The Death-ego and the Vital Self: Romances of Desire in Literature and Psychoanalysis

Gavriel Reisner

Jan 2003 · Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

About this ebook

This volume presents original views of the relationship between desire and romance. It begins by looking anew at the nature of desire, citing its central theoretical text as Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'. It traces the struggle betwen myth and romance, between the ego on its way to death and the self in search of life, through close readings of poems and letters of John Keats and in detailed considerations of a series of novels including 'Frankenstein', 'Wuthering Heights', 'Jane Eyre', and 'Sons and Lovers'.

Ratings and reviews

One of the most unfortunate things about the academic study of Literature is that flashy books that follow intellectual fads get inordinate attention while books of substance are neglected. Reisner's book is one of uncommon substance; a truly rigorous and insightful psychoanalytic study of how works of fiction, and specifically the romance genre, dramatize the conflict within the psyche between life and death, eros and thanatos; or, as Reisner formulates it, between an ego seeking death through the reduction of inner conflict and tension and a force in the psyche seeking life through the engagement of vital energies in living out the force of desires. The work is in effect divided into two parts. The first three chapters are theoretical; the last four give readings of 4 novels, thereby also tracing a historical progression of the romance genre. The theoretical chapters are dense but rewarding. Unlike many of his followers, Reisner is a careful and reflective student of Lacan. He is thus able to use his thought to offer a new model for studying genres as figurations of desire. Chapters 2-3 extend this theoretical model through readings of Freud's great and enigmatic Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Keats' concept of negative capability. The result is a rich psychoanalytic understanding of Desire in terms of the battle with the psyche between death and life. Reisner then applies this model to Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Sons and Lovers. These chapters are the finest thing in the book. Reisner is a careful and unusually insightful reader. These are four novels I know fairly well and have taught many times, but I felt often in reading Reisner that I was discovering them for the first time. What's magnificent here is Reisner's ability to get at the basic desire informing a novel and then show how the complexities of the novel result from the conflicts implicit in that desire. I think anyone teaching fiction or any reader concerned to read in an intelligent way will find much of benefit in this book. I'm sure that it will remain for me a standard text on both the theory of fiction and the practical art of interpreting novels. One final quality should be added: this is the kind of book that leads readers to engage in deep reflections on their own conflicts and desires. You can't ask for more.