A Psychoanalytic reading of “The Great Gatsby”

One area of human behavior explored in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (1925) that has important implications for psychoanalytic criticism is found in the romantic relationships portrayed in the novel. If we don’t view the novel through a psychoanalytic lens, we found it one of the great American love stories. For many psychoanalytic literary critics, Jay Gatsby is a rather larger-than-life romantic hero. For a psychoanalytic reading the interest created by the romance between Gatsby and Daisy lies on the ways in which it mirrors all of the less appealing romantic relationships portrayed and thereby reveals a pattern of psychological behavior responsible for a good deal of the narrative progression. This pattern is grounded in the character’s fear of intimacy. This psychological problem is so pervasive in the novel The Great Gatsby’s famous love story becomes, through a psychological lens, a drama of dysfunctional love.

The clearest indication of fear of intimacy in the novel lies in Tom Buchanan’s constant extramarital affairs, of which Jordan became aware three months after the couple’s wedding. Tom’s relationships with women, including his wife, reveal his desire for ego gratification rather than for emotional intimacy. Daisy’s fear of intimacy is not quite as immediately clear. Her marital faithfulness and her suffering over Tom’s involvement with Myrtle might suggest to some readers that Daisy desires emotional intimacy with her husband. It is obvious that Daisy didn’t love Tom when she married him. She tried to call off the wedding the evening before when she’d received an abroad letter from Gatsby. Her behavior upon receiving his letter suggests that she married Tom to keep herself from loving Gatsby. For both Tom and Daisy, fear of intimacy is related to low self-esteem. If Tom were as emotionally secure as his wealth, he wouldn’t work as hard as he does to impress others with his money and power. Daisy’s low self esteem is indicated in large part of her relationship with Tom. Falling so much in love with a man who was openly unfaithful to her suggests an unconscious belief that she doesn’t deserve better.

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. The romance between Nick and Jordan reveals that they, too, rear intimacy. Nick is first attracted to Jordan by her self- containment, by the image of emotional distance she projects. He frequently uses words such as “impersonal”, “Insolent”, “cool” and “contemptuous” to describe what he considers the “pleasing” expression of Jordan’s face.

The instance affair between Gatsby and Daisy seems to be offered as counterpoint to the Buchanan’s marriage of psychological convenience. Gatsby and Daisy’s romance has striking similarities to the others. Daisy has no more desire for intimacy with Gatsby than she has for intimacy with Tom. Her extramarital affair, like her earlier romance with her lover, would not have occurred had she known that Gatsby does not belong to her social class. Daisy’s marriage has become painful, and her affair with Gatsby provides a welcome distraction. If she has Gatsby, she doesn’t even have to think about Tom. Daisy’s affair functions as a psychological defense. It underscores the psychological importance of her dysfunctional marriage. If her marriage weren’t a powerful force in her life then she wouldn’t have to defend against it. It is the continued unconscious importance of her marriage that finally makes Daisy feel safe enough to be with Gatsby again. Gatsby and Myrtle are psychological tokens in the Buchanan’s marriage. It is symbolically significant that Tom and Daisy kill each other’s lover. Although it is in fact a real accident, Daisy is the driver who kills Myrtle with Gatsby’s car. From fears of his and Daisy’s lives, Tom felt he had to tell Wilson that it was Gatsby who killed Myrtle.

For many readers, the most difficult case to make for fear of intimacy is the case for Gatsby. Gatsby believes that his ultimate goal is the possession of Daisy. Daisy is merely the key to his goal rather than the goal itself. Gatsby has set his sights on the attainment of wealth and social status long before he knew Daisy. The boyhood “schedule” of Jimmy Gatz- in which the young man divided his day, in the self- improvement tradition of Ben Franklin, among physical exercise, the study of electricity, work, sports, the practice of diction and poise, and the study of needed inventions- suggests that he’d long planned to live the “rags-to-riches” life associated with such self-made millionaires as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

From a psychological perspective, Gatsby’s invented past is more than just a strategy to pass himself off as a member of an upper class; it’s also a form of denial, a psychological defense to help him repress the memory of his real past. And his claim that his desire to psychologically kill the parents whose wounding influence still inhabits his own psyche and receive from those parents the psychological sustenance. The financial achievements Gatsby planned for himself revealed their ultimate psychological payoff only upon meeting Daisy. Daisy is, for him, not flesh-and-bone woman but a symbol of the emotional insulation he unconsciously desires. As we saw in the case of Tom and Daisy, the best way to achieve emotional insulation from oneself is to avoid intimacy with others. Gatsby’s shameful idealization of Daisy as the perfect woman is a sure sign that he seeks to avoid intimacy. A psychological lens reveals a much different love story than the one ordinarily associated with The Great Gatsby. As the novel illustrates, romantic love is the stage on which all of our unresolved psychological conflicts are dramatized, over and over. It is the over-and-over, the repetition of destructive behavior that tells us an unresolved psychological conflict is “pulling the string from the unconscious.”