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KMID : 0385320060170020189
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
2006 Volume.17 No. 2 p.189 ~ p.203
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Who Killed the Catcher in the Rye
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Lee Byung-Wook
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Abstract
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Salinger’s famous novel [The Catcher in the Rye] has been the bestseller since 1951. I am interested in the paradoxical message of rescue fantasy of the protagonist Holden Caulfield and the longstanding reclusive life of J.D. Salinger. In my viewpoint, it seems that he shows serious identity confusion as a half-Jew, and has a strong contempt for the self. Although he struggles to deny his own corrupted aspects including the parental imago, and he projects them into the outer world, but he seems to fail to integrate love and hate deep-seated in his own mind. That is his unique tragedy. Salinger’s psychopathology seems to be various as like narcissistic grandiosity and frustration, obsessive-compulsive traits, odd schizotypal uniqueness, and ego-centricity, paranoid tendency, not depressive but overly optimistic belief system, a strong need to be rescued through the spiritual purification etc. I think that the main power who killed the catcher in the rye is from his strict but sparse superego and his own inner parental objects relations. This is the reason why he conducts the pursuit of a nirvana condition which seems to get rid of those deep-seated inner objects. But the writer is not healer, only open questioner. I think that the real catchers for the wandering children and young persons are not totally provocative flatterer with the negativistic messages, but their open-minded parents, teachers and many clinicians, and finally I believe that many real active catchers are even now striving for their psychological growth without socially full attention.
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KEYWORD
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Salinger, Catcher, Rescue fantasy, Growth
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