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@article{207953,
        author = {Mr. Arka Das and Mr. Yash Naik},
        title = {Behavioral Functioning and Renaissance Humanism: A Psychological Analysis of the Renaissance Self},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {3},
        pages = {3524-3531},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=207953},
        abstract = {The relationship between psychology and literature provides an important interdisciplinary framework for understanding the representation of human thought, emotion, behavior, and adaptation across historical periods. Renaissance humanism, with its emphasis on human potential, individual agency, education, reason, and self-development, produced literary characters who were increasingly represented as psychologically complex individuals responsible for their own decisions. The present paper examines the relationship between behavioral functioning and Renaissance humanism through a psychological analysis of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Behavioral functioning is examined through interconnected domains of adaptive functioning, emotional functioning, social functioning, cognitive functioning, and occupational or role functioning. Using a qualitative interpretive and interdisciplinary approach, the paper argues that Renaissance literature can be read as a representation of the psychological consequences of freedom, ambition, moral conflict, and individual responsibility. Faustus illustrates the destructive consequences of unregulated ambition and maladaptive decision-making; Brutus demonstrates the psychological consequences of value conflict, social influence, and impaired political judgment; and Hamlet represents the relationship between reflection, emotional disturbance, indecision, and impaired action. The analysis does not attempt to diagnose fictional characters retrospectively. Rather, contemporary psychological concepts are used as interpretive tools for understanding literary representations of human functioning. The paper concludes that Renaissance humanism created a literary environment in which the individual became a central site of conflict between aspiration and limitation, reason and emotion, autonomy and responsibility. This interdisciplinary perspective demonstrates that Renaissance literature remains valuable for examining enduring questions concerning human behavior, self-regulation, identity, decision-making, and psychological adaptation.},
        keywords = {behavioral functioning, Renaissance humanism, psychology and literature, Doctor Faustus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, emotional regulation, individualism},
        month = {August},
        }