Name Anxiety and Psychic Imprints: A Freudian Reading of Belonging and the Unconscious in The Namesake

Name of Author : Dr.P.Parthiban

Abstract: Jhumpa Lahiris The Namesake explores how the unconscious self bears the weight of naming, identity, and belonging across cultural and generational divides. Through the protagonist Gogol Ganguli, Lahiri examines the psychic struggle of a subject caught between inherited Indian traditions and American individualism. The anxiety surrounding the name becomes a metaphor for Freudian repression, displaced desire, and fragmented belonging. The act of naming, far from being arbitrary, carries an emotional residue that reflects the deeper mechanisms of the unconscious. Freuds theories of the uncanny, repression, and identity formation offer a compelling lens for understanding how Gogols name becomes a site of internal conflict. The novel traces the protagonists journey from shame to self recognition, showing how memory, guilt, and symbolic attachment operate beneath conscious awareness. By reading the text through Freudian psychoanalysis, one sees how identity is constructed not through rational choice but through unresolved psychic traces. The novel becomes a psychological case study of cultural displacement as much as a narrative of migration. Lahiri ultimately reveals that belonging is less a matter of geography than of reconciling ones unconscious imprints of loss and desire.

Keywords : Freudian theory; unconscious; naming; belonging; identity; repression; diasporic psychology; alienation; memory

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