Psychoanalytic approaches to the effects of excessive religious ideologies in matthew gregory lewis' the monk: A romance and margaret atwood's the handmaid's tale

This dissertation argues that a person who is filled with great enthusiasm in pursuit of achieving extreme religious objectives is inevitably subjected to serious psychological problems. Through the novels in this study, the probable sources of severe personality and mental disorders of the protagonists are explored by means of regarding them as patients who are raised in the hands of merciless religious leaders. Due to the fact that excessive ideologies demand their devotees to comply with strict orders under any circumstances, individual aspects of followers are erased. This situation causes them to return to the early periods of their childhoods- that is, mature persons turn out to be infants who struggle to resolve the conflicts of Freud's early stages of psychosexual development. Living childhood traumas in adulthood is also an indication of the failure in the formation of identity in the infancy. Considering that sexuality is crucial in the process of creation of one's identity, strict ideologies' repressing or limiting sexual lives of their fanatics in the novels is one of the crucial reasons why they are not able to form their identities. This dissertation is worthy of attention as being an attempt to give an example of psychoanalytic literary criticism by means of utilizing psychoanalytic approach to interpret the novels and the protagonists' inner selves. Key Terms: Religion, Ideology, Individuality, Psychoanalysis, Psychosexual development, Identity, Sexuality