Christa Wolf’s Defence Mechanism of Conflict in Unter den Linden

Abstract

Everyone has defense mechanisms that protect them from external threats. Sigmund Freud considered that the defense mechanism refers to a person's subconscious process that persists in anxiety. Unter den Linden is a short story about a woman who walks in her dream and was written in 1969 by Christa Wolf. She is a novelist with her work which discusses a lot of social critics. The social criticism presented in Unter den Linden is also about gender equality, she opposes GDR ideology which is very patriarchal and demeans women through Unter den Linden. These papers' goals are to analyze the bridge between literature and psychology in the field of conflict and defense mechanisms. This research was conducted using a descriptive qualitative method. The source of conflict that will be analyzed in this paper is how defense mechanisms affect Christa Wolf's state of mind. Instead of doing bad things, she prefers to channel her emotions through work. This is called the sublimation self-defense mechanism. It is shown by how she wrote the story to criticize the GDR government who ruled East German. The result of the analysis shows that psychology and literature are two things that cannot be separated and both affect the writer's life and social life