Rational Self and the Bad Child

In Foster’s essay he describes Freud’s theory that we are “fundamentally divided on a psychic level,” by simply stating that “we contain an adult rational self and another self, a bad child.” (p. 483) We bury this child deep in the unconscious. This child is the side of us that Freud describes as “Not me” but “another child who becomes the wild, perverse, desiring, violent creature of our nightmares.”
This is demonstrated in Dracula when Jonathan Harker is sleeping in the Counts castle and the three female vampires came to visit him. The three vampires seem to appear from the moonlight. Though Harker’s journal we know that he describes his feelings as “uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that the would kiss me with those red lips.”(p. 61) Though Jonathan is engaged to Mina and we knows that he loves her, he is intrigued by them. His rational side is fearful of this women because he has never seen them before and knows that they have materialized in front of him out of moonlight. Though in his head he knows that something is wrong with this situation, the “bad child” within him wants to know what they are going to do to him. He describes his longing for them to kiss him as “ an agony of delightful anticipation.”(p.61) As the passage moves on we see how Jonathan fights with his own thoughts and describes that though he is scared he can not bring himself to stop the women which is the side of the “bad child.”