Primo Levi’s Loneliness: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Suicide-Nearness

Abstract

To elucidate suicide-nearness, the perspectives of the death drive and narcissism are applied to the writings of Primo Levi. Emerging themes are Levi’s struggle to maintain his self-regard from his year as a prisoner in Auschwitz and onward, and his observations on xenophobia, violence, and the need for love. The gradual increase of depressive content in Levi’s work is noted, as are his identifications with others who succumbed in the Holocaust or took their lives after surviving it. The conflict between the wish for peace and the need for love is seen as impossible to resolve under the threat of extermination and as reemerging in the prevailing sense of loneliness that Levi described.