Psychological Factor in Schizophrenia

26 Ginza, for the first time he met a woman named Yoko. Kawashima fell in love with her. Shortly, a year and eight months after their first meeting in Ginza, they decided to get married and finally have a baby named Little Rie. After short introductory about Kawashima’s family, the story began with Kawashima taking bath with his baby. After they finished taking a bath, Yoko usually dries his baby, and when Yoko was drying Little Rie, Kawashima saw Yoko murmuring something to Rie. After he saw his wife murmuring something to Rie, he felt something burning inside him and it made him anxious. Since then, he became suspicious and wanted to stab his daughter. Every time his anxiety came, he became sweating, then continue by smelt something weird like a pungent whiff of something organic burning, and so on. Every time Kawashima tried to stab his baby, there was a doubt in him. In one side he realized that he was Rie’s father but on the other side he felt that he must stab her because he thought that the baby was a threat for him. Since that night, he could not sleep, so he decided to go outside. He thought that he would rather enjoy the cold than staying at home. When he was enjoying night, he suddenly stopped at a shop to buy some diapers and when he already in, he suddenly saw his other self standing before the shelves two or three paces ahead of him. It pointed to the picture of a baby on the package and grinned at Kawashima. No longer after that, it told him that the only way to overcome his fear and anxiety is by finding a way to stab someone else with an ice pick. 27

B. Approach of the Study

The focus of this study was to analyze the factors that make Kawashima suffer from paranoid schizophrenia and to prove that he has problems with his psychological condition. The psychological approach was used in this study. This approach focused on the behavior of the main character like symptoms, and reasons why he can be categorized as having a mental illness like paranoid schizophrenia. To know deeper about the mental illness in the Piercing and relate it to the writer’s analysis, the writer applied the psychological approach by Mary Rohrberger and Samuel H. Woods, Jr. in Reading and Writing About Literature. “Psychological involves effort to locate and demonstrate certain recurrent patterns” which “draws on a different body of knowledge” 1971: 13. Psychological approach would help the writer to understand human behavior such as problems related to learning, perception, emotions, motivations, and thinking. Those behaviors usually are written as an object. In short, the psychological approach was used because it was related to the problems and factors that affect the main character in the novel.

C. Method of the Study

The data collection was done through a library research. In this study, the writer took the data from literary books, psychological books and dictionary, and some internet sources. There were two parts of sources that the writer used in this study. The primary data is Piercing, written by Ryu Murakami in 2007 in English version translated by Ralph F. McCarthy. The secondary source that would