Lacanian Psychoanalysis of Frankenstein

726 Words3 Pages
One lens to view Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the psychoanalytic lens. This perspective, influenced greatly from the works and thinking of Sigmund Freud, stems from the idea that much of our desires, fears, and motives come from our unconscious. He postulated that most of these desires are repressed by the consciousness to reduce anxiety and dissonance, and emerge only in the disguised forms of dreams, language, and art. One of the most commonly repressed feelings, which Freud called the Oedipal complex, is the boy’s psychosexual desires towards his mother and his jealousy towards his father. According to Freud, the boy must identify with his father in order to resolve the “oedipal crisis” and develop into an adult with a healthy identity. Freud and many others used these theories as models for analyzing literature and gathering insight on the writer, the process, the language, and the effects. Lacan, a prominent psychoanalyst, extended Freud’s theories and interpretations by introducing language as a term. He incorporated the importance of linguistics into the Oedipal complex, forming the theory of the Imaginary and Symbolic order. The Imaginary stage, which occurs within the pre-oedipal period and ends with the start of the Oedipal stage, is when the child begins to recognize itself, its mother, and other people as independent selves. The Symbolic order represents the importance of language in the Oedipal stage; it is the system of names and words that allows the child to understand his gender, the authority of the father, and the father’s relationship to the mother. In the Psychoanalytic criticism of Frankenstein, David Collings explains Victor Frankenstein as a man who has not fully completed his passage from the Imaginary order into the Symbolic. According to Collings, two distinct realms in the novel represent these two orders. The Symbolic realm is the
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