McEwan’s Enduring Love: A Psychoanalytical Investigation

Abstract

This essay is a psychoanalytic examination of Ivan McEwan's novel ‘Enduring Love’. The Object Relation Theory, which asserts the existence of a fundamental human instinct known as mother-child relationship, provides a unique viewpoint on how an individual interacts with his or her environment. It is about studying the characters' behaviours and attempting to understand them from a psychoanalytic perspective. The anxieties and tensions that permeate McEwan's characters' psyches in Enduring Love will be shown via the use of synthesising key phrases and concepts from Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott's object-relations theory. Klein, Fairbairn, and Winnicott argue that during an infant's early years, there are both good and toxic things from the outside world. These things, which include activities, people, and relationships, are referred to as objects, and are internalised as positive or negative experiences, indicating that what we live through, contributes to the development of our self and personality. Mother is an object, and the infant's relationship with his or her mother is critical to the child's maturation, growth, development, and later stages of life. According to this, identifying the source of McEwan's characters' failures in their interactions and relationships with one another results in their early childhood's unsatisfactory emotional experiences, resulting in an imperfect development in later stages of life in establishing healthy relationships.