PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM

Psychoanalytic criticism is an approach to literary criticism. It is influenced by Sigmund Freud, Carl G. Jung and Jacques Lacan. This literary theory/criticism sees a literary work as an expression of the unconscious of the individual psyche of its author or of the collective behaviour/unconscious of a society or of the whole human race. It is a means to understand the literary text properly and psychoanalytically. It is a kind of psychoanalytical reading as well. We can develop our understanding to literary text through psychoanalytical theory. It operates the literary text and produces a clearer picture of the text from which we can easily get mastery over the text. Psychoanalytical criticism is one of the most important reading techniques to understand the psychological and mostly ambiguous literary text as well.

This theory/criticism is concerned with dynamics not only of the psyche but with the dynamics of interpersonal relations. Freud provided convincing evidence that most of our actions are motivated by psychological forces over which we have very little/limited control. The human mind has been categorised into three different segments. They are ID, EGO and SUPEREGO. The store/house of the unconscious desires and wishes is ID. The unconscious feelings and desires that are in ID are not accepted by the conscious mind, EGO and SUPEREGO. In this storehouse, there are sexual and overambitious instincts. These instincts constantly strive for fulfilment. However, the superego completely dominates these wishes and desires for the distortion of unconscious contents. Due to the conflict between conscious and unconscious, an illness known as neurosis (A mental or personality disturbance not attributable to any known neurological or organic dysfunction) is provoked.

Psychoanalysts have extended the field of psychoanalytic criticism to encompass (cover/embrace) analysis of the motives of authors, readers and fictional characters. A text according to them contains childhood memories, relationship to parents and fear of intimacy because of psychological tension. Freud presents the idea that a text contains oedipal dynamics (relating to the Oedipus complex) over which we have limited control. C. G. Jung presents his theory of the collective unconscious. Lacan analysed psychoanalytic theory in light of post-structuralism. He asserts that there is not a one-to-one relation between signifier (word form) and signified (meant/sense).

Thus the psychoanalytic unconscious wishes and desires that are manifested in the literary text deserve importance. These wishes are shown through condensation and displacement. That’s why language itself can be studied as a means of presenting unconscious wishes and desires.

Notes on ID, EGO & SUPEREGO

The id, ego, and superego are names for the three parts of the human personality which are part of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic personality theory. According to Freud, these three parts combine to create the complex behaviour of human beings.  

Id: Meeting Basic Needs

The id is the most basic part of the personality and wants instant gratification for our wants and needs. If these needs or wants are not met, a person becomes tense or anxious.

•  Sally was thirsty. Rather than waiting for the server to refill her glass of water, she reached across the table and drank from Mr Smith’s water glass, much to his surprise.
• A hungry baby cried until he was fed.
• Michael saw a $5 bill fall out of Nick’s backpack as he pulled his books out of his locker. As Nick walked away, Michael bent over, picked up the money, and slipped it into his pocket, glancing around to make sure no one was looking.
• In line at the salad bar, Amy was so hungry that she shoved a handful of croutons in her mouth as she waited for the line to move.

Ego: Dealing with Reality

The ego deals with reality, trying to meet the desires of the id in a way that is socially acceptable in the world. This may mean delaying gratification and helping to get rid of the tension the id feels if a desire is not met right away. The ego recognises that other people have needs and wants too and that being selfish is not always good for us in the long run.

• Sally was thirsty. However, she knew that her server would be back soon to refill her water glass, so she waited until then to get a drink, even though she really just wanted to drink from Mr Smith’s glass.
• Even though Michael needed money, he decided not to steal the money from the cash register because he didn't want to get in trouble.
• In line at the salad bar, Amy really wanted to shove a handful of croutons into her mouth. However, since her boss was there, she decided to wait another minute or two until she sat down to eat.

Superego: Adding Morals

The superego develops last and is based on morals and judgments about right and wrong. Even though the superego and the ego may reach the same decision about something, the superego’s reason for that decision is more based on moral values, while the ego’s decision is based more on what others will think or what the consequences of an action could be.

• Maggie couldn't remember the answer to test question #12, even though she had studied. Nate was the smartest kid in the class, and from where Maggie sat, she could see his answers if she turned her head slightly. When Ms Archer turned her back, Maggie almost cheated, but her conscience stopped her because she knew it was wrong. Instead, Maggie took a guess at the answer and then turned in her paper.
• While away on business, Tom had many opportunities to be unfaithful to his wife. However, he knew the damage such behaviour would have on his family, so made the decision to avoid the women who had expressed interest in him.
• When Michael saw the $5 bill lying on the floor with no one around it, he turned it into the school office in case anyone came looking for it. He wouldn't want to lose $5 and hoped that whoever had lost it would ask about it in the office.
• The cashier only charged the couple for one meal even though they had eaten two. They could have gotten away with only paying for one, but they pointed out the cashier’s mistake and offered to pay for both meals. They wanted to be honest and they knew that the restaurant owner and employees needed to make a living.

The id, ego and superego work together in creating a behaviour. The id creates the demands, the ego adds the needs of reality with the superego adds morality to the action which is taken.

<<<The id (or it)

The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. It consists of all the inherited (i.e. biological) components of personality, including the sex (life) instinct – Eros (which contains the libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct. The id is the impulsive (and unconscious) part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to instincts. The personality of the newborn child is all id and only later does it develop an ego and super-ego. The id demands immediate satisfaction and when this happens we experience pleasure when it is denied we experience ‘unpleased’ or pain. The id is not affected by reality, logic or the everyday world. On the contrary, it operates on the pleasure principle which is the idea that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately, regardless of the consequences.

The Ego (or I)

Initially, the ego develops in order to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason whereas the id is chaotic and totally unreasonable. The ego operates according to the reality principle, working out realistic ways of satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative consequences of society. The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette and rules in deciding how to behave.

Like the id, the ego seeks pleasure and avoids pain but unlike the id, the ego is concerned with devising a realistic strategy to obtain pleasure. Freud made the analogy of the id being a horse while the ego is the rider. The ego is 'like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse' (Freud, 1923, p.15).

The Superego (or above I)

The superego incorporates the values and morals of society which are learned from one's parents and others. It develops around the age of 3 – 5 during the phallic stage of psycho-sexual development.

The superego's function is to control the id's impulses, especially those that society forbids, such as sex and aggression. It also has the function of persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and to strive for perfection.

The superego consists of two systems: The conscience and the ideal self. The conscience can punish the ego by causing feelings of guilt. For example, if the ego gives in to the id's demands, the superego may make the person feel bad through guilt.

The ideal self (or ego-ideal) is an imaginary picture of how you ought to be and represents career aspirations, how to treat other people, and how to behave as a member of society.

Behaviour which falls short of the ideal self may be punished by the superego through guilt. The super-ego can also reward us through the ideal self when we behave ‘properly’ by making us feel proud.

If a person’s ideal self is too high a standard, then whatever the person does will represent failure. The ideal self and conscience are largely determined in childhood from parental values and how you were brought up.>>>

THE ORIGINS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Sigmund Freud is the father of Psychoanalysis. He continued to modify his theory over the period of nearly half a century. Psychoanalysis focuses on the unconscious aspects of personality. According to Freud, the human mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden in the unconscious. He believed that the conscious level of the mind was similar to the tip of the iceberg which could be seen, but the unconscious was mysterious and hidden.

Psychoanalysis claims that every human being is a product of his childhood experiences. The present behaviour of a man is determined by his past childhood experiences. No man is completely free from psychological problems; every man has some kind of psychological tension within him. The source of all our behaviours (physical or mental) is our unconscious. Human Psychology is scientifically and systematically studied by Sigmund Freud. He divided the human mind into three layers: Id, Ego and Superego. All the unfulfilled desires are stored in the Id, the unconscious part of human psychology. According to him, each of our adolescent and adult behaviours is shaped by our childhood experiences.

According to Freud, the family holds an important role in psychoanalysis. Each of us is s product of the role we are given in the family.  In childhood, the child gets wish fulfilment because s/he is one with the parents. When the child grows up, the child finds the presence of the parents as a barrier to establishing relationships with the desired parents. Moreover, the child has wounds, fears, guilty desires and unresolved conflicts. There is the realisation that there is a lack of something about which the child is unaware of. Oedipal conflicts and sibling rivalry create a sense of jealousy. For instance, if a man remains in competition with his father to get his mother’s love, in order to enjoy sex, he may categorise a woman as a bad girl (not like mom) because sex with a good girl (a girl like mom) is guilty and dirty. He prefers sex with bad girls which are actually his unconscious desire for his mother. In other words, he seduces her (has sex) and then abandons her because he thinks that she is bad and dirty and cannot be associated with mom. When he seduces a good girl two things can happen: first, she becomes a bad girl, and like other bad girls, she doesn't deserve his love. Second, he feels so guilty for seducing her because it’s like seducing his own mom, and as a result, he abandons her to avoid his guilt.

In this way, unconscious desires and wishes originate because of the lack of wish fulfilment. Family is the primary source for the formation of the unconscious.

THE DEFENSES, ANXIETY, and CORE ISSUES

Our unconscious is a storehouse of our destructive behaviours. Any behaviour that is not good to expose is suppressed in our unconscious. Our society, culture and laws accept only behaviours that are constructive and civilised. The unconscious part of human psychology doesn't differentiate between socially accepted and rejected behaviours. Consequently, human beings are likely to involve in destructive activities. Defenses protect the contents in the unconscious.

Defenses include selective perception (hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle), memory (modifying our memories so that we don’t feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely), denial (believing that the problem doesn't exist or the unpleasant incident never happened), avoidance (staying away from people or situations that are likely to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious i.e. repressed experience or emotion), displacement (taking it out on someone or something less threatening than the person who caused our fear, hurt frustration or anger), projection and regression (ascribing our fear, problem or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it).

Regression is considered one of the most complex defenses. For instance, if we face a difficult problem or situation in present, we think of some happy events in the past. Regression is a defense because it helps us divert our mind from present difficulty to the pleasant past. When the desires are not fulfilled, human beings do have the anxiety of not getting what they desire to get. What is equally important is the distortion of the images.

The core issues that have a direct relation to anxiety are: -

• Fear of Intimacy: - The characters do have the feeling that emotional attachment may destroy the relationship, so they create distance.
• Fear of Abandonment: - There is always the feeling that the loved one may leave emotionally and physically.
• Fear of Betrayal: - There is always the feeling that the friends may betray or cheat.
• Low Self-Esteem: - The feeling that the person doesn't have attractive qualities to attract others.
• Unstable Sense of Self: - It refers to the inability to recognise one’s personality.
• Oedipal Complex: - The love of the son to the mother is ascribed (assigned) as oedipal dynamics.

These are the core issues that psychoanalysts highlight, and they are interrelated too. However, the defenses mechanism doesn't allow us to act in the way we intend to act. As a result of this, characters are involved in dreams and creative activities.

DREAMS AND DREAM SYMBOLS

Psychoanalytic criticism claims that we have two kinds of psychological experiences: conscious and unconscious experiences. Our conscious experiences are those of which we are aware; our unconscious, those we are not aware of. It is the unconscious experiences that are the focus of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic criticism deals with the concept that our unconscious wishes and feelings need manifestation. During sleep, the unconscious is free to express itself. Through condensation, displacement and symbols the wishes are fulfilled. According to Freud dreams are born out of the material available in the unconscious. Most of the time this material is chaotic (unpredictable/Lacking a visible order or organisation) and nasty by nature. It is nasty because it is not fit in the first place as suitable for the conscious mind or the ego. As we cannot produce this material in public, we tend to exhibit it to ourselves only in our world of dreams.   

Dreams do have an underlying meaning. By means of dream images, different feelings are manifested. The underlying or hidden meaning of our dreams is altered through the process of displacement and condensation. All the unconscious desires, and wishes, unfulfilled during our childhood are called latent contents. Those unfulfilled desires wake up, or become active, and try to push upward in the form of dreams. So the images, events, etc. that we see in our dreams are like symbols because they represent the contents that have been repressed in our unconscious.

Through condensation, a single dream image represents more than one unconscious conflict. Condensation is when a whole set of images is packed into a single image or statement when a complex meaning is condensed into a simpler one. It occurs during a dream whenever we use a single dream image or event to represent more than one conscious wound or conflict (metaphor). For example, if we dream of fighting against a wild bear, it might represent our psychological conflicts both at work and at home.

Through displacement one unconscious feeling is represented through secondary significance. Displacement is when the meaning of one image or symbol gets pushed into something associated with it, which then displaces the original image. For example, if we dream that our college teacher is sexually molesting (harassing) us, it may mean that one of our parents had sexually molested us in our childhood which we might have totally forgotten now.

Human beings are aware of gender roles. That’s why we need to be aware of male and female imagery. Male imagery includes all the phallic (penis) symbols. Towers, fish, knives, guns, sticks, swords, rockets, pens, telescopes, etc. are phallic symbols. In totality, all the vertical objects are phallic symbols. Caves, rooms, cups, ponds, etc. represent female imagery. It means all the horizontal objects are female imagery. For example, if a girl finds herself trapped or lost in a small, dark room, in her dream, she might be expressing her unconscious fear that she is still an immature girl.  Flying, walking, moving, dancing, etc. are sexual activities. Dancing and riding are related to sexual intercourse, likewise playing instruments can be interpreted as masturbation.  

Dreams do have implied implications. In the same way, dream symbols occur so as to get wish fulfilment. For all these reasons dreams prevent us from sick or neurotic patients. All kinds of dreams, whether they are happy, joyful, or most frightening, and disturbing, they are the process of giving safe and harmless outlets for our wounds, fears, guilt, desires, and unsolved conflicts that are repressed in our deep unconscious.

THE MEANING OF DEATH

Psychoanalytic criticism analyses human activities in relation to the experience of the person. Because of the unfulfilled erotic and overambitious desires people do have death wishes. Or life has close relation with death. According to Freud, death is a biological drive which he calls death drive or thanatos. Freud marks death as the final stop to the pleasure principle i.e. the goal of the pleasure principle is to be fully satisfied, to be at complete peace, and to have no more needs. Freud also asserts that every person has an unconscious wish to die. For those, who live a painful life, death promises release from the earthly struggle. He concluded that the death instinct motivates man to go for destruction.

Psychoanalysts present the idea that we have different self-destructive behaviours. All the time we have the thought of our own death and fear of being alone. Everyone dies his or her own private death. By seeing the death of others, we have the fear of abandonment. We lament other’s death not because we love them, but because we have the feeling that we are alone. Fear of death is related to the fear of life as well. There are different fear factors for the reason of choosing death, such as loss of children’s love, loss of job, loss of status, loss of friends’ attention, loss of health, loss of wealth, loss of power, loss of identity, etc. Despite all these fears, human beings continue to live amidst (among) struggle-some life and try to ignore or forget or feel about death. The awareness of death makes our lives so painful and frightening because we are filled with an intense fear of losing our life. In such a critical situation when one is obsessed with the fear of death, the only way to escape this fear is death itself. Death wish emerges in human being because of psychological reason. We don’t like to rest thinking that it may result in death. However, death is the biological cause. According to Freud, people commit suicide because of unfulfilled desires. When these desires do not get outlet people to commit suicide.

In this way, psychoanalytic criticism presents the importance of death for the reason that death takes place mostly because of unfulfilled desires. Committing suicide means not getting one wish fulfilment. Thus, psychoanalytic critiques have given the concept of self-destruction, a theoretical modality.

THE MEANING OF SEXUALITY

Like death drive, sex drive plays a major role in forming our consciousness. Human psychology and psychological experiences according to Freud deserve importance. Sexuality is one of the very important aspects that makes human beings act in different ways. Many of our activities are motivated by sex. Even small children are sexual beings who pass through three stages- oral, anal, and genital in which pleasure is focused on different parts of the body.

Human sexuality is not only a biological matter, rather it contains implied implications. It is the society that presents the rules of sexual conduct. Society's rules suppress human’ Id. Superego is the social rule that generates a guilty feeling. As a result of this sexual energy is not released. So human beings move for different alternative ways for gratification. It means there lies a conflict between ‘Id’ and ‘Superego’.

Girls suffer from penis envy whereas boys suffer from castration (Neutering a male animal by removing the testicles) anxiety. Even if they have anxiety, they cannot externalise their feelings. When a girl compares her sexual organ with a boy, she realises that the boy has a penis, which she lacks, and then she suffers from penis envy, or the desire to have a penis. On the other hand, upon realising that girls don’t have a penis like theirs, the boys suffer from castration anxiety or the fear that they will lose their penises. Consequently, literary texts, dreams, and other activities contain the implication of sexuality. For psychoanalysis, there is no abnormal or normal sexual behaviour, no moral or immoral sexual behaviour. It is our thinking that makes normal and moral sexual behaviour good and civilised, whereas abnormal and immoral behaviours as unacceptable, against cultural norms, or uncivilised. Psychoanalysis is concerned with which behaviours are destructive and which are not.

Thus, psychoanalytic criticism presents the idea that literary text contains the desire for sex. Moreover, penis envy and castration anxiety reside within us. These feelings are to be studied within a literary text. Penis envy and castration anxiety can be best understood when we replace the words penis and castration with power. 

LACANIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French Psychoanalyst who first read Freud’s psychoanalysis through the lens of structuralism. Lacan analysed Freudian psychoanalysis in the light of structuralism and post-structuralism. He argues that the unconscious is a product of language and is structured like a language. According to him, the development of human psychology is presented in the light of the mirror stage, imagery order and symbolic stage. Lacan says that language is the result of the unconscious. He rejected attempts to link psychoanalysis with social theory, saying 'the unconscious is the discourse of the other' -- that human passion is structured by the desire of others and that we express deep feelings through the 'relay' of others. He thus saw desire as a social phenomenon and psychoanalysis as a theory of how the human subject is created through social interaction. Desire appears through a combination of language, culture and the spaces between people.

During the early months, infants do have complete satisfaction. When the child enters the mirror stage (6-18 months onward), the child begins to develop a personality. Though the child cannot express themself through words, s/he begins to create distance with the parents. In this stage, the young child identifies with his own image.

After the mirror stage, the child moves to the imaginary order searching the symbols of lack. The child desires for the lost. This is the search for others. This is a stage of fundamental narcissism (self-love) by which the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire. Either through condensation or through displacement there is a strong desire for self-satisfaction. The search for the REAL is beyond the meaning-making system. It means the child wishes to express their desires through words. However, the desires are not completely fulfilled. Because of this reason, the child now a mature man moves from one symbol to another.

The symbolic stage refers to the social world of linguistic communications, inter-subjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law. Once a child enters into language and accepts the rules and dictates of society, it is able to deal with others. The symbolic order works in tension with the imagery order and the REAL. It is closely bound up with the superego and the phallus.

In this way, Lacan presents the lack of unity between signifier and signified. He sought to return psychoanalysis on the unconscious, using Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics, structural anthropology and post-structural theories. Lacan focused largely on Freud's work on deep structures and infant sexuality, and how the human subject becomes an 'other' through unconscious repression and stemming from the Mirror phase. The conscious ego and unconscious desire are thus radically divided. There is the lack of proper materialisation of the unconscious. Lacan’s interpretation of psychology is best so much on the unstable quality of the meaning.

CLASSICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS & LITERATURE

Psychoanalytic criticism relates the psychology of the author with literary text. The role of the writer, readers and society as well play significant role in literary text. It basically deals with motives, especially hidden or disguised motives as such it helps clarify literature on two levels, the level of writing itself, and the level of character action within the text.

Psychoanalytic criticism developed by Sigmund Freud is known as classical psychoanalysis. By analyzing the behaviors of literary characters in the text, critiques present their concept. Characters in literary text represent the psychological experience of human beings in general. Either the author or the characters activities are to be analyzed. Psychoanalysis opens the nature of the subject: who it is who is experiencing, what our relationships of meaning and identity are to the psychic and cultural forces which ground so much of our being. Oedipal dynamics, fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, fear of betrayal, low self-esteem and unstable sense of self must be analyzed in in literary text. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ can be offered as an example of psychoanalytic text. This text contains fear of intimacy among major and minor characters. There is fear of intimacy between Daisy and Tom, Daisy and Gatsby, Nick and Jordan etc.

Psychoanalytic theorists disagree on how our personalities are formed, and the best way to treat no adaptive relationship. Not all text may have psychoanalytic concept, so the readers should be careful in exploring which concepts are present in the text and in what way. We can reach the narrator’s unconsciousness through analysis of oedipal dynamics or other family dynamics operating in the text, or characters’ psychological relation with death or to sexuality.

As we live in the post-Freudian age; we cannot escape the fact that we think about human life differently from the way people in the past thought about it. While on the level of practice psychoanalytic approaches to literature may not always be rich or rewarding enough, may tend to be reductive, on the level of theory psychoanalysis is of great importance.

PSYCHOANALYTIC READING OF ‘THE GREAT GATSBY’

One of the major literary criticisms, psychoanalytic criticism explores human behaviour, identity and oedipal dynamics in a literary text. The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald has important implications for psychoanalytic criticism is found in the romantic relationships portrayed in the novel. The novel is a love story. However, from a psychoanalytic lens, this novel is not a love story, but a story about psychological conflict. When we apply a psychoanalytic approach to the novel, it reveals the unconscious, repressed desires of the characters which may not be revealed to ordinary readers.

Since Sigmund Freud, and Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald have approximately lived in the same era, hence Freud’s attitude could explicitly impress Fitzgerald’s literary work. In many ways, in his stories, he expressed the frustration of the young generation with the American dream along with some disillusionment. On the other hand how disillusionment can be effective in someone’s attitude? The Great Gatsby is an example of the American Dream in which people begin to seek out pleasure and power instead of individualism. Wealth is easy to come and it is used as a tool to obtain other desires.

The whole story of the novel revolves around the single word ‘love’. The kind of love affairs that both the major and minor characters display the result from the fear of intimacy. Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Myrtle, Nick and Jordan are the major characters of the novel. All these characters do have a psychological problem: fear of intimacy. Tom and Daisy are husband and wife. However, Tom develops a love affair with Mrs Wilson. For Tom, Daisy represents social superiority whereas Mrs Wilson represents instinctual (natural) gratification. But Tom doesn't have the desire to reveal his relationship with Mrs Wilson. From this point of view, it is clear that Tom’s relationship with Myrtle lacks intimacy. He has no desire to be close to his mistress. She is merely the means by which he avoids being close to his wife. His treatment of Myrtle certainly suggests no deep emotional investment. For Myrtle, Tom Buchanan represents a ticket out of George Wilson’s garage. Through Tom, Myrtle hopes to acquire permanent membership in a world where she can display the “impressive haunter”. While economic extreme anxiety, rather than fear of intimacy, is the only motive given in the novel for Myrtle’s pursuit of Tom, her other relationship also suggests that she wants to avoid emotional closeness. She is in fact induced to marry George Wilson not by any personal feeling for him but by her mistaken impression that he was from a higher class than the one to which he belongs.

In the same way, the central character, Daisy though married to Tom develops an affair with Gatsby. In reality, Daisy doesn't love Tom but couldn't be one with Gatsby as well. Daisy is divided between Tom and Gatsby. In the same way for Mrs Wilson, Tom represents material gratification. Neither she is completely willing to be with Tom nor with Mr Wilson. She likes to avoid emotional closeness. The relationship between Nick and Jordan as well contains psychological conflict. Nick desires to create distance with Jordan because of the fear of intimacy.

The hero of the novel, Gatsby seems to be in love with Daisy. However, he has also psychological conflict like the other characters. All the time, he is devoted to Daisy, but the unhappiness that he has is because of the memory of the past. Daisy for him is not a flesh and blood woman. He seems to idealise her but he also thinks that a relationship with an ideal is impossible.

From the psychological lens, The Great Gatsby contains psychological problems in all the characters. It is not a love story but a story about unfulfilled wishes on the one hand, and fear of intimacy on the other.