Board Thread:Character Discussion/@comment-31564770-20170322233001/@comment-31749935-20170415214426

I agree with a lot of what's already been said, so I don't want to repeat. However, the thing about Freud is that he was a fraud (wordplay most definitely intended) His research mainly consisted of case studies that his fans wrote to him with and he diagnosed these cases without ever having met the patients.There are a lot of ethical issues involved in his work, and also a lot of it is just not scientifically sound.

Instead of it being the id and the superego which have been separated from the one person, I think that the show is trying to portray it as mostly an issue with repression. Regina was struggling to repress her 'evil' impulses and instincts, instead of working through them, trying to understand them and accept that they existed. If she accepts their existence and doesn't repress them then there would be no more 'evil queen' living inside her head and causing that battle that she mentions before the split. That's not to say that she has to become 'evil' again, just accept that she once did those things. She needs to forgive herself, rather than excise those feelings, because that's giving them the space to thrive and consume her, rather than dealing with them properly. That's why she hasn't got her happy ending; because she's not allowing herslef to have it- she doesn't believe she deserves it because she still feels guilty for what she has done in the past.

It's fine to feel regret over the things that she did as the evil queen, but not to let guilt destroy her future. If Snow can forgive her, but she's still not happy, that's because she hasn't forgiven herself.