Lost in Unbridled Pursuit of Pleasure: A Psychoanalytic Study of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned

Abstract

This article aims at making a psychoanalytic study of the hedonistic indulgence of a bewildered, dull and aimless generation of affluent youth in the transitory glittering of the New York Cafe society as depicted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned. The main characters of this novel Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert are driven by hedonism which ultimately leads to their self-destruction. This article tends to make a psychoanalytic study of the hedonistic nature of the human mind through the perspective of pleasure principle by analyzing the issues of id, ego and superego. Freud, in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents, writes: “what decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle” (263). The term “pleasure principle” was originally used by Sigmund Freud who argued that it is the tendency of people to go to great lengths to avoid even momentary pain and to seek immediate gratification, regardless of the consequences. In the novel, both Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert live their respective lives hedonistically until their psychology clashes with each other in pursuit of wealth and status. The purpose of the paper, therefore, is to analyze the pleasure seeking behaviour of these two characters which stems from the human psyche by interpreting the issues of id, ego and superego, where id largely dominates their psychic apparatus with few instances where ego intervenes and manifests the superego.