Without personal access to the authors, readers are left to their own devices in interpreting the literature. This can become challenging with more difficult texts, such as the short story Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Fortunately, literary audiences are not left to flounder in pieces like this; active readers can look through many different lenses to see possible meanings in a work. For example, Conrad's Heart of Darkness can be deciphered with a postcolonial, feminist or archetypal mindset, or analyzed with Freudian psychoanalytic theory. The latter two would effectively reveal the major roles of Kurtz and Marlow as Id and Io respectively, and provide the opportunity to draw a conclusion about the play as a whole. Sigmund Freud's theories on the construction of the mind are simple, but he radically changed the field of psychology. He proposed, among other things, that the human mind is composed of three parts: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. The preconscious consists of information, such as a telephone number, that is “accessible to consciousness without emotional resistance” (Schellenberg 21). According to Freud, the unconscious is the most important area of ​​the mind. The information stored within it has “very strong resistances” to becoming conscious (Freud 32). The id resides in the unconscious, which "contains everything... that is present at birth... - above all therefore the drives that originate from somatic organization" (14). From birth, every action is instinctive, from the id. The id does not recognize or harbor desires other than its own and is impatient for its needs to be satisfied. This phase lasts until a part of the id changes “under the influence of the real external world” (14). This part changed b...... middle of paper ......o, while the archetypal structure of the tale glorifies Marlow's dominance over Kurtz. These two analyzes together provide a much more complete and comprehensive interpretation of the work. Conrad presents the idea that there is darkness within every person. Darkness is hereditary and instinctive, but because it is natural doesn't make it right. He celebrates – and therefore almost recommends – the turn away from instinct. By telling Marlow's story, Joseph Conrad emphasizes to his audience the importance of self-knowledge and the non-necessity of instinct in civilization. Works Cited Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin Group, 1997.Freud, Sigmund. Notes on psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1949. Schellenberg, James A. Master of Social Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.