Freudian Analylsis of "The Enduring Chill"

I observed the heavily Freudian influenced relationship between mother and son in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Enduring Chill.” From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the hostility Asbury emits toward his mother stems from an underdeveloped or unfulfilled Oedipus complex. According to Freud, every young boy goes through a period in his life—usually from age three to age five— where he fixates on his love for his mother. During that stage, the boy competes with his father to win over his mother’s love. The boy passes through the stage amicably if the parents express their love to the boy without imposing “excessively prohibitive or excessively stimulating attitudes.” However, if he undergoes trauma from his parents, he is subject to experiencing “infantile neurosis” later on in his adult life. Asbury’s Oedipus stage seemed to twist the desire to win over his mother’s love into a bitter hatred of his mother and the love she had for him. Perhaps Asbury felt like he lost any kind of competition with his father who successfully became “a lawyer and a businessman and a farmer and politician all rolled into one.” Mrs. Fox esteemed her husband for his ability to “do anything.” Asbury, on the other hand “in addition to being smart, he had an artistic temperament” that Mrs. Fox must have recognized early on in his childhood. His inability to win his mother’s love due to his contrasting personality must have hindered his completion of the Oedipus stage. Later in his life, he felt like a failure, and his depression, or infantile neurosis, led him to believe he “had no talent. [He] couldn’t create. [He] had nothing except for the desire for these things.” His mental pathology sprung from his destitute opinion of himself as a failure to his god, Art. He most likely-- again, according to a Freudian analysis—projected his desires for his mother onto Art, and when he realized he could not win over Art in the same way he won over his mother, his neurosis led him to believe he deserved to die. His death would revenge his mother’s inability to love him or understand him and it would produce something ascetically artistic to satisfy his passion for Art. Additionally, the mark of a successfully transitioned Oedipus complex is the affluent completion of the superego. Freud argues for the existence of three parts to the human psyche: the ego, the id, and the superego. They represent, respectively, the human desire for structured organization, the desire for nihilistic fulfillment of pleasure, and the conscience or mediator of the two. Because Asbury’s Oedipus complex stage eventually led him to hate his mother, Asbury most likely has a distorted sense of what is right and wrong, an underdeveloped superego. He cannot see, for example, that his mother truly cares for him but insists that her abhorrent way “had simply been the air he breathed.” She smothered him, and when he tried to break free, he found he couldn’t live without the smothering. To pay her back for chaining him to her, he wrote a letter to “leave her with an enduring chill and perhaps in time lead her to see herself as she was.” A hurtful, almost evil death note to his mother, anyone else would see as wrong. Seeking and longing death, too, anyone else would see as warped sense of reality. Asbury, however, believes death was a “justification, a gift from life.” My questions then, follow: Is Asbury, then, punished for his twisted superego? Is the only way to fix him through the “Holy Spirit” which eventually condemns him? Perhaps the Jesuit priest was correct in believing Asbury was “a good lad at heart but very ignorant.” He is ignorant of what is really right and wrong, ignorant that art cannot define a man, and ignorant of the idea that life is truly a better gift than death.