DREAM AS WISH-FULFILMENT AND GUILT PROJECTION: A FREUDIAN READING OF THE NARRATOR IN THE TELL-TALE

Abstract

This article examines Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” through a Freudian lens, interpreting the narrator’s obsession and confession as manifestations of dream logic and guilt projection. Drawing upon Freud’s concept of dreams as wish-fulfilments, the study suggests that the narrator’s murder of the old man symbolises a displaced fulfilment of his unconscious desire to annihilate the
internalised paternal figure. However, this wish-fulfilment transforms into psychic punishment as the repressed guilt resurfaces through the auditory hallucination of the beating heart. The story’s fragmented narration mirrors the dream-work mechanisms of condensation and displacement, revealing how Poe dramatises the collapse between wish and guilt within the human psyche. Freud’s theories from The Interpretation of Dreams and Beyond the Pleasure Principle serve as the interpretive framework to decode the narrator’s divided self, where the unconscious transforms forbidden desire into symbolic action, only to return it as moral terror.