King’s Psychological Gothicism
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psychoanalyst Levin defines as “increased fear activation” (498). As Mort is
incapable of understanding the dream’s dysphoric imagery and of achieving “a
fantasy solution” (McKellar 89) of the pictographic dream-language and its
repressed dream-content, he screams in his dream: “7 am lost and afraid!”
(King, Window 255).
This verbal outbreak illustrates Mort’s ffailty and extreme fear of selfdissolution, a fear that finds its symbolic manifestation in the juice of the blood
oranges dripping down the board and smearing Mort’s name to the degre RF