12/16/2023 0 Comments Imp of the perverseThe beginning is an almost clinical discussion of the brain and the various impulses or behaviors. Except, of course, that the id doesn’t think at all, at least not in any meaningful sense. The Imp of the Perverse is a story told in two parts. If it feels good, id thinks you should do it. The id does things purely because it wants to, and does not think about whether they are morally right or wrong. The idea that ‘we act, for the reason that we should not’ prefigures the idea of negative psychology, but Poe’s story as a whole can be said to foreshadow Sigmund Freud’s description of the role of the id in the unconscious mind. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. Eventually, he ends up proclaiming his guilt – not because he wishes to release himself of the burden of his guilt but because he wants to publicise the fact that he committed such a perfect crime. However, so emboldened does he become, that he starts to commit acts merely because he knows it is wrong to do so: he becomes gripped by ‘the spirit of the Perverse’. Indeed, he becomes convinced he’s invincible and his guilt will never be found out. He confides to us that everything went well for several years after that: his crime had not been discovered, and he had, to all intents and purposes, got away with it. He then tells us that he committed murder by lighting a poisoned candle in the room of the man he murdered, so he could inherit the man’s estate. The story is narrated by a man who opens is account by commenting upon the perversity of all mankind. The plot of ‘The Imp of the Perverse’ – if we can even describe the brief ‘events’ of the story as constituting a plot per se – can easily be summarised. In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an insightful short story called 'The Imp of the Perverse.' He explains what he means by an 'imp' through the storys narrator, who relates what the imp in our mind.
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