Fitzgerald and Freud: Love and Violence

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald's works are related to Freudian theories. Fitzgerald's third novel The Great Gatsby was published five years after Freud's paper “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. Similarly his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night was published about five years after Freud's other important paper, “Civilization and Its Discontents”. The purpose of this research is to illustrate the relation between Fitzgerald's two novels and Freud's two articles. 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.