration of the psychological defects within the text; it is not the ethical rehabilitation of the guilty, but the presentation of the real to the reader by dislocating them from the said and the unsaid inside the text. Thus, it forces them to face the unknown and leave them at this point, thereby providing an open-ended solution for the reader.The fact that the neurotic, hysterical and psychotic symptoms of Edgar Allan Poe?s characters are so definite enables the affective use of psychoanalysis. Their distance from the notion of the typical subject of Lacan?s Symbolic order causes the disclosure of the unconscious at certain moments, and these result in regret, alienation, violence and melancholy. Whether it is the outside `big Other? that is repressed or the idea and thought inside the mind, it returns to the conscious in various ways and it may make the experienced crisis vicious and unbearable. The Symbolic is usually capable of manipulating both the conscious and the unconscious of the subject. Thus the study in this thesis is the close analysis of the returns of Symbolic and the Real among the traumatic repetitions to the consciousness of Poe?s characters.