A Psychoanalytical Approach to the Short Stories The Owner of the House, Summer Night and Train Journey by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Abstract

The paper deals with the psychoanalytical approach to dreams and the unconscious in three short stories by the Turkish author Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Insight into the nature of the human psyche and language as a medium of expression will be based on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. The psychoanalytical literature that we will use in this research will represent the fundamental theoretical basis on which we will try to valorize the above-mentioned stories. As part of the reading of the short stories The Owner of The House, Summer Night and Train Journey by the Turkish author Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, the emphasis will be on elements such as time, the past, dreams, the unconscious, the other or the personal history of the characters about the world they build within themselves. The identity crises experienced by the protagonists of the analyzed stories have their roots in childhood traumas, and dreams represent the key to uncovering the unconscious. By applying Freud's psychoanalysis to the text, they tried to reveal the symptoms of the text and the unconscious mechanisms whose meaning is hidden in images, symbols, and metaphors. In his short stories, we find the story of the collapse of the inner world of the hero, of their escape from reality and continuous search, while the subject(s) of the text itself is constructed through its past, or more precisely, it is defined by a complex of events and people from the past.