| dc.description.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. | en_US |
