Repressed Trauma and Return of The Past: A Psychoanalytic Study of Elaine Risley in Cat’s Eye

Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (1988) is a profound and searing exploration of the psychic marks of childhood trauma and its spectral return in adult life. The present research presents a psychoanalytic analysis of the protagonist, Elaine Risley, with particular focus on the repressed memories of her childhood and their re-emergence to form her identity, and self-perception. Atwood's discontinuous narrative, hesitating between past and present, duplicates the structure of traumatic memory and repression. Psychoanalytic theory is used, drawing upon Freud's theory of repression, compulsion to repeat, and unconscious return of the past, and the works of Lacan, Kristeva, and Caruth, to decipher Elaine's conflicted process of self-confrontation. The article argues that Elaine's childhood friendship with Cordelia and her own near-death experience in the ravine become central sites of trauma, too overwhelming for the young Elaine to consciously integrate. They become buried in the unconscious, returning decades later in the form of dreams, hallucinations, and fragmented memories. Her dreams about Cordelia and her re-visitation of the ravine represent Freud's idea of repetition compulsion, where the psyche is driven to re-enact that which it is unable to integrate successfully. This circular preoccupation with memory disrupts linear temporality, showing the non-linearity of trauma as conceived by Caruth.