“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual”: The question of psychoanalysis in Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Abstract

This paper will focus on the question of psychoanalysis in Tender Is the Night by Francis Scott Fitzgerald. In particular, this analysis wants to demonstrate how this novel acutely penetrates the historical contest of the roaring twenties and the changes happened in this period about psychoanalysis. During the Roaring twenties mental disorders were paid close attention: the new science of psychiatry was emerging and new therapies were being tested, including hypnosis, psychoanalysis, “ergo-therapy” and treatment with electroshock, the “reeducation” therapy, the post-traumatic stress of “repetition”, all of which treated less or more critically in Tender Is the Night. Moreover, the content of the novel is linked to Zelda Fitzgerald’s mental illness and her admission to a Swiss psychiatric clinic in 1930. For this autobiographical reason, Fitzgerald became knowledgeable enough to follow her treatment and a certain amount of what he learned appears in Tender is the Night. Additionally, this paper will explore Fitzgerald’s use of nascent Freudianism and it will evaluate the weight and significance of the discourse and the psychiatric and psychoanalytic concepts utilized in the novel. Lastly, the fundamental theme of the incest in the novel can be evaluated as a contagious disease which expresses a possible metaphor for the decline of western civilization: in particular, the disappearance of the traditional sexual gender as it becomes more fluid after the Great War.