Love and Violence in Selected Novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Freud’s Psychoanalytic Lens

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s two novels are influenced by two papers written by Sigmund Freud. Fitzgerald’s third novel The Great Gatsby (1925) was published five years after Freud’s paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Similarly his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night (1934) was published about five years after Freud’s other important paper, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). While The Great Gatsby follows the major issues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Tender Is the Night has its roots mostly in Civilization and Its Discontents. In the former paper, Freud introduces repetition compulsion and relates it to the death instinct. In the latter one, he is concerned with the aggressive behavior that results from conforming to the rules of society and how society affects the individual. While The Great Gatsby follows the repetition through the love relationships of the characters, Tender Is the Night focuses on the aggressive behavior of its characters.