How is "Young Goodman Brown" interpreted from a Freudian perspective?

Freudian analysis is based on a number of assumptions. For example, Freud believed that the conscious mind often seeks to suppress the unconscious; thus, repressed emotions percolate in the realm of the unconscious, intentionally ignored.

Through psychoanalytic literary criticism, we can see this at play in some works. Let's take "Young Goodman Brown," for instance. In this story, what the author never intended (the repressed elements of malevolence, profane desire, and irreverent behavior in human nature) is in conflict with what the author intended (the moral nature of the devout).

In fact, there is a fascination with the macabre in the story. Additionally, the dream-like imagery casts doubt in our minds, as it does in Goodman Brown's. Like him, we are led to ask: are the pious really joined in harmonious empathy with the wicked?

But, irreverently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid crimes. It was strange to see, that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.

In this story, the idea of the "collective unconscious" also holds sway. To Freud, the "personal unconscious" held repressed memories. Carl Jung expanded on that idea and came up with the "collective unconscious," the idea that humans shared universal ancestral memories. He believed that many cultures share similar symbols (as evidenced in art, literature, and music) because they come from the same archetypes.

An example of an archetype is what Jung called the "persona" or mask. This is the face we show the world; it represents what we believe is our best self. Of course, what is hidden from the world constitutes our repressed desires and emotions, seemingly ignored by us. In "Young Goodman Brown," the most pious members of our protagonist's congregation are shown to secretly cherish the most irreverent desires. In the dark of night (where all is hidden, just like in the unconscious), they seemingly enjoy a witches' sabbath with the wicked in attendance.

For more on psychoanalytic literary criticism and Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, please refer to the links below.

How is "Young Goodman Brown" interpreted from a Freudian perspective?

Freudian analysis is based on the conflict between the Id, the Ego, and the Superego.  The Id represents our savage and hedonistic tendencies.  The Superego represents our conscience and pride (morality).  The Ego, or reason, balances between both our tendencies to be devils (id) and angels (superego).  Young Goodman Brown travels in a dream into the forest following a devil (his id).  Faith, his wife, begs him not to go.  Along the way he finds many people who he esteems in the forest participating in satanic rituals.  He even finds his wife, Faith in the forest participating in a "black mass."  Faith represents all of the ideals that Goodman Brown's superego values--fidelity to God and morality.  Immediately before his and Faith's initiation into the Satanic cult, he begs Faith to look heavenward.  He wakes from this dream trip unsure of the reality of what he has experienced and most importantly, unsure of Faith's success in looking heavenward.  Thus he begins to mistrust Faith and indeed everyone who he ever had any faith in.  His ego is unable to reconcile the conflict between his id and his superego.  Thus, Goodman Brown ends up bitter and mistrustful from then on.

Analyze "Young Goodman Brown" from a psychoanalytic perspective.

To analyze Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story from a psychoanalytic perspective, I would recommend that you focus on three key terms and concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis --repression, projection, and dreamwork – and apply those terms and concepts as thoroughly as possible to the story. You may find, in the end, that just one of these terms or concepts will be enough! What this psychoanalytic approach might emphasize can include:

• the extreme control of desires (i.e. the forces of repression) in the town of Salem that is the setting of  the short story,
• the title character’s ability to see sin in everyone but himself (i.e. projection)
• and the possibility that Young Goodman Brown’s journey into the woods that night was indeed all just a dream that reflects (through symbols that can mean more than one thing at once) his own anxieties and conflicts (i.e. symbols that can be interpreted through dreamwork).

These concepts can be applied thoroughly to Hawthorne’s short story or, for that matter, to the works of most or all Romantic writers. Hawthorne’s story is very well suited to this sort of approach. At the end, for example, the story itself is clearly left open: perhaps Young Goodman Brown had dreamed it all, and perhaps he hadn’t.

In "Young Goodman Brown," how are the setting and characters interrelated?

You have asked a question that points towards the allegorical significance of this excellent short story. Clearly, the setting plays an immensely important part in the story. Note how Young Goodman Brown is said to leave his home and to head towards the forest, which is described in terms that make it ominous and foreboding, foreshadowing the evil sights that Goodman Brown will witness:

He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of teh forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be...

The forest is definitely described as an evil place, a place hidden from light and where evil acts can be perpetrated without others knowing. Thus it is a fitting place for Goodman Brown in his "present evil purpose." Of course, as he meets the Devil, and has to choose between heading on and turning back, the other characters that he sees, fine upright, good Christian folk (or so he thought) indicates one of the central themes in the story: the way that we are all tainted by evil, no matter how "good" we appear to be. Note how this is indicated by Goodman Brown's conversation with the devil about his family:

"They were my good friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their sake."

The setting and the charactes therefore help to advance Hawthorne's main message in this story: that evil is part of the essential human condition that cannot be ignored or covered up by masks of spiritual hypocrisy. It is this truth that Goodman Brown learns, and which, ironically, destroys the rest of his life as he commits himself to gloom and doom.

When do the setting, conflicts, complications, and climax occur in "Young Goodman Brown"?

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown, the setting of the conflicts and complications—as well as the moment of the climax—takes place in the forest. 

Brown, newly married, plans a trip into the woods, despite Faith's appeal that he stay home. Married only a short time, and in light of his wife's concerns, he promises that when he returns, he will not go again. It is interesting to note that he does not speak of the errand that takes him into the forest. It is inferred that he is there on some dark business. And it is also unusual in that the Puritans believed that the forest was the devil's realm: to go there meant placing oneself in the path of danger—at the risk of losing one's eternal soul.

...the Puritans did regard the forest as a kind of "hell," in that they identified it as the haunt of the devil...In addition, the Puritans believed...that witches held their rites in the forest.

With this in mind, it is hard to imagine what would bring Brown into the forest in the first place. However, when he arrives, he meets an old man with a startling resemblance (at first) to Brown. The old man is expecting him:

“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the Old South was striking as I came through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes agone.”

Note Brown's double entendre here, in response to the old man:

Faith kept me back a while...

Does he mean his wife, or allegorically, his religious faith?

In his dealings with the devil in disguise, we can see Brown's internal struggle with his own belief system, which is shaken by what he perceives as a falling from grace by not only his peers (and leaders of the church, at that), but also by his wife. 

The most overriding conflicts are established in the forest, when Brown learns not only that his own family had a relationship with the devil, but so too do the Puritan leaders of his town. (These conflicts are man vs. man and man vs. society.) The devil reports:

The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too. 

 ...[the] very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and spiritual adviser...

With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the devil!

Please apply psychoanalytic criticism to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."

In searching for the underlying motives and thinking of Goodman Brown, the reader need look first to the exposition of Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown."  There,the sanctimonious Puritan, Goodman Brown, tells his wife Faith that he is going into the forest primeval just "this one night."  In fact, he deludes himself,

With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose.

Goodman Brown leads his wife to think that he makes the journey into the forest because it is a task that he must accomplish, when he is actually challenging the devil:

"There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree," said Goodman Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, "What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow?"

Brown feels that he must test his faith, and as a good Puritan, he feels justified in what he does, believing himself a Christian who can resist evil.  However, when the old man with the staff that resembles a serpent appears, he is the likeness of Goodman himself,

...the second traveller was ...apparently in the same rank of life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than features.

This second traveller, who claims to have been good friends with Brown's father, laughs when Goodman claims to be a man of "prayer and good works to boot, [who] abide[s] no such wickedness."  Apparently, the traveller is the darker side of Goodman himself, a side which he refuses to admit because of his Puritan beliefs that he is saved.  As further proof of this, while Goodman and the elder traveller continue, the traveller's exhortations to "persevere in the path and discourses" seem 

rather to spring up in the bosom of his auditor than to be suggested by himself.

Because Brown's faith is too simple in itself--he says he will go "just this one night" to witness the black mass--his Puritan self-righteousness projects his own Calvinistic sense of Depravity and Original Sin from which he cannot free himself onto others.  So, as the pink ribbons of Faith waft through the air, Brown perceives not his faith being lost, but that of his wife's just as he views the evil purpose of Goody Cloyse and Deacon Gookin. Yet, despite his sanctimony, he becomes "a distrustful, if not a desperate man from the night of that fearful dream" as his inner self looks into his corrupted heart and feels the "loathful brotherhood by the sympathy of all that was wicked in him."

Young Goodman Brown's night at the black sabbath elicits his underlying motives to create illusions to justify his Calvinistic indoctrination about the concept of total depravity. It is from this concept that Brown's Puritan gloom emanates; it is from this concept that no deeply thinking mind is completely free, Hawthorne seems to say.