Dreams, Desire, and Self-Realization in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: A Psychoanalytic Study
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Abstract
Scholarship of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist has been focused primarily upon the path Santiago has traveled through Jungian individuation, archetype, spirituality, and the quest to find his “Personal Legend.” Much less work has been done on the recurring dream as a psychoanalytical pattern. The dream is regarded as a beginning, not a psychological organizer in the novel from beginning to end, as is most often the case in most studies. This paper both draws on Freud’s ideas of wish-fulfillment and repetition and on Jung’s individuation model to suggest that Santiago’s dream is not just a vehicle through which he begins his journey but in fact organizes and frames it; at every crisis Santiago repeats his dreams, pressing his unconscious desire into his conscious identity until it is absorbed. By reading the novel in detail, one can see that the language of dream, treasure, fear, and return is what has made it popular, and that the vocabulary of destiny that Coelho has developed is standing on a consistent psychological ground, which is not often explored by critics. When the dream is read as structure, rather than origin, the meaning of the ending is different: instead of an ironic twist on a lost journey, it is the completion of a process that begins on the first page of the dream.
Keywords
Psychoanalytic Criticism; Dream Analysis; Unconscious Desire; Individuation; Archetypes; Repetition Compulsion; Paulo Coelho; The Alchemist
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How to cite this paper
Dreams, Desire, and Self-Realization in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: A Psychoanalytic Study
How to cite this paper: Muhammad Danish Ishaque, Muhammad Farman. (2026). Dreams, Desire, and Self-Realization in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: A Psychoanalytic Study. Journal of Literature Advances, 3(2), 148-152.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jla.2026.12.007
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