Analyze "Young Goodman Brown" from psycoanalytic point of view.

To analyze Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story from a
psychoanalytic perspective, I would recommend that you focus on three key terms and concepts in
Freudian psychoanalysis --repression, projection, and dreamwork – and apply those terms and
concepts as thoroughly as possible to the story. You may find, in the end, that just one of these
terms or concepts will be enough! What this psychoanalytic approach might emphasize can
include:

• the extreme control of desires (i.e. the forces
  of repression) in the town of Salem that is the setting of the short
  story,


• the title character’s ability to see sin in everyone but
  himself (i.e. projection)


• and the possibility that Young Goodman
  Brown’s journey into the woods that night was indeed all just a dream that reflects (through
  symbols that can mean more than one thing at once) his own anxieties and conflicts (i.e. symbols
  that can be interpreted through dreamwork).

These
concepts can be applied thoroughly to Hawthorne’s short story or, for that matter, to the works
of most or all Romantic writers. Hawthorne’s story is very well suited to this sort of approach.
At the end, for example, the story itself is clearly left open: perhaps Young Goodman Brown had
dreamed it all, and perhaps he hadn’t.