The Pschoanylisis Of Holden Caulfield

My name is John Johnson and I am Holden Caulfield’s psychoanalyst. I have a PhD from Stanford University and have been working with teenagers for ten years. However, Holden Caulfield has been different then any other patient I have ever had. Even though Holden and I have had a pretty good relationship it still has taken more than a year for me to get him to open up and tell me anything about his life. Just recently I was able to convince him to do a little free association with me. Once he did open up through the free association activity I found out some interesting things.

I think that the Id dominates the ego with Holden. He does things without really contemplating what the consequences will be. For example he doesn’t apply himself in school because he does not think he needs school. If his ego could contain his id then he would realize that if he ever wants to do anything with his life then he needs to get through school. He also acts impulsively around women like when he is on the train with Mrs. Morrow, the mother of one of his classmates, he begins to act strangely, he said, “’Would you care for a cocktail?’ I asked her. I was feeling in the mood for one

I feel that Holden has a lot of anxiety because he is afraid to grow up. His nature of anxiety is he tries to avoid anything that makes him feel that he is getting older. Holden uses a lot of projection though out the book as one of his defense mechanisms. “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me”(2). He says the movies are phony and so are the people that go to them. Even though he says this he goes to the movies and he has very strong feelings about them. Holden does many things to contradict himself throughout his story. Such as taking Sally to a play even though he says that he does not like them either. He doesn’t want to become like this but he can’t help it, which is why he tries to make it look like all the people around him are the phonies even though he is the biggest phony of them all.

I also feel Holden has a lot of regression which is returning your mind to a state of gratification. “God, he was a nice kid, though. He used to laugh so hard at something he thought of at the dinner table that he just about fell out of his chair”(38). This is just one of the times where Holden regresses and thinks about Allie when he was alive and how happy he was. He regresses about other things that made him happy too. Such as Jane Gallagher and how they use to play together when they were kids. “We’d get into a god dam movie or something and right away start holding hands, and we wouldn’t quit till the movie was over. And without changing position or making a big deal out of it. You never even worried with Jane, whether your hand was sweaty or no. All you knew was you were happy. You really were”(79). Feelings like this and when he is having a conversation about Jane with Stradlater “All I know is I got up from the bed, like I was going down to the can or something and then I tried to sock him, with all my might, right smack in the toothbrush, so it would split his god dam throat open”(43) make me think Holden should get back in touch with Jane and try to reconcile what ever relationship they had. Even though Holden never calls Jane he often thinks about calling her during his hard times, which shows she is important to him, but he is afraid that it will be a different Jane Gallagher because she has gotten older, and he will not like her anymore or she will not like him. I still think he should take the risk and try to get her back in his life because although he cannot have Allie back he still can have Jane.

I think in the short term Holden has a lot of work to do to get himself into a substantial mental state. He will really need to coo

Some topics in this essay:
Holden Caulfield, Hollywood DB, Florida California, Jane Gallagher, Jane Stradlater, Allie Jane, little kids, Stanford University, Holden Caulfield’s, jane gallagher, free association, phony people, holden anxiety, feel holden, playing game, catcher rye, anxiety growing, holden caulfield,