Dreams Gone Sour A Psychoanalytic Analysis Of The Great Gatsby

Dreams gone sour: A Psychoanalytical interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Psychoanalytic criticism takes the techniques of psychoanalysis; a treatment of neuroses developed by Sigmund Freud, and applies them to examine literary works. It is a science concerned not only with the interaction between conscious and unconscious but also with the ways of mental function.
This paper entitled “Dreams gone sour: A Psychoanalytical interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby” discusses F. Scott Fitzgerald’s much acclaimed novel, The Great Gatsby (1925) from a psychoanalytical perspective. It studies how the id versus superego literally bifurcate the characters into two completely different mindsets and how the vigorous

Jay Gatsby’s love for Daisy Buchanan could in fact be interpreted on means beyond the norm of intimacy between a man and a woman. When asked about Daisy, Gatsby would explain several times through the novel that she was the woman that his mother never could amount to. She was everything his mother wasn't- "rich, elegant, luxurious." (The Great Gatsby 63) This insinuates an oedipal fixation towards Daisy that pertains to his mother. Gatsby looks at Daisy in the sense that she is the woman that his mother could never be, which can be a factor that increases Gatsby’s love for Daisy, in order compensate for a certain emptiness inside of him that his mother was never able to fill up for him. Enveloped in guilt because he never had a proper, loving relationship with his own mother, Gatsby vicariously seeks this through Daisy Buchanan. Throughout the novel, it is implied that this is the reason why Gatsby’s love for Daisy was so continuous- it was comparable of that to the undying, nurturing love that a mother and son are supposed share.
Thus, The Great Gatsby, has many psychoanalytical elements by which the characters are based on and flawed by, although the novel primarily revolves around the concept of the ‘American Dream’ gone wrong. As Lois Tyson states, "the corruption...lies not in the American dream or in Jay Gatsby but in what surrounds and victimizes the characters." (Tyson 40) In short,

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