Yet another AHS related blog!

Keeping with the theme of the wonderful American Horror Story, season 1 posed a lot of Freudian questions and views. The main ones being hysterics, the subjective nature of memory and the dangers of repression.

Season 1 is based off of the idea of a haunted house. Inside, a murder occurred annually. As luck would have it, a family moves in after suffering the emotional damage spun from an affair and a stillbirth. It is once they move into this house that they meet an eccentric cast of dead and undead alike. Ranging from the victims of a home invasion to a man who has half of his face scorched when killing his family in a fire. All of the souls of the victims are trapped on the grounds of the murder house.

After many traumatic events, that would send anyone over the edge, Vivian (the mother of the family) is raped by a man in leather (later revealed to be one of the ghosts). As she attempts to relay this information to her husband, he has her committed to a psychiatric ward. Much like Freud's hysterics, Vivian is categorized as an "overemotional" woman who exaggerates tales.

Other Freudian topics prevented in this season is repression. The family originally moves from Boston to California after Psychiatric Ben's (the husband) affair is unearthed. He represses many of his sexual feelings and in turn is almost a magnet to sexual behavior. My personal favorite part is the subject of Moira the maid. Men see her as a young woman who cleans the floors in lingerie and has an insatiable thirst for sex. Women, however, see Moira as an older, matronly maid. "According to Moira, this is because women's intuition gives them insight on the true nature of people whereas men see only what they desire - however, if the man can resist the compulsion to see her as a sexual object, they too will see her as who she is." (http://americanhorrorstory.wikia.com/wiki/Moira_O'Hara) It is only once Ben stops repressing his sexual desires for Moira that he sees her as she really is.

Lastly, the daughter of Ben and Vivien suffers from depression and attempts to commit suicide. She fails on account of being saved by one of her father's psychotic patients. It is later explains that she did in fact successfully commit suicide and did not know. The subject of forgetting such an event, fictional or not, touches upon the conscious and unconscious theory of suppression and repression.