A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Lascivious Eyes Based on Freud's Theories of Anxiety and Defense Mechanisms

Literature emanates from human mind, and the analysis of human mental actions contributes a lot to literary criticism. Psychoanalysis, as the science connecting literature and psychology, has been able to reflect the problems of society through psychoanalytic concepts by entering the field of literature and processing and analyzing the literary texts through characters and their inner states. In his novel Lascivious Eyes, the Saudi novelist Qmashh Allyan recreated the characters of the story through a psychoanalytic approach and highlighted the impact of divorce on the emergence of various types of psychological anxiety for children. Using the descriptive-analytical method and Freud's psychoanalytic criticism and relying on his theories of anxiety and defense mechanisms and the way these concepts are applied and implemented by the characters, this study seeks to analyze the impact of divorce on the actions and reactions of the novel's characters in order to provide a better insight about the phenomenon in question by extracting its components. The results showed that the two main characters of the story, after their family breakdown, were suffering in various situations from realistic, neurotic and moral anxiety and resorted to defense mechanisms according to the situation where they felt anxious to protect themselves from unbearabale realities and mental conflicts.