ABSTRACT
This study is to reveal paranoid schizophrenia as represented in Poe’s works: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher. The research method was descriptive qualitative research method. By using descriptive qualitative research method, the data were processed qualitatively and explained descriptively to answer the research question. The data were collected through library and website research to find the previous studies and supporting data related to the issue in this study. In this study, I employed Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis theory to find out what happened to the main characters’ psyche and to reveal the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia through the main characters in Poe’s Works: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher. The results of the study show that paranoid schizophrenia in Poe’s three short stories is revealed through the internal aspects, there are characters and conflicts. Essentially, the main characters show symptoms such as delusion, hallucination, and catatonia through the reflections of their unstable inner minds and unexplainable flaw in their personalities. Those conditions create the fatal action such the main characters becomes the aggressors by attacking an innocent victim. Hopefully, this study will be a useful reference for the next research related to the topic in doing literary research.
Keywords: Paranoid Schizophrenia, Mental Disorder, Psychoanalysis, Projection
