Psychoanalytic analysis of "Makhmal" in the short story "The Monkey Whose Master Had Died" written by Sadeq Chubak based on Karen Horney's theory

Personality is formed in society and interaction with others. People have complex contradictions in behavior, speech and thought. They have a distinctive character after interpersonal interactions in society. Psychoanalytic reading is one of the approaches of literary criticism that has a significant impact on the interpretation of story elements, the analysis of the unconscious of the character, and the rooting of behavioral causes and motives. Karen Horney is considered as one of the psychoanalytic theorists who, with a different attitude from Freud's views, pointed out the relationship between culture and environment with the formation of a person's shape and divided the personality into three types: "compeliant", "aggressive" and "detached". Sadeq Chubak is one of the pioneers of modern fiction writing in Iran. In some of his works, mental disorders can be seen in the hearts of neurotic characters. In the upcoming research, the behavioral, moral, and psychological characteristics of the character "Makhmal" in the short story "The Monkey Whose Master Had Died" written by Sadeq Chubak have been selected for analysis. The current interdisciplinary study aims to analyze the mental and individual disorders hidden in the character of "Makhmal" based on the descriptive-analytical method and collecting information in a library manner along with extracting from the text of the selected short story, based on Karen Horney's theories. In this research, after defining concepts such as psychoanalytic criticism, neurotic personality, social psychoanalytical approach and compliant personality type, a summary of the story is presented and the psychological characteristics of the character in question have been analyzed. According to the results of the research, the neurotic personality of "Makhmal" is placed under the compliant type according to Karen Horney's classification. Monkey has a dependent, domineering and subordinate personality. Throughout the story, he suffers from fear, doubt, hatred and lack of self-confidence and suffers from separation anxiety disorder. The relationship between "Makhmal" and "Jahan" can be seen as the relationship between an authoritarian father and a child.