A study of the psychic apparatus in “The Great Inquisitor, by Dostoevsky

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the short story “The Grand Inquisitor”, which is part of Dostoevsky's literary work The Brothers Karamázov (2012), highlighting the agents of Freud’s psychic apparatus, which are found in the aforementioned narrative. The dominant facets of the superego are analyzed, as well as the flows of the id and ego, in relation to the main intentions of the characters, in order to reveal that the criticism contained in the literary work refers to questions related to the dominated and robotized human being under the figure of an “Invisible Inquisitor”. It starts from the intertwining between literature and psychoanalysis, which makes it possible to observe how these areas are related to deal with a common essence that acts in society, which can evolve or delay the social harmony.