by Marites Bundoc
“The object petit a becomes at once ‘the eternally lacking object’ and ‘the cause of desire’ that is akin to restlessness, anxiety. In the meantime, the self that feels the ‘lack’ remains a collection of fragments fictively yoked together” (Lacan qtd. [by Smith] in Shelley 309). As a child, Victor’s whole life was his mother, as most children’s, in their early life stage where children are in love with their parent of the opposite sex; Freud calls this phenomenon the oedipal complex (Stevens 236). When his mother dies, his world is shattered and without having grieved long enough for that loss, he finds himself going to the university at Ingolstadt. David Collings shows us that “the early pages of Victor’s story emphasize the distinctive oedipal quality of his solitude” (qtd. in Shelley 324). Victor testifies that “the world to me was a secret which I desired to divine. Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember” (Shelley 43). A psychoanalytic interpretation of this passage would refer to Victor’s oedipal attachment to his mother, which he expresses in the form of assembling pieces of dead matter, corpses, to re-create another living being: “It was with these [ambivalent] feelings that I began the creation of a human being. … After having formed this determination [of the height of his creation], and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began” (57).
Victor’s monomania in creating a new human being is explained by Hannah Segal as the art of re-assembling the shattered pieces of a ruined and lost object and world in a way that acknowledges the depth of the loss and nonetheless resolves to make meaning and beauty out of the remaining fragments:
All creation is really a re-creation of a once loved and once whole, but now lost and
ruined object, a ruined internal world and self. It is when the world within us is destroyed,
and when it is dead and loveless, when our loved ones are in fragments, and we ourselves
in helpless despair – it is then that we must re-create our world anew, reassemble the
pieces, infuse life into dead fragments, re-create life
(qtd. in Allen 208-9). Victor’s feverish project to the exclusion of everything else then makes sense: he is re-creating his dead mother.
A psychoanalytic interpretation of Frankenstein also offers the reader the idea of substitution. “For boys … the recognition that his older and more powerful father is also his rival … in turn leads to the understanding that what once seemed wholly his and even indistinguishable for himself is in fact someone else’s: something properly desired only at a distance and in the form of socially acceptable substitutes” (Shelley 308). Elizabeth Lavenza became the substitute for Victor’s mother; her maternal qualities reflected those of Victor’s mother, who raised her:
The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home. Her sympathy was ours; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us. She was the living spirit of love [emphases mine] to soften and attract: I might have become sullen in my study, rough through the ardour of my nature, but that she was there to subdue me to a semblance of her own gentleness (Shelley 44-5).
When Victor’s mother died, Elizabeth became the new “mother” to Victor and his brother William.
Victor’s father soon arranges a marriage between Victor and Elizabeth; however, there seems to be always a reason to postpone the wedding on Victor’s part, this time, he leaves Elizabeth again to go to Scotland to work on his creature’s bride. In Freud’s psychoanalytic practice, he had observed his patients’ fixation on some very definite part of their past:
they were unable to free themselves therefrom, and have, therefore, come to be completely estranged from the past and the future. Illustrating the oedipal complex, Freud tells about his patient, a girl who had formed an erotic attachment to her father and concluded that for as long as she was sick, she did not have to marry so she could stay with her father (Freud 106-7). Similarly, Victor finds an alibi to postpone his wedding to Elizabeth and resumes part two of his work; he was also always sick – which, naturally, necessitated his prolonged “rests.”
On the part of the creature, Lacan observes that “people desire to be recognized by the Other, and they recognize that desire through that desire for recognition” (Stevens 241-2). Victor’s “offspring’s” most intense desire is to be recognized by its father. Sadly, he does not get what he desires so, he goes on aggressive rampages to show his resentment against Victor, like a child ranting and raving because their parent ignores them. Who does he punish for his frustration? He projects his pain of rejection onto those whom Victor loves – like a jealous sibling – Cain and Abel’s story once again.
“Frankenstein! You [little William] belong then to my enemy – towards whom I have pledged eternal revenge; you shall be my first victim.”
“The child still struggled, and loaded me with epithets which carried despair to my heart; I grasped his throat to silence him, and in a moment he lay dead at my feet.”
I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph: clapping my hands, I exclaimed, ‘I, too, can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him” (Shelley 126).
A psychoanalytic concept that applies to the monster’s pathetic sense of abandonment in Frankenstein is that of the abject introduced in Julie Kristeva’s Powers of Horror:
something neither subject nor object, something that cannot be assimilated. She calls it ‘radically separate,’ loathsome. Not me. Not that. But nothing, either: ‘A something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. Thus the abject is something that is part of an individual and not part of the individual and consequently blurs the boundaries between self and other (Kristeva qtd. in Stevens 243).
Examples of the abject are “waste, sewage, corpses, wounds, bodily fluids, and even the skin on a mug of warm milk,” all of which “produce a kind of nauseous, gagging feeling in the subject because they remind us of our own animal natures.” Kristeva elucidates that these things “need to be cast off, excluded, or made taboo in order to preserve our identities” (qtd. in Stevens 243). This is what happens to Victor as he beholds his creature: its grotesqueness disgusts, repulses him so violently that he casts it off, like a father rejects their malformed child, like the king of Thebes casting off his new-born prince fated to kill his father and marry his mother in Sophocles’ tragic play Oedipus Rex, the source of Freud’s oedipal complex. When the creature kills William, his creator labels him with all the derogatory epithets that could only stir up hatred in his heart, in return:
“Abhorred monster! Fiend that thou art! The tortures of hell are too mild a vengeance for thy crimes. Wretched devil!” – (Shelley 92) – to which the creature answers: “Oh Frankenstein, … Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded” (93).
The monster’s misery and rage then extends from his immediate “family,” Frankenstein, to the world at large, to society: “All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties dissoluble only by annihilation of one of us.” Then he pronounces his war cry: “I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” (92).
Unable to recover from the traumatic experience of seeing the “monster,” the De Laceys leave and the enraged creature burns their cottage as he raves like a lunatic:
As the night advanced, a fierce wind arose from the woods, and quicky dispersed the clouds that had loitered in the heavens: the blast tore along like a mighty avalanche, and produced a kind of insanity in my spirits, that burst all bounds of reason and reflection. I lighted the dry branch of a tree and danced with fury around the devoted cottage … (Shelley 123).
Another way of interpreting Frankenstein is through the lens of myth criticism. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” the theme of primordial goddesses, from the Greek Persephone to Psyche to Aphrodite, Zeus’ beautiful daughter without having been birthed by a mother, thus, doubling for Victor’s creature, to the Oriental Mother-Earth goddess, shows an ambivalence of beauty and ugliness, death and love, and a theme of substitution exemplified by the sister in the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale Twelve Brothers (Freud 295-6, 299). The sister takes the place of her brothers who are fated to die if a girl is born in the family. The mother of course, hides her sons in the forest until their sister, upon learning that she had brothers, comes looking for them. Seeing that she is not out to kill them, they take her with them and she lives with them and takes care of them. She saves her brothers by setting them free from the curse of being ravens by remaining dumb for seven years – at the risk of losing her own life as she defies the order of her husband, the king, to give up dumbness.
In like manner, Elizabeth takes Victor’s place against the clutches of death from the monster’s hands, although the creature cannot kill Victor because Victor is his other self, – his alter ego, thus, the ambivalence, the double nature, the goddess of death and love at the same time. Freud gives a name for this duality of man’s mind: the id, or “it,” which is the irrational, unconscious, and unknown part of the psyche, and the ego, or I, which is the rational, orderly, conscious part (Smith qtd. in Shelley 301). This could be why the creature, having no name, is referred to as “it.” We have seen Elizabeth’s substitution for Victor’s mother by being alive when Victor’s mother dies in her place in a fit of fever, because she loved and cared for the orphan Elizabeth – another substitution; now, Elizabeth substitutes for Victor in the realm of the dead, because she loves him. Although Mary Shelley was not a practical Christian, it seems that she has offered us a parallel theme of substitution by sacrificial love, agape. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (NIV, Jn. 15.13).
Works Cited
Allen, Amy. “The Psychoanalytic Art of Living; or, Learning to Love One’s Fate.” Psychoanalysis and Culture, 23 Apr. 2025, https: doi.org.10.1057/s41282-025-00532-1. Accessed 14 Jun. 2025.
Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Translated by G. Stanley Hall, Pantianos Classics, 1920.
—. “The Theme of the Three Caskets.” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Translated by James Strachey, vol. 12, The Hogarth Press, 1958, pp. 292-301.
Holy Bible, New International Version, Zondervan, 2022.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Edited by Johanna M. Smith, 3rd ed., Boston, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.
Smith, Johanna M. “Psychoanalytic Criticism.” Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Edited by Johanna M. Smith, 3rd ed., Boston, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.
Stevens, Anne H. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Broadview Press, 2021.
The Journey Through Literature 
Leave a comment