The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is suffering from mental illnesses but she isn’t getting the proper treatment she needs. Sigmund Freud mentions how some doctors like Breur, don’t really see hysteria as something real because it isn’t concrete or something they can physically treat. This has led to many mistreatments such as the ones shown in “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

In Freud Sigmund’s second lecture, he goes into more detail about the causes of hysterical dissociation. He believes those who have fallen to hysteria, have failed to repress unpleasurable wishes but the wishes are still within the unconscious mind. For example, he had a patient whose father and sister died and while she was next to her sister’s dead body, she said, “Now he is free and can marry me’” (Freud 19). This statement from the sister shows how she had feelings in her unconscious mind that were being repressed. Throughout all of her sister’s marriage, she was repressing these feelings for her brother in law and these feelings were waiting for any possible time to surface. Which they did, when the wife was on her deathbed. These repressed feelings as he states are, “on the look-out for an opportunity of being activated, and when that happens it succeeds in sending into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable substitute for what had been repressed, and to this there soon become attached the same feelings of unpleasure which it was hoped had been saved by the repression” (Freud 21). According to Freud’s theories, when the sister unknowingly stated her true feelings and let go, she became healthy once again. Freud thought going back and bringing the repressed idea into a conscious activity, would help the patient in recovery and would, “reach a better outcome than was offered by repression” (Freud 21), which was proven with the patient previously mentioned. As she was finally letting herself feel what she felt for her brother in law, she became much better as she didn’t need to lie to herself or strain herself to repress the taboo feelings encompassing her. 

Back then, doctors didn’t really know how to treat hysterical patients as they did not view it as something serious. Since it wasn’t something tangible compared to a broken bone for example, there were many wrong treatments that were provided. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman, the narrator is depicted as slowly losing her mind as the story progresses. There were many factors that lead to her ultimate demise which is ironic because her husband is a physician. In the story the narrator has fallen ill and according to her husband, “there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 648). Her husband doesn’t believe she is actually sick and just gives her prescriptions in order for her to get over it. Since doctors back then didn’t think hysteria was real because it wasn’t something they could physically see or something that was tangible, she wasn’t taken seriously which resulted in a lack of treatment. As the days passed by she was consumed by her isolation and went crazy. She was stuck in a room with yellow wallpaper that she very much disliked and constantly mentioned her displeasure with the wallpaper. She vowed to get rid of the wallpaper before her time within the room was over. She supposedly saw the women within the wallpaper, “began to crawl and shake the pattern” (Gilman 655). In reality this was a hallucination as she was the only one in the room. This all corresponds to what Freud has mentioned about repressed wishes and desires found in the unconscious mind. She ignored these feelings of disgust towards the wallpaper and as Freud mentioned, “Hysterical conversion exaggerates this portion of the discharge of an emotionally cathected mental process; it represents a far more intense expression of the emotions, which has entered upon a new path” (Gilman 13). She ended up frantically tearing the wall paper to help the women she hallucinated and was ultimately consumed by her madness.

In conclusion, “The Yellow Wallpaper” reinforces the theories Freud talks about in his lectures. With the wrong treatments the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” faced, she was pushed over the edge and was led to her demise. Just as Freud said, if there isn’t any proper treatment occurring, the condition will continuously worsen until a final blow occurs.

Works Cited 

D., C. P., et al. “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.” The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 91, no. 2, 1978, pp. 2207–15. Crossref, doi:10.2307/1421547.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Yellow Wallpaper, Independently published, 2020, pp. 647–56. …56.