CHILD ABUSE AS THE BACKGROUND OF LITERARY CREATION IN JUDY WESTWATER’S STREET KID

Abstract

Judy Westwater’s Street Kid: One Child’s Desperate Fight for Survival is a memoir novel. This novel tells about child abuses Westwater experienced, such as negligence, and physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Before she wrote the novel, there was no one, who knew about her childhood experience. She just repressed her emotion on her own. She wrote the novel when her friend urged her to write her story down. Writing the novel is a therapy for Westwater because it may flow out the repressed emotion that never looses and is buried in her unconscious mind. Through writing the novel, the unconscious mind is free to come out. It is like a dream. While in the waking life people cannot express everything they want, in the dream the repressed feeling is free to express. There is a similarity between literary work and dream. Both of them are expressions of unconscious wishes or desires. Therefore, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis theory especially the theory of interpretation of dream is applied because the purpose of this study is to analyze Westwater's creative process. There are three steps of the analysis; first, identifying child abuse she experienced, second identifying the influences of child abuses on her emotion repressed in her unconscious mind and the last, identifying her unconscious mind which is expressed in the novel. The result of this research shows that Judy Westwater’s creative process is influenced by her unconscious mind shaped by her experience of child abuses and her society.