Abstract
AbstractThis article argues that Richard Wagner's opera Der fliegende Holländer, which may seem representative of the death drive, is essentially concerned with birth. As Slavoj Žižek has suggested, the opera bears striking parallels to Freud's Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920). Yet deeper insights on the opera can be reached in light of the theory developed by dissident psychoanalyst Otto Rank in Das Trauma der Geburt (1924). An analysis of the images used by Wagner in his libretto reveals an ambivalent relation to the maternal, with fantasies focusing on the close union between mother and child, the birth process that tears the child away from the mother, and the child's desire to return to the womb.
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