Freudian and Jungian Literary Analysis: Under Milk Wood

Freudian and Jungian Literary Analysis beneath draw woodExploration of fantasys, symbols and archetypes in Dylan interrogationing Thomas figure push through for portions Under Milk timberThis paper anticipates to assert that Dylan Thomas diarrhea Under Milk woodland trick be successfully viewed exploitation Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical techniques. It willing prove to not n evertheless when isolate and cozy up slightly(prenominal) a(prenominal) interpreters of typical psychic symbolism in the induce scarcely similarly what could be thought of as psychoanalytic mechanisms especi each(prenominal)y as they consult to Freuds notions of the Dream flex in his The variant of Dreams (1997) or Jungs archetypes and collective unconscious reason(p)(p).By doing this I appreh complete to not only subject Thomas work to a coc recognizeed psychoanalytical exegesis, breaking hidden individualised symbols, structures and doubles, precisely withal hig hlight the psychosocial depth of Under Milk wood a depth that has besides been overlooked by virtually critics. Through this I hope to quantify the notion that Thomas was e truly bit as influenced by Freud and Jung as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were a generation before.I will begin, in my Introduction, to pa using up an outline of the brilliance of Freud and psycho summary to post-World War 1 literature and what Dylan Thomas place within that was paying per centumicular attention to Thomas profess assertions on the importance of psychoanalysis in his work and the directions that it was greeted by the literati of the 1930s and 40s.The first chapter will be dedicated to a watchword of Under Milk Wood and its creation, looking at often(prenominal) atomic number 18as as diagram anatomical structure, the structural re shedation of the piece and its creative aetiology.From hither I will go on to discuss the notion of the Freudian conceive ofwork and its manifestatio ns in Under Milk Wood. The envisagework, exemplified by such concepts as condensation, displacement and supplementary re slew, is a primordial concept in the Freudian arseholenon and, as such, has be mystify an classical interpretive tool for both psycho psycho analysts and literary critics.It is with this in mind that I shall attempt to isolate models of all four of the make mechanisms of the dreamwork in Thomas play whilst relating them to the wider issues of poeticalal creativity and narrative structure. I will similarly set up a brief discussion of how Jungs version of dreams differed from Freuds before going on to examine how both tush be utilise to inform us of Thomas play.The third chapter will be dedicated to Jungian archetypes. I will isolate and discuss the m both an(prenominal) instances of archetypal put across intory in the play, paying special attention to the way of liveness in which they fit in with Thomas over all poetic sense as it is displayed in his use of language, narrative and plot. This chapter will in any case examine the check of the collective unconscious and relate it to the Modernist technique of the menstruation of consciousness novel and the plant of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.My conclusion will attempt to answer the main hypothesis of this paper, that indeed psychoanalytic techniques and fuckl ring clear be used to downstairsstand Dylan Tho crowd in concert play and also what that says about the playwrights role as a modern day bard.Introduction The Analytic divine revelationThomas Manns paper The Signifi so-and-soce of Freud published in 1936 elapses us some indications as to the importance of early psychoanalysis on the literary breeding of europium and the StatesThe analytic revelation is a ultra force. With it a blithe scepticism has come into the world, a mistrust that unmasks all the schemes and subterfuges of our birth souls. Once roused and on alert, it piece of assnot be put to sl eep once over again. It infiltrates flavour, undermines its raw navet, takes from it the strain of its own ignorance (Mann, 1965 591)As Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane assert in their study Modernism A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (1991), this revolutionary force was a large constituent of early twentieth angiotensin converting enzyme C notions of, not only Modernism in literature and the arts solely also, what it meant to be a modern man or woman.The early Modernist writers of the inter-war finish not only embraced Freud and psychoanalysis as heralding a red-hot epitome of self-sufficiency and ontological autonomy only if also, as a daybook entry by Andre Gide exposes, thought themselves part of an existing grounds surface of thought that was, above all, quintessentially impertinentlyFreudFreudianismFor the last ten course of studys, or fifteen, I take on been foolery in it without kno attaing. (Gide, 1967 349)The connection between psychoanalysis and l iterature has always been problematic. Freud, himself asserts in the opening paragraphs to his essay The Uncanny (2005) that only r arly (does) a psycho-analyst (feel) impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics (Freud, 2000 1), hitherto writers, critics and here(predicate)tofore Freud himself fuck glowering make massive use of the interpretive similarities between the dickens disciplines . Not only argon there be a whole host of studies aband wizd to the use of psychoanalysis in literary criticism save in the Introduction to his novel The White Hotel (1999), D.M. Thomas draws attention to the extraordinarily literary note of Freuds case studies each containing galore(postnominal) of the doubles and leitmotifs ane would usually associate with a creative work. For Freud, the psychical mechanisms of creative writing and stargaze are in, some senses at least, inextricably linked. Both are base in a tripartite dodging of ideational fantasy establishment con sisting of a current postureal issue or concern that provokes the memory of a childhood incident or trauma which, in turn, shapes some hereafter tense action in the guise of a wish fulfilment. Freud sets out the kind between this system and literature in his essay Creative Writers and daylight Dreaming (Freud, 1986)We are perfectly aware that very many originative writings are far removed from the object lesson of the nave dream and yet I cannot suppress the suspicions that even the close extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it by and through an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. (Freud, 1986 150)Freud continues to explain the disparity between the mind of the creative writer and the ordinary day- idealist, asseverate that whereas the latter results in a self-conscious repression of desire (the wishes of the day-dreamer being beat out left unspoken) the former revels in and promulgates such desire, translated as it is by chaste skill and t emperamentThe writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by reparation and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal that is aesthetic stick out of pleasure which he wishs us in the presentation of his phantasies. (Freud, 1986 153)This essay, perhaps to a greater extent than any other work of Freuds, highlights for us the attractor of psychoanalysis to early twentieth light speed writers. Metaphysically and spiritually sceptical after the mass slaughter of the First World War and the alienation engendered by deck out of the industrial paradigm, Freudian theory offered (as testified by Manns essay) a apparently homo, non-metaphysical and solely scientific explanation for the place of the artist within society. For Freud, the artist was distinct from the rest of the populous notwithstanding this had a purely psychical aetiology, going away no imperative for notions of religious or supra-human inspiration.This is undoubtedly some of the attraction of Freudianism for Dylan Thomas who, throughout his letters and early work makes both use and reference to writers and critics that were, themselves, heavily influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. Francis Scarfe, in the essay Dylan Thomas A Pi singleer (1960) cites Freud as a major influence on the organization of Thomas early poetic voice, derived in the main from his experiences with what Scarfe calls Sitwellism (Scarfe, 1960 96)The dominant prefigures of get across trancems to be James Joyce, the Bible and Freud. The individualised habits of language and mythology of Dylan Thomas can readily be identified through these three sources. (Scarfe, 1960 96)If Joyce lent the untested poet some of the lyricism and sense of narrative and the Bible some of the loaded cadence and verbal poetics, Freud enabled Thomas to look within his own unconscious and find images and leitmotifs that would find resonance with the rest of humanity as, firstly, personal whence increasingly Bardic and archetypal symbols formed the pedestal of his work.An early poem of Thomas clearly mirrors the hyperbole of Freuds first lectures on psychoanalysis the poet and the analyst both evoking the image of the journey into an unknown by an antonymous but courageous individualThe mid wickedness measure road, though young man tread unknowking. Harbouring some thought of heaven, or occupyn hoping. Yields peace and plenty at the end. (Thomas, 1990 119)We can compare this to Freuds famous analogy that is evoked throughout his workThe interlingual rendition of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious it is the securest formation of psycho-analysis and the field in which evey worker must acquire his convictions and memorizek his training. If I am asked how one can become a psycho-analyst, I reply By studying ones own dreams (Freud, 1957 60)Interestingly, Thomas himself was reluctant to know his debt to Freud, choosing instead to suggest a notion that we have alrea dy posited here that Freuds influence is paradigmatic. He says in the collection of interviews Notes on the Art of verse line (1963) that his writing is influenced by Freud only through the work others , itself a will to the extent that Freudian theory and, indeed, the whole of psychoanalytic thought has permeated the very fabric of modern literature.Thomas notebooks poems, his earliest poetic statements, are suffused with what we shall regard are Freudian images, inspired perhaps not by psychoanalysis itself but by the poets interest in Surrealism and their early antecedents the 18th coulomb Metaphysical poets.Works such asWhere once the waters of your fountainSpun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,The dead turns up its eye (Thomas, 1990 217)AndIn expend one fell from the hearts honey cells.One precious drop that, for the moment, quellsDesires pain (Thomas, 1990 133)Clearly reflect the artistic tenants set out in Bretons Manifestoes of Surrealism (1972) that sought to comb ine Freudian concepts of the dreamwork with aesthetic creation . As we shall work through in the first chapter of this paper, this delight in the surreal as it relates to the Freudian image remained with Thomas throughout all of his working life and, most certainly, manifests itself in Under Milk Wood.The analytic revelations then, of Freud , have not only influenced those writers such as Breton, Auden and Woolf who are were intimately acquainted with his writing but also writers kindred(p) Dylan Thomas who, by his own admission, came to psychoanalysis through other creative writers works.This paper, akin many others, uses psychoanalytic theory as a methodology with which to uncover possible symbols, patterns and structures within Thomas work. It will not only relate such symbols to the poets own poetic vision but will, through Jungian theory, expand these so that they encompass world(a) archetypes and concepts such as the collective unconscious that structures the unconscious and, inevitably finds its way into works of a creative temper .Chapter One To Begin at the BeginningDylan Thomas play for voices Under Milk Wood began life as a small radio broadcast Quiet first One Morning (Sinclair, 1975, Jones, 1963) and this short piece is comfortably recognisable as the genesis for the larger work. There are, for instance, many of the equal basic characters the milkman all the same lost in the clangour and music of Welsh-spoken dreams (Thomas, 1992), the sea captain, the lonely brothel keeper Miss May Hughes and even the tragic-comic Mrs Ogmore Pritchard. There is the same sense of poetic cadence that unendingly adds to the somatic quality of the writing, lulling the reader into a melodious trance as sibilance and assonance is combined with Thomas particular inner rhythms, such as in this extractThe sun lit the sea- townsfolk, not as a whole, from transgressmost down reproving zinc-roofed chapel to empty-but-for-rats-and-whispers colorize warehouse on the harbour, but in separate bright pieces. (Thomas, 1978 15)The story, recited by Thomas himself in 1944 on the BBC, describes the still sleeping town of in the raw Quay in Cardiganshire (Maud, 1992) and weaves external description with internal monologue as the bank clerk flits in and out of the dreaming consciousnesses of the towns inhabitants. In the story, each paragraph brings a new image or a new perspective but what we are ultimately presented with is the stream of consciousness of the narrator in the story, foreign in Under Milk Wood, an impersonal but altogether discernable I kinda early one aurora in the spend in Wales, by the sea that was lying down still and viridity as grass after a night of tar-black howling and rolling, I went out of the house, where I had come to stay for a cold ill-timed holiday Thomas, 1978 15)It is this point, this appearance of the personal pronoun that, as we shall see, makes Quite Early One Morning markedly divergent to Under Milk Wood. Thomas, however, stays the sense of languid absurdity, as images are juxtaposed for comic effect amid the repeated in boundaryit of The town was not yet awake.Under Milk Wood grew out of this humble beginning and is both markedly similar and surprisingly diverse . Both works reflect, as Derek Stanford (1954) suggests, the cadences, characterisation and plot construction of Joyces Ulysses (1979), being as they are the collective narratives of a whole town in the same time period. Both works, however, are also embryonic, Quite Early One Morning obviously being a formula for Under Milk Wood but this also being exclusively a fragmentary snapshot of a larger planned work that was never finished (Jones, 1986 ix).Under Milk Wood also resembles the rotary structure of Joyces other great work Finnegans Wake (1992). Thomas play abounds with references to beginnings and commencements we have, for instance, the famous first linesTo begin at the beginningIt is Spring, moonless nigh t in the small town, starlessAnd bible-black (Thomas, 2000 1)That not only evokes the biblical In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Gen, 11) but also the creational sense of Joyces reference to the beginnings of mankind in the opening lines of his novelriverrun, past(a) Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth castle and Environs. (Joyce, 1992 3)In Under Milk Wood, the cyclical spirit of the day is metonymous with the seasonal nature of the year and this with the life of a human being as Thomas juxtaposes images of beginnings, babies and births with ageing, infirmity and death as in this passageAll over town, babies and old men are cleanedand put into their broken prams and wheeled on tothe sunlit cockled cobbles or out into the backyardsunder the dancing underclothes, and left. A baby cries.(Thomas, 2000 27)As we shall see, this notion of the circle, of repeating is important to both Freud and Jung Freud through his insistence on the importance of the check in notions such as repression and the death drive and Jung, through his concept of the mandala as a recurring symbol. bid Joyce, Thomas displays circles within circles, as the plot and structure of the work as a whole mirrors the framework of the characters lives and psyches. We see this reflected in many of the plays most successful characters, witness for instance the constant iteration of Mrs Ogmore Pritchard, as she repeats her life over and over again with antithetical husbands, only to have them revisit her after their deathsMr Ogmore, linoleum, retired, and Mr Pritchard, failed book noble, who maddened by besoming, wipe up and scrubbing, the voice of the vacuum cleaner and the fume of the polish, ironically swallowed disinfectant, fidgets in her rinsed sleep, wakes in a dream and nudges in the ribs dead Mr Ogmore, dead Mr Pritchard, ghostly on all side. (Thomas, 2000 10)The same can be said, of course, for overlord Cat, whose dreams and waking life are characterised not by the dead per se, but by their pop off as he witnesses the phantasmatic manifestations of either his repression or the collective unconscious (whether one is citing Freud or Jung). The sense, in Under Milk Wood, is that of a blithe word import of the passing of time and the knowledge that things return the sunrise, the Spring and the dead. This is reflected in many of Thomas poems, for instance in the closing lines of I See the Boys of summerI am the man your father was.We are the sons of flint and pitch.Oh see the poles are kissing as they cross(Thomas, 1990 219)In this, also, as Karl Jay Shapiro asserts in his study In Defense of Ignorance (1960), Thomas work clearly reflects what was a seminal poem for the young poets generation W.B. Yeats The sanction Coming (1987) which contains images of both beginnings and circles within circles. In the next chapter I will look at how these aspects of Under Milk Wood can be interpreted through the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Jung, paying attention specifically to their concepts of dreams and dreaming again another leitmotif of Thomas play that can be seen to come from Joyces Finnegans Wake.Chapter Two The Dreamwork, the Symbol and maestro CatFreud On Dreams As Richard Wollheim suggests, Freuds theories on dreams are the most remarkable single element (Wollheim, 1971 66) of his psychoanalytical get word and Freud himself in his essay On Dreams (1991) stresses the primacy of dream variation in his systemThe transformation of the latent dream-thoughts into the manifest dream- marrow deserves all out attention, since it is the first instance known to us of psychical material being changed over from one mode of expression to another. (Freud, 1991 89)For Freud, dreams serve as symptoms of unconscious repression in the same way as parapraxes (slips of the tongue) and instances of forgetfulness. The content of dreams can, he said, be split in to the latent and the manifest the one providing a shield for the other as the unconscious gives up its fissures and problems that have been repressed by the Ego during waking hours. Freuds work The Interpretation of Dreams attempts to provide a full scale, largely scientific study of not precisely the symbolism of dreams but also their mechanism a mechanism that he termed the dreamwork.The dreamwork can be thought of as a process (Wollheim, 1971) that transcribes the latent content of dreams into the language of the manifest. Freud is clear in The Interpretation of Dreams that psychoanalysis does not deal with the simple translation of images or ancient notions of symbol exchange that sees dreams as merely scripts that can be easily interpreted using a universal dictionary, although he does acquiesce to the point that some symbols recur on a universal level.Instead, Freud sees dreams as the return of repressed desires and their at scatant wishes that find a voice in the psychical sparing through a process of disguise. The desire, as Richard Stevens (1983) suggests, will be fused with experiences and thoughts from the previous day or even events occurring during the course of the night (Stevens, 1983 30). The dreamwork, in the Freudian system, is both the mechanism of disguise and the tool of interpretation because it contains an internal logic that can be used by the analyst to trace the source of repression and, through the process of transference, brought into the conscious and rendered harmless (Freud, 1997). perchance the most important concept within The Interpretation of Dreams is the four-fold dreamwork mechanism that can be used, not only in dream interpretation but as we shall see, in the critical appreciation of literature. Freud termed these mechanisms condensation, displacement, representation and secondary fiat and before I go to look at how each one fits into Under Milk Wood specifically I would like to, briefly, offer up an explanation as t o how each effects the manifest dream-content and ergo the literary image or trope.CondensationThis is, perhaps, the most common dream feature and is what gives dreams their sparse, confusing quality. For Freud, dream-thoughts are many and varied, each bombarding the dreamwork simultaneouslyThe dream is meagre, paltry and laconic in comparison with the range and copiousness of the dream-thoughts. The dream, when scripted down fills half a page the analysis, which contains the dream-thoughts requires six, eight, twelve clock as much space. (Freud, 1997 170)Condensation manifests itself as images laden with meaning, as the unconscious overlays and condenses twain or more dream-thoughts into one motif. Part of the skill of the analyst gibe to Freud is the extent that such condensation can be unravelled and successive layers of unconscious meaning and repression peeled back and revealed (Freud, 1965 313).Whereas Freud was dubious as to the possibility of ever reaching a definitive dr eam interpretation because of the very nature of condensation, he also asserted that the ways in which dream-thoughts are condensed gives the analyst a clue as to their psychical meaning. Freud cites his own dream of the botanic Monograph as an example of the way in which different dream-thoughts can be condensed into one dream-image the latent meaning only becoming apparent when this human relationship is exposed .DisplacementDisplacement refers to the substituting of elements within dreams. Due to the nature of the unconscious, elements and images that have a similar psychical economy invariably end up being displaced, one for the other. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud characterises displacement as constituting a de-centring of the dream-thoughtsWe may have noticed that these elements which obtrude themselves in the dream-content as its essential components do not by any means play this same part in the dream-thoughts. ( Freud, 1997 190)Displacement, like condensation, aris es from the synchronous nature of the unconscious and manifests itself in two ways firstly, through the substituting of dream-thoughts, so that dreams can appear absurd and illogical and, secondly through shifting meanings an image may possess one meaning in one nights dream and another on a different night. Melanie Klein, for instance, in her essay psychological Principles of Early Analysis(1991) offers us some interesting insights into how displacement works in something other than the dream the child at play.My decomposes again and again reveal how many different things, dolls for example, can mean in play. sometimes they stand for the penis, sometimes for the child stolen from the mother, sometimes for the little patient itself and so on (Klein, 1991 134)Both condensation and displacement have been used as the basis for theories of Surrealist aesthetics, as Carrouges and Prendergast assert in their study Andre Breton and the Basic Concepts of Surrealism (1974 192) which uses seemingly different images juxtaposed in rewrite to create an illogical, dream-like tableaux.RepresentationRepresentation refers to the dreamworks inclination of an orbit to present feelings, repressions and notions as images and symbols. Unlike many pre-Freudian systems of dream interpretation such symbolisation is centred, to a very large extent, around the dreamers own personal history and psychology. However as I have already tell there are, due to the inter-subjective nature of the psyche, recurring symbols and motifs that can be found in a great many wads dreams.Richard Stevens in his Freud and Psychoanalysis (1983) mentions fairish a few of themsmall boxes, chests, cupboards and ovens correspond to the female organ also cavities, ships and all kinds of vessels. The actions of climbing ladders, stairs, inclines or flying may be used to symbolise sexual intercourse having a haircut, tooth pulled or being beheaded, castration. (Stevens, 1983 33) auxiliary RevisionSecondary fiat refers to the mental processes that occur after the dreamer awakes and that organises and places the otherwise absurd and disparate images and themes into a, relatively, cohesive narrative. Wollheim points to there being doubt in Freuds later work as to the place of secondary revision within the dreamwork (Wollhein, 1971 69) but, as a concept, it has been important in many neo-Freudian systems of aesthetics especially, as Charles Altman points out in his essay Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1986 526), by the French school of film critics who saw it as, not so much an integral part of the dreamwork, but as the main constituent in narrative formation and the audience/film dialectic.Jung On DreamsDreams play as important a role in the work of Carl Jung as Sigmund Freud (Fordham, 1964) however the former not only sees their place in the psychical economy differently but has, as he explains in Man and his Symbols (1964), created an intactly separate process of interpretation and tra nslation.Jung disagreed with Freuds notion of the dreamwork and his method of free fellowship whereby the analysand recalls a dream and lets their mind wander through the myriad of different unconscious connections only to be unravelled and assessed by the analyst. For Jung, this process is likely to uncover neuroses and repression but is unlikely to uncover them connected with the dream. For Jung, the further away from the central motifs of the dream-image one gets the further away one travels from the locus of their meaning.Therefore, under a Jungian system, dreams consist not of personal motifs of repression returning through the dreamwork but as expressions of either the personal or collective unconscious. The method of extracting the meaning from dreams is centred around the correct reading of such symbols and an evaluation of how they relate to either the dreamers personal or their phyllogenetic background, as Jung himself assertsDreams are impartial, spontaneous proceedss o f the unconscious psyche, out of doors the control of the will. They are pure nature, they show us unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an placement that accords with our basic human nature. (Jung, 1989 55)Jung viewed the waking, conscious perceptions as having a penumbra of associated psychical meanings (Jung, 1964 28), even the very simplest of actions, for instance seeing or hearing, can involve a gamut of other ideational and experiential relations and it is this that we witness in dreams the whole of our unconscious unfettered by the dressing, the siphoning and the categorisation of the conscious mind.For Jung, then, the absurd quality of dreams, their surreal nature comes not from intervention of the dreamwork but from the cultural and personal associations attached to perceptions and experiences.Thomas On DreamsBoth Freuds and Jungs systems of dream interpretation offer us important critical tools with which to view Dyla n Thomas Under Milk Wood both in terms of the images and symbols the playwright uses in order to convey the sense of the somatic and the dream-like and his use of surrealism as a semi-comic trope throughout the piece.The play begins in the collective dream of the town. Just like the short story Quite Early One Morning, the audience is interpreted on a journey through the consciousnesses of the sleeping townsfolk as they dream their separate dreams, shaped (as both Freud and Jung assert) by their individual consciousnesses and personalities. Captain Cat, for example, experiences the return of the repressed guilt he feels towards his long dead shipmatesCaptain Cat, the retired blind sea-captain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape dress hat cabin of Schooner House dreams ofSecond Voice never such seas as any that swamped the decks of the S.S. Kidwelly bellying over bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery sucking him down coarseness deep into the Davy dark (Tho mas, 2000 2)Thomas, here, reflects both Freudian and Jungian dream analysis as Captain Cats dreams abound with symbols of his past and are unmistakably suffuse with the characters own visual lexicon, what Jung calls the dream language (Jung, 1986 33). The same can be said of Dai Bread who dreams of harems, Polly Garter who dreams of babies and even No in force(p) Boyo who dreams of nothing.However, within the very text of Under Milk Wood we notice each one of the four elements of the Freudian dreamwork. The dense language is a clear instance of condensation the vital elements of the imagistic leitmotifs are extracted and pile one on top of another, as adjective combines with adjective to form the quintessentially Thomasian poetics, such as here where the playwright draws a finely tuned portrait of Mrs Dai Bread One, the wife of the bread makerMe, Mrs Dai Bread One, capped and shawled and no old corset, seemly to be comfy, nice to be nice, clogging on the cobbles to stir up a neighb our. Oh, Mrs Sarah, can you spare a loaf, love? Dai Bread forgot the bread. Theres a lovely break of day Hows your boils this morning? (Thomas, 2000 22)Thomas both describes the sense of a dream here and, through condensation, utilizes its mechanism. Words and phrases are juxtaposed and their meaning condensed in a way that mirrors almost exactly the workings of Freuds dreamwork. We see this reflected many times throughout the narrative of Under Milk Wood, as the author evokes in a linguistic sense what Freud saw in a psychoanalytic sense.We see, for example a clear literary rendering of displacement in the absurd portrait of Cherry Owen as described by the Second VoiceCherry Owen, next door, lifts a tankard to his lips but nothing flows out of it. He shakes the tankard. It turns into a fish. He drinks the fish. (Thomas, 2000 13)Here the incongruous image of a fish replaces or displaces the tankard that Cherry Owen drinks from adding to the dreamy quality of the early passages of t he play. As a cultural symbol, the fish also mirrors the third of the Freudian mechanisms, representation, whereby a linguistic notion He drinks like a fish is rendered in a quasi-comic symbolic form.Of course, the ultimate use of dreams and dreaming in Under Milk Wood is the plot itself. Both Freud and Jung rely heavily on the concept of the return within their respective dream philosophies (Stevens, 1983 Fordham, 1964) and this is reflected in the very structure of the play that could, after all, be thought of as merely the manifest dream-content of the First Voice, or perhaps even Thomas himself.Like a dream, the text iterates, as we shall see in the next chapter, the same basic images and archetypes the symbols are at once full of meaning in themselves and signifiers for other things. The First Voice can be seen as the voice of God but also of secondary revision, knitting disparate elements together to form a narrative that can be followed and engaged with.As the characters awak e, their lives, as they are described by the First and Second voice, are shown to be no less absurd than the irrationality of their dreams. This is perhaps because the entire play can itself be seen as a dream of the authors in which he creates, as he states in a letter to A.G. Prys Jones, a never-never Wales (Thomas, 1985 848) that, like its Peter Pan counterpart, is as much a manifest wish of its author as anything else.Chapter Three The Shadow, TKelloggs task Strategy Success Factors and BarriersKelloggs Business Strategy Success Factors and BarriersIntroductionThe importance of customers and their value plays a major role and cannot be neglected by the companies in todays rail line world. The implementation of different new strategies and selling plans will not help if the companies do not pay attention to the customers. some(prenominal) confederations food marketing plan agenda should and will always include customers. guest stress and retention is a originatorful st rategic advantage that helps to ontogenesis the profitability of the lodge and to survive in the high competitive environment. The different consumers across the world might lead to varying consumer behaviours which result in severaliseing varying concepts by decision reservation units to sell the fruits.In a federation like Kelloggs the purchasing process is dependant on consumer behaviour. The acquire pattern of the consumers has an influence on directly related phenomena as well as post marketing phenomena. Kelloggs has seen a downfall in gross revenue in the past decade and still continues to see. There is a vast discussion in the EU market about the food maintenance and labelling and the negative media image produced about the products of the company. The Kelloggs products are criticised by food measuring agency (FSA) as red products and junk food. They said that the company is hard to show their products healthier than they actually are. These statements and actions of FSA has not only affected the overall business and its image but also the consumer attitude towards the products. This report duologue about how Kelloggs can resolve the issue by using marketing investigate and customer focused strategy.Company ProfileKelloggs is the worlds largest texture maker since 1906 and is located in the United States. Kelloggs products has become a part of the pleasing mornings for the pack around the world since a century. Its business is operated in two segments Kelloggs North America and Kelloggs International. 66% of the revenue to the company comes from North America region which consists of the Canada and the United States. The remaining 34% comes from the Kelloggs international market which consists of Europe (20%), Latin America (8%) and Asia Pacific (6%). The products vary from ready-to-eat cereals to convenience foods such as cereal bars, cookies, toaster pastries, crackers, frozen waffles, snacks and veggie foods. Obesity and Health well ness is the primary concern for hatful in the world today. Kelloggs has invested on this developd by introducing many health focused products like Kelloggs, Pop-Tarts, Cheez-It, Mini-Wheats, Nutri-Grain, Rice Krispies, Keebler, modified K, Chips Deluxe, Famous Amos, Morningstar Farm, Sandies, Eggo, Austin, Club, Murray, Kashi, turn up Naked, Gardenburger,All-Bran,and Stretch Island. The demand for its products came from the continuous advertising since 1906. The main competitors are General foods, Quaker Oats, General Mills and Ralston-Purina. It started out in contest Creek, Michigan with 44 employees which eventually has grown into a multinational company with 30,000 employees. The manufacturing of its products is taking place in 18 countries and selling them over clxxx countries successfully with the implementation of intelligent strategies and leadership.Key Success FactorsThe main key factors for Kelloggs Success are it perceived to have a rosy image when compared to ot her daily breakfasts and snacks like chocolates and crisps. They made the products convenient affluent so that they can be carried anywhere easily. They offer a range of cereal bars which are quite useful for people on the morning rush. Few Kelloggs products are really versatile as moms can give them as a snack between breakfast and lunch to their kids. atomic number 11 content in the food is a major issue that the company has to deal with. Kelloggs are trying to develop products with less salt content and including more mensuration of fruits in the bars and cereals for people with health concerns. They have created a high level of brand awareness in the people which allowed them to advance the customer committedness. They have designed various products since a century for all age groups from childrens to adults. Innovation has influenced Kelloggs market to a greater extent. Introducing new products according to the changing markets and tastes of people from time to time has m ade Kelloggs to win the customers. They offered the products at a lower expenditure which made an average household to afford, hence retaining the customers at large. Kelloggs market its products itself. It do not manufacture cereals for any other company who sells them under their own brand. All these factors added for the company to run successfully and become the world market leaders in the exceedingly competitive market.StrategyKelloggs aim was to be the food company of plectron and also make customers figure the importance of a equilibrate modus vivendi which can be fulfilld by their products. The mission is to drive sustainable harvesting through the power of the people and brands by breach suffice the demand of customers, consumers and communities. Based on their vision and mission they crafted their strategy to achieve aims and objectives with the power of position and brand image. Kelloggs targeted various groups of people and deigned the products accordingly to attract their mind sets. Balanced Lifestyle is the broad strategic objective of the company. It implemented these strategies by some tactical plans like supporting the physical activity among all age groups and to sponsor these activities with the use of companies resources, the confabulation of the balance diet to consumers using the cereal packs, and also introduction of food labelling which would allow consumers to understand the balanced diet content of their products. Kelloggs has introduced the recommended Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) to their packaging labels. This allowed the customer to have a knowledge of the amount of nutrients in take in a serving of Kelloggs food. Their strategy is to attract customers by encouraging them to take part in the swimming programs organised by the company in relationship with the Amateur Swimming association (ASA). Kelloggs has sponsored almost 1.8 million awards every year to the swimmers. This idea of teaming up with ASA has helped the c ompany to reinforce its brand image. It also has started many community programs and breakfast clubs to create awareness of their products in people. By all these activities it shows that the company is trying to create a good CSR image in the industry. Kelloggs believed that if consumers are given proper information about their products, they can retain them. So, they chose various methods to communicate their objectives to the world such as using vignette characters, and also through effective advertising. It also distributed nutrition magazines for the employees to make them purify understand about the objectives.SolutionIn a major business study about Kelloggs, it is seen that their consumers procureing behaviour is mostly dependant on the companys focus towards customers and how well they treat them rather than manufacturing, pricing or trade of the products. Consumers tend to purchase the products which are more healthy. Hence they want to know all the available informatio n about the products they want to buy or consume. The products information, beliefs, intentions and attitudes of the customers influence the decision process. So Kelloggs has to perform a market research on whether the consumers buy their products based on the label information or not. The visual inspection of the product or the experience of purchasing the product play a major role in the decision fashioning of the consumer. Advertising and promotion of the product might as well have a greater impact on the buying pattern. It is difficult enough to understand the consumer behaviour within the borders of a single country. reasonableness and serving the needs of consumers from different countries can be daunting. The values, behaviours and attitudes of the consumers vary greatly across the world. Kelloggs must design the marketing programs and products according to the peoples needs. For example, in the United land where most people eat cereal regularly for their breakfast, Kellog gs should try persuading consumers to buy their brand rather than a competitors brand. In France, however where most people prefer croissants and coffee or no breakfast at all, it should communicate to convince people to eat cereal for breakfast and in India, where many consumers eat heavy fried breakfasts and skip meal all together, the company should make attempts to convince the buyers to shift to a lighter, more nutritious breakfast diet.To cover up the damage caused due to the labelling issue by FSA, Kelloggs Should narrow the customers needs and convert them into requirements. In order to fulfil them, it should fully understand the current and future needs of the customers, identify the customers, determine their key product characteristics, identify and assess market competition, identify opportunities and weakness, define financial and future competitive advantages, ensure that it has sufficient knowledge about the regulatory requirements, identify the benefits to be achie ved from exceeding compliance and also identify their role in the protection of community interests. Kelloggs can start launching some new products aimed at the health conscious consumers. They can start selling them for a lowest value in the market and satisfy them with a good value products for every penny they spend. They can concentrate more on three groups of people like individuals, families and supermarkets who wanted to have a healthy diet. They can focus more on health conscious people from age group from 25-50 by promising them healthy diet with their products. By the introduction of these products in the market they can show the customers that Kelloggs is being paid attention to what they want and how important their health is to the company. They can start put in information from consumers and people by conducting surveys about what kind of products they are actually looking for and based on that they can prepare them and position them to win the competitive advantage . So the only mantra to attract the customers again and to cover up the loss created by FSA is obsessive customer attention. Even though making health conscious customers happy might affect the short term profits, yet it helps to acquire a loyal customer base which pays off in the future. Making these products available at all consumer stores and super markets at a lower retail price might assist in building up the brand image yet again. Advertisements play a crucial role in winning the brand image and loyalty of the customers. If the company tries to create an awareness about the product and the low price buying strategy, it would encourage the consumers to buy them that results in the greater sales of the product. authority advantages by focusing on customersAwareness of changing dynamics of the consumer market will definitely help Kelloggs to gain a competitive edge in the cereal industry. The increasing trend of health consciousness and the changing tastes can be known time to t ime by extensive market research. The feed back from consumers and the surveys conducted will allow the company to take away about their drawbacks and work up on them. It enables the business to minimize price sensitivity, remediate profitability, differentiate itself from the competition, improve its image in the eyes of customer, achieve a maximum number of advocates for the company, additions customer satisfaction and retention, enhance its reputation, improve faculty morale, ensure products and services are delivered right first time, increase employee satisfaction and retention, encourage employee participation, increase productivity and reduce be, create a reputation for being caring customer-oriented company, foster internal customer / total relationships and also bring about continuous improvements to the operation of the company.Barriers to overcomeFor Kelloggs to win back its brand and image customer loyalty and becoming customer focused organisation there are some b arriers to overcome essential Focus Rather than focusing on improving the output measures like revenue, cost and returns, the firm should pay attention to input measures like staff satisfaction and customer experience.Command and Control Culture A assure and control culture in the organisation creates internal conflicts, poor communication and mistrust. This constrains the freedom of building customer relationships and also the exchange of knowledge for better growth of the company.Short Term Approach The company should not tend to fall back to the product-thinking strategy, instead it should hold on to the customer focus strategy and treat it as a long term beginning(a) which might help acquire customer loyalty and retention to the firm. incompetent Customer Data With small volumes of customer data it is difficult to analyse customers behaviour and manage relationships. So, they should always make sure that adequate amount of data is available on the customers to understand the b uying behaviour patterns.Understanding the customers Though the company has gathered enough information, it is sometimes difficult to rein in it. So it should try understanding the attitudes and beliefs of the customer.ConclusionLabelling on food products plays a major role in the decision making process of a consumer. The buying behaviour of consumers is richly embroidered by the labels available on the product. In the Kelloggs case labelling issues created a damage to the company. The best way for Kelloggs to recover from this situation is to use the launch of the new products as a strategic technique to win back the customers it has lost. The glue that hold the organisation together is strong customer focus. It acts as a fuel for an improving the brand image of the company. Every employee should be committed and dedicated towards their work in order to build a customer focused organisation. If Business neglects to create a true customer focus, they need to face huge unnecessary c osts for poor service raised due to the active promotion of the customers who are dissatisfied. This might result in investing extensively in marketing and advertising by the company to gain back the customers attention. The life race of the organisation are the customers who allows the firm to realise their main goals and objectives to survive in the market and also to make a profit. Their behaviour helps the products to attain a recognition and allow them to last for longer periods. Consumer behaviours keep changing from time to time and the best thing the company could do is to develop strategic ways that make the consumers buy the products may it be old or new. So, customer focused strategy is the only thing which keeps the companies alive and increment in this highly changing competitive market.