A Study of Rachel’s Anxiety and Ego-Defense in Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on The Train

ABSTRACT
Alfarisi, Faris Salman .13.05.111.000.15.English Department of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Science, Trunojoyo University Madura.A Study of Rachel’s Anxiety and Ego-Defense In Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train

Rachel’s Anxiety and Ego-Defense In Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins The girl on the Train is a thriller novel who has a psychological substance in the story that explores the lives of an alcoholic woman who is devastated by the end of her marriage and her relationship with the missing woman. The aim of this study is to describe the main character as an alcoholic woman in feeling anxiety and ego-defense who has an unusual routine on the train stalking a family who lives near her ex-house before she got divorced. This study applies qualitative research by applying psychoanalytic from Sigmund Freud as the underlying theory which is relating to unconscious perspective as one of the main objects to identify an object. The result of this study, Rachel experienced oppression physically and psychologically either from herself or someone else by excusing the problem of anxiety into ego-defense. She implements repression, projection, displacement and sublimation as some features of defense mechanism to solve her neurotic and moral anxiety portrayed in the novel.
Keywords: Psychoanalytic, consciousness, anxiety, defense.