Speaking with the Dead: The Sick Chick and the Psychic Crypt in Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Catherine Macmillan

doi:10.2478/genst-2022-0004

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores Gail Honeyman’s 2017 novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine from the perspective of Abraham and Torok’s concept of the psychic crypt. On one level the protagonist Eleanor, a thirty-year-old urban single woman searching for love, resembles a chick-lit heroine; however, Eleanor is deeply lonely, apparently autistic, suicidal and a survivor of childhood abuse and trauma. The paper argues that Eleanor’s difficulties can be understood as the consequences of encryptment which, in Abraham and Torok’s terms, is a disease of mourning where the dead loved one is incorporated rather than introjected into the psyche.

Highlights

It is arguably difficult to classify Gail Honeyman’s 2017 bestselling and critically acclaimed novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine according to genre
Abraham and Torok’s concept of the psychic crypt can be described as a disease of mourning according to which, due to an inability to mourn the dead love object, the dead object is introjected rather than incorporated into the psyche. This results in the dead object being, as it were, “buried alive” in the subject’s ego
For Abraham and Torok, several conditions have to be fulfilled for encryptment to take place

Summary

Introduction

It is arguably difficult to classify Gail Honeyman’s 2017 bestselling and critically acclaimed novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine according to genre. Eleanor’s search for love is an unorthodox one: emotionally immature despite her intellectual gifts, Eleanor develops an obsession with Johnnie Lomond, a handsome singer whom she has never met, a crush which seems more appropriate for a girl of thirteen than a woman of thirty It is Eleanor’s co-worker, the scruffy, down-to-earth, kindly Raymond Gibbons who provides the real love in Eleanor’s life by treating her with warmth and friendship, encouraging her to open up to the world and even saving her life following her suicide attempt. As is explored further below, it is argued that the concept of the psychic crypt, developed by psychologists Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, may help to shed light on Eleanor’s difficulties, including her conversations with her dead mother

A “Mummy”fied past

Conclusion