Desire, Repression, and the Unconscious: A Freudian Reading of Rooney’s Novel Normal People

Abstract

This paper examines Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) through Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic concepts of the id, ego, superego, repression, anxiety, and unconscious desire. The novel follows Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron from secondary school in rural Ireland to university in Dublin, portraying a relationship repeatedly shaped by intimacy, silence, social shame, class difference, and emotional vulnerability. Using qualitative textual analysis, this study argues that Rooney presents both characters as divided subjects whose desires are mediated by internalized social expectations. Marianne’s self-punitive relational patterns can be read as evidence of a damaged self-image formed within an emotionally violent family environment. Connell’s secrecy and anxiety, meanwhile, emerge from the tension between his attachment to Marianne and his fear of class-based embarrassment, peer judgment, and masculine expectations. The paper does not claim that either character simply represents one part of Freud’s structural model. Instead, it demonstrates that both characters experience conflict among instinctive wishes, practical self-protection, and internal moral criticism. The study also argues that psychoanalysis is most productive when combined with attention to class, gender, and family power. Rooney’s novel therefore shows that emotional life is neither purely private nor purely social: external inequalities become internal pressures that influence what people desire, fear, say, and withhold. Through its portrayal of Marianne and Connell, Normal People presents intimacy as a difficult process of confronting repression and learning to communicate across shame.