Reading for Psychological Awareness The Secret Sharer
Reading for Psychological Awareness: “The Secret Sharer” Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is a prime example of a story to read for psychological awareness. ... In “The Secret Sharer” the unnamed captain is a psychologically complex character. ... Research into Joseph Conrad’s life can help to understand why he wrote “The Secret Sharer.” According to the website Classic Notes, Conrad based “The Secret Sharer” on an event that happened in his real life. “Conrad claims, however, that the incident that he based The Secret Sharer on is true, happening on a vessel cruising in the Far East. ... The website goes on to say imply that to write “The Secret Sharer” was therapeutic to Conrad: Like much of Conrads other work, "The Secret Sharer" is deeply interpersonal. ... His works, therefore, often deal with a lonely person who is cut off from his fellow man, as the captain is in "The Secret Sharer” (“Classic Notes”). Classic Notes goes on to explain that many of his stories take place in the midst of loneliness and isolation, but that “The Secret Sharer” symbolizes the end of this period in Conrad’s life (“Classic Notes”). ... The fact that “The Secret Sharer” is considered the end of Conrad’s loneliness suggests that this story was a way for Conrad to heal himself (“Classic Notes”). Freud’s concept of the conscious and subconscious can also be used to read “The Secret Sharer. ... The Classic Notes website explains how the gray sleeping suits that both the captain and Leggatt wear are symbolic of the personality and subconscious of the captain: These suits, which both the captain and the "secret self" wear, represent the place where the "dark self" and the self communicate.