Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? is a short story about a 15-year-old girl named Connie who ends up in a troubled situation with what we think is a way older man. The man introduces himself as Arnold Friend; he also introduces his odd friend found in the passenger seat as Eddie and states that he knows Connie and all the people whom she surrounds herself with, even going into explicit details about where her family had gone that hot summer afternoon.  Arnold Friend tries to convince Connie to come out of her house and jump in his car for what he calls a “ride”, after a while of going back and forth with each other, as Connie runs to get the house phone and call the cops, something drastic happens (Which the author never seems to explain thoroughly) and ends with Connie on the floor feeling weak. At the end of the story, she is walking towards Arnold Friend, Eddie, and his dirty yellow truck. Joyce Carol Oates develops the Freudian idea of wishful impulses and perversions in her short story by demonstrating to the audience the growing conflict within the characters themselves and the relationship between them. 

 Throughout the story, we are approached by Connie’s snarky attitude, and within this attitude, we can see hints of her trying to act more mature than what she really is. This relates to her wishful impulse to be more grown-up. Wishful impulse is an action that cannot be attained due to it going against one’s morals. In the story it states “ Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—’Ha, ha, very funny,’—but high-pitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.” (Oates n.pag). This quote supports the idea that Connie’s attempt to act more mature is a wishful impulse as it is identified that there are two sides to her, and when a person has two sides to them it is most likely because they think that what they want is wrong. As Freud states,  “Thus the incompatibility of the wish in question with the patient’s ego was the motive for the repression; the subject’s ethical and other standards were the repressing forces.”. (Freud 2212). Although the only evidence of repression is when she is at home hiding her double personality, the quote states that these wishful impulses tend to be repressed due to a person knowing that the wish is not ethical according to their standards, or in Connie’s situation, her parent’s morality.

 In Freud’s IV lecture he introduces us to the idea of infantile sexuality, where he talks about several terms, one of them being perversion. Perversion is something that deviates from the norm, sexual wise, it usually derives from a fixation that occurs during the psychosexual stages of development. In Oates’ short story, we get to see various examples of perversion, but most importantly in Arnold Friends’ deviant lust towards Connie as it is obviously not the sexual norm being that Connie is way younger than him. In the story, it states “ I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t.”(Oates n.pag). This quote shows that Arnold Friend has an unnatural interest in Connie being that he is more interested in a type of love that seems one-sided and forced. This is a perversion as it is not the sexual norm to want to force someone to be with you.

As Connie tends to act much older than what she is, she soon learns that she does not want to be older when Arnold Friend makes her feel terribly uncomfortable by saying the things that adults would say to each other. Arnold Friend also manipulates Connie to leave with him by using her family as leverage. Both of these situations connect to Freud’s second lecture as it hits the topics of wishful impulse and a certain state of hypnosis. Although Freud’s lectures can be applied to way more than these short stories, they certainly help us analyze what exactly is happening in these realistic psychological thrillers. Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is just one of the many stories that we can analyze but it’s semi vague situations that give a lot of variation to how you view the situations within them.