"Lord of the Flies": A Psychoanalytic View of Destructiveness.

"Lord of the Flies" was William Golding's first published novel and since its appearance in 1954 it has become one of his best known works. It is commonly said that it shows how thin is the veneer of civilization and how readily we humans can return to the state of primitive savages or animals and once again become blindly destructive. I read the novel recently for the first time, and I was struck by how similar were the processes depicted in the story to those I have experienced in my work as a psychoanalyst. I would like to make use of Golding's novel to discuss some of the psychoanalyti…