Chapter Psychoanalysis of Tender is the Night - Study Guide by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Psychoanalysis

With the emphasis on dreams and visions in the country's ethos I think psychoanalysis becomes an important facet to consider. Dreams are our main route to the unconscious, fragile illusions and neurosis, all of which are open to multiple interpretations as we can see from the works of Freud, Lacan and Jung. In Fitzgerald's novels we can see a preoccupation not only with the American Dream but also dreams and psychoanalysis. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver is a psychiatrist who marries one of his schizophrenic patients after a seemingly successful case of transference in their letter writing through the war. We cannot help but see the influence of Freud and his works into the human mind, which were contemporary to Fitzgerald. In 1920, Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle was published, followed by Group Psychology (1921) and The Ego and Id (1923) which accounted for the structure and functioning of the mind into an id, ego, and a super ego and in 1930 the 'death instinct' was explored in Civilisation and Its Discontents. Freud in recognising that dreams, like neurotic symptoms, are products of a conflict and compromise between conscious and unconscious impulses (see The Interpretation of Deams etc.) was able to classify the differences between the primary and secondary processes of thought - between the modes of functioning in the unconscious and conscious regions of the mind. Freud was able to demonstrate the normal development of the sexual instinct in childhood and, largely on the basis of examining dreams, arrived at his fundamental discovery of the unconscious forces that influence our everyday thoughts and actions.

Where the unconscious is most damagingly at work is in psychological disturbance of one kind or another. Psychosis is where the ego, unable as in neurosis partly to repress the unconscious desire, actually comes under its sway. If this happens then the link between the ego and the external world is ruptured, and the unconscious begins to build up an alternative delusional reality resulting in the psychotic behaviour of paranoia and schizophrenia. Freud's psychoanalytical practice was set out not just to explore the mind but to cure it. The cure involves explaining the unconscious motivations to the patient but Freudian theory also involves 'transference'. The patient 'transfers' his problems; if there are strains in the relationship with the father then the patient may unconsciously recast the analyst in that role. This is not just a case of repetition but through transference the analyst is given privileged insight into the patients psychical life, in a controlled situation in which he/she can intervene. We can see then in Tender is the Night a fascination with the tension of the inner reality of imagination and the outer reality of the world played out through the exploration and interrogation of the American dream and psychoanalysis.