Crime and Punishment

I believe that the Freudian idea of the unconscious and the internal conflict within human beings is a theme constantly used in the novel Crime and Punishment written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this novel, the main character Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished student who had to leave his university, devises a plan to kill and rob an elderly woman and follows through with this plan. After committing this horrible crime, Raskolnikov continues to do a series of 'good deeds' to try to rid himself of the constant guilt that he is becoming sick with. The theme of the Freudian unconscious is very prevalent in the novel because Raskolnikov's internal dialogue is one of either the 'id' part of his personality- the part of him that is aggressive by nature and was overtaken with greed- this part of Raskolnikov's personality tries to rationalize the murder (in one of Raskolnikov's thought dialogues he tells himself that there are those who are capable of and should commit murder) and tries to hide the guilt from the outside world, making Raskolnikov paranoid and anxious. The 'superego' of Raskolnikov is the side of himself that he shows to the world, the part of him that is guilty and has a moral compass and is trying to account for the horrible crime by committing good deeds and reconnecting with his estranged family. The way Dostoevsky depicts this character is as though Raskolnikov became mentally ill and no longer has a sense of the 'self' or 'ego', he is constantly being torn between a split personality of 'id' and 'superego' never knowing which of these is satisfied. 

The idea of the unconscious is popular in the arts because there is a natural curiosity with human beings and the mind being irrational in nature, this makes for great storytelling and character development. However, in psychology, which has become more geared towards the cognitive approach, this remains a hypothesis that can be neither proven nor disproved due to a lacking in causal data.