Introduction

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is far more than a Gothic tale of scientific hubris—it is a masterwork of psychological portraiture, a literary x-ray of the human mind confronted with trauma, abandonment, and the fundamental question of what makes us human. Written while Shelley herself grieved the loss of her daughter, the novel emerges as a profound exploration of maternal loss, obsession, attachment failure, and the violent consequences of moral disengagement. Through the dual narratives of Victor Frankenstein and his creature, Shelley constructs a psychological battlefield where unhealed grief transforms into destructive obsession, where failed attachment cascades across generations, and where identity itself becomes a site of tragedy. This analysis applies classical and contemporary psychological frameworks—Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacanian mirror theory, attachment theory, existentialism, and trauma psychology—to reveal the novel’s sophisticated rendering of the human psyche in crisis.

Part I: Victor Frankenstein’s Psychological Architecture

Foundational Trauma and Unresolved Grief

Victor Frankenstein’s psychological disintegration originates in a single, formative event: the death of his mother. At seventeen, he loses his mother to scarlet fever—a maternal loss that he never adequately grieves. Rather than confronting this loss, Victor channels it into what clinical psychology would recognize as complicated or pathological grief, where the grieving process becomes derailed and transmuted into obsessive behavior. As scholars of the text note, Victor’s “unhealed grief” serves as the core psychological driver of his entire project to create life. His obsession is not, as Victor insists, rooted in pure scientific ambition; rather, ambition becomes the conscious mask concealing an unconscious war against death itself—an attempt to resurrect what was lost and assert control over the uncontrollable.

This distinction is critical. Victor repeatedly describes his drive in terms of “secrets” and “knowledge,” yet psychoanalytic interpretation reveals that his real quest is to transcend mortality and restore the maternal figure he has lost. His work becomes a form of what Freudians call sublimation—the defense mechanism by which unacceptable drives (in this case, the impulse to undo death itself) are channeled into socially valorized activities (scientific discovery). However, unlike healthy sublimation, Victor’s is pathological, feeding rather than resolving his underlying trauma.

The Architecture of Obsession: Monomania and Avoidant Attachment

Victor’s psychological structure reveals what 19th-century psychiatry termed “monomania”—an obsessive fixation characterized by “a constant thirst for knowledge” and existence in “a habitual state of desire or aversion, passion and feeling.” His father, Alphonse, embodies what attachment theory would classify as avoidant attachment: emotionally distant, unsympathetic, unable to provide comfort after his wife’s death. Alphonse’s failure to attune emotionally to his grieving son creates what developmental psychologists recognize as an attachment wound—Victor learns that emotions are isolating rather than connecting, that vulnerability invites dismissal rather than care.

This paternal attachment style becomes the template Victor unconsciously reproduces with his creature. Just as Alphonse failed to recognize Victor’s emotional needs, Victor abandons his creation at the moment of its awakening, unable to tolerate the emotional confrontation his creation demands. The cycle of abandonment repeats itself across generations, suggesting what contemporary psychology calls intergenerational trauma—trauma patterns unconsciously passed from parent to child.

The Tripartite Psyche: ID, Ego, and Superego in Conflict

Freud’s tripartite model of the psyche illuminates Victor’s internal war. His id—the reservoir of primitive impulse—drives him toward the forbidden knowledge of life creation, the “secrets of heaven and earth” he desperately seeks. This impulse emerges from what Freud would recognize as the pleasure principle: the desire to master, to possess, to transcend human limitation.

However, Victor simultaneously carries a powerful superego—the internalized moral censor—that recognizes his ambition as transgressive and unnatural. The superego, shaped by Alphonse’s distant moralism and by societal norms against usurping nature’s prerogatives, condemns Victor’s desire. As one scholar notes, “From the point of view of instinctual control, of morality, the superego can be super moral and then becomes as cruel as only the id can be.” This superego, unable to prevent Victor’s transgression, exacts savage punishment through guilt: the haunting of his memories, the deaths of everyone he loves, and his ultimate collapse.

The ego, the mediating rationality, becomes overwhelmed in this conflict. Unable to successfully balance desire and morality, Victor instead employs multiple defense mechanisms, most notably repression and projection. He represses his grief, his guilt, and his responsibility, pushing them into the unconscious where they fester and return with destructive force. He projects his own monstrosity onto the creature—what he fears in himself (his capacity for destruction, his violation of natural law) he attributes to the external other.

Dissociation and Moral Disengagement

Victor exhibits symptoms consistent with dissociation and depersonalization following his creation’s emergence. His horror and disgust produce what clinical psychology recognizes as acute dissociative episodes—moments where he feels detached from his own reality, where “breathless horror and disgust filled [his] heart.” This dissociation serves as an adaptive but ultimately maladaptive response to unbearable affect. By fragmenting his consciousness, Victor briefly escapes the psychological impact of what he has done—yet this very dissociation prevents him from integrating his guilt and taking responsibility.

More insidiously, Victor employs what Albert Bandura termed moral disengagement—cognitive mechanisms that allow him to commit harmful acts while maintaining a positive self-image. Victor externalizes blame for the deaths he causes, attributing them to “fate,” to “the curse of the creature,” to anything but his own choices and negligence. When confronting Walton near the novel’s end, Victor accepts “no responsibility for [his] actions” and characterizes his path as “irrevocably determined,” exemplifying what social psychologists call an external locus of control. In Sartrean terms, Victor engages in bad faith—radical self-deception about his own freedom and agency.

Gender, Sexuality, and the Womb Envy

Beyond Freud’s classical neuroses lies a deeper psychosexual dimension. Victor’s obsession with creating life can be read through the lens of what analysts call womb envy—the unconscious male desire to appropriate and surpass female reproductive power. His creation violates the natural female generative process: he produces “life” without the maternal body, without the woman’s role. In Freudian language, he attempts to become his own mother, achieving what Freud saw as the deepest fantasy of omnipotence—self-generation without dependence on the feminine.

Furthermore, Victor’s relationship with Elizabeth is psychologically fraught. She is described as his “more than sister,” a figure occupying an ambiguous kinship position that suggests incestuous desire repressed through social convention. His sexual anxiety becomes evident in the wedding-night scene, where he summons the creature to consummate his marriage with violence—as if only the violent double can perform the sexuality Victor cannot. The creature, in Victor’s unconscious, becomes the vehicle for Victor’s own disowned aggression and sexuality, allowing Victor to commit violence vicariously while maintaining a facade of civilized restraint.

Part II: The Creature’s Tragedy—Identity, Language, and the Symbolic Order

The Mirror Stage: Encountering the Monstrous Self

The creature’s psychological journey begins not at birth but at the moment he first perceives himself—when, gazing into a pool of water, he encounters his own reflection with horror. This scene directly instantiates Lacanian psychoanalysis: the creature experiences what Lacan called the mirror stage, the crucial developmental moment when an infant recognizes itself as a unified subject through an external image.

However, the creature’s mirror stage is catastrophic. Unlike an infant who identifies with an idealized image of completeness and integration, the creature sees monstrosity reflected back. The image produces not recognition but “the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification.” In Lacanian terms, the creature becomes trapped in the Imaginary order—the register of visual, specular identification—unable to access the Symbolic order, the realm of language, law, and social meaning where subjects can escape the limitations of the body’s appearance.

This entrapment in the Imaginary is not merely psychological; it is existential. As Lacan theorized, the Symbolic order (language, kinship, culture) is the realm through which subjects transcend their biological determination and become fully human. The creature’s exclusion from the Symbolic—his inability to participate in human language as an equal speaker—marks him as perpetually non-subject, as what one scholar terms “a speaking subject attempting to describe the essentially non-linguistic state of the Imaginary.”

Language Acquisition and the Cruelty of Symbolic Exclusion

The creature’s most poignant attempt at humanization occurs through his acquisition of language. Hiding in a lean-to adjacent to the De Lacey cottage, he learns English by listening to the family’s conversation—he becomes what Lacan would call a marginal subject, able to comprehend the Symbolic order but denied participation in it. He grasps grammar, vocabulary, and literature. He reads Paradise Lost and identifies profoundly with Satan’s lament: “I am malice. I am darkness.”

Yet this linguistic awakening becomes his greatest torment. Language grants him consciousness of what he lacks: kinship, social belonging, recognition as human. As he learns words for “sex,” “family,” “society,” he simultaneously becomes aware of his exclusion from these categories. The Symbolic order, which should integrate him into human community, instead isolates him by making visible his permanent estrangement.

When he finally reveals himself to the De Lacey family, expecting compassion because he has “learned” their language and values, he is violently rejected. This rejection is psychologically devastating precisely because it occurs after his entry into language. The creature can now articulate his suffering—”I am benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone?”—yet articulation itself becomes evidence of his monstrous difference. Language, which should liberate him, becomes the tool by which he recognizes his permanent exclusion.

Identity as Social Construction: The Internalization of “Monster”

The creature’s tragic journey illustrates what contemporary social and critical theory recognizes: identity is not an internal essence but a social construction, achieved through recognition and interaction with others. The creature begins with no predetermined identity—he is literally born tabula rasa, a being with no family, no social position, no name. His possibility space is infinite: he could become anything.

But the social world permits only one identity: monster. Everyone who sees him—the villagers, the sailors, every human he encounters—recoils in fear and disgust. Through the “gaze” of others, he is relentlessly constituted as dangerous, abhorrent, non-human. As one scholar emphasizes, “The creature cannot single-handedly overcome the asymmetrical power relations that underlie the social construction of his identity.” He attempts to resist this imposed identity—through education, through kindness, through revelation of his gentle nature—yet these efforts fail precisely because they occur within a social context structured by asymmetrical power.

The tragedy deepens when the creature, having internalized society’s judgment, comes to accept “monster” as his true identity. No longer fighting the label, he embraces it: “I had declared myself in a hideous and abhorred monster…I gave up finding identity and accepts ‘monster,’ ‘devil’ as his social identity.” What begins as an external attribution becomes internal truth. Psychologically, this represents what trauma theorists call internalized oppression—the process by which targets of devaluation absorb the negative judgments directed toward them and come to believe in their own worthlessness.

Existential Nothingness and the Creature’s Freedom

From a Sartrean existential perspective, the creature embodies the human condition in its rawest form. Unlike Victor, who was born into a preexisting social world with a name, family, and predetermined essence, the creature exists as pure nothingness—as what Sartre calls the for-itself, a being whose essence is not predetermined but must be created through free choices.​

Yet this radical freedom becomes a prison. Sartre insisted that “existence precedes essence”—we must create ourselves through our actions—but the creature’s actions are constrained by the violent reactions of others. His freedom to become human is negated by society’s refusal to recognize him as human. As Sartre argued, the other’s gaze constitutes a fundamental threat to freedom, transforming the subject into an object-in-itself. The creature experiences this existential objectification: he becomes thing rather than subject, defined entirely by how others see him rather than by what he chooses to become.

Part III: The Psychology of Violence and Moral Collapse

Thanatos and the Death Instinct

As the creature’s attempts at connection fail repeatedly, his psychological organization undergoes a profound transformation. What emerges is what Freud termed Thanatos—the death instinct, the drive toward destruction and return to an inanimate state. Where initially the creature’s desire was directed toward life (connection, love, beauty), it becomes increasingly oriented toward death (violence, revenge, annihilation).

This is not simple aggression; it is a manifestation of what Freud identified as repetition compulsion—the unconscious drive to re-enact traumatic experiences. Just as Victor repeatedly creates and abandons, the creature repeatedly seeks connection and experiences rejection. The trauma of rejection becomes structured into his psyche such that he is compelled to repeat it, to recreate it, to make others experience the abandonment he experiences.

His violence is thus deeply connected to his psychological structure. Each murder—William, Justine, Clerval, Elizabeth—represents a traumatic reenactment, a way of making Victor feel the abandonment, the loss, the unbearable suffering the creature endures. The creature does not kill for rational reasons; he kills to externalize internal death, to discharge the thanatic energy that accumulates within him.​

The Corruption of Moral Capacity

Perhaps most psychologically significant is the creature’s original moral sensibility. Upon awakening, he is innocent, benevolent, capable of love. He weeps at tales of human virtue; he gathers firewood for the De Lacey family out of pure compassion. He possesses what developmental psychologists call moral capacity—the ability to understand right and wrong, to feel guilt, to value others’ welfare.

Yet this moral capacity is progressively corrupted through what Bandura termed moral disengagement. As society rejects him, the creature begins to reconstrue his violence as justified. He tells Victor: “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” This reframing is psychologically significant—it shifts responsibility from himself to external circumstances. He does not understand his violence as freely chosen; he understands it as imposed by his circumstances, by Victor’s abandonment, by society’s cruelty.

Consequently, the creature kills without remorse. He has disengaged from the moral framework that once constrained him. Society has already defined him as monster, has already labeled him evil—why not become what they have declared him to be? This represents a tragic form of internalized moral disengagement, where the very social judgment that should constrain behavior instead licenses it.

Part IV: The Biographical Substrate—Shelley’s Traumas Inscribed in Text

To fully comprehend the novel’s psychological depth, we must acknowledge the author’s own trauma. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein while grieving the death of her infant daughter Clara, and the novel is suffused with her experience of maternal loss, guilt, and the terror of causing life that will suffer. In a profound sense, Shelley becomes both Victor and the creature: the creator who brings life into a world of suffering, and the created being—the infant—whose vulnerability evokes horror.​

Shelley’s own complicated relationship with motherhood shapes the novel’s portrayal of parental failure. Victor’s abandonment of the creature mirrors Shelley’s unconscious fear that she, too, has abandoned her children through death or inadequate presence. The novel thus becomes a psychological confession, a working-through of guilt, loss, and the contradictions of bearing life while carrying death within oneself. This biographical reading does not reduce the novel to autobiography, but rather reveals how personal trauma can be transformed into universal psychological insight.

Conclusion: The Psyche as Tragedy

Frankenstein endures not because of its Gothic scaffolding but because it renders the human psyche with such unsparing psychological sophistication. Victor and the creature are not simply good and evil, creator and creation—they are two aspects of a single psyche fractured across two bodies, enacting the primal dramas of attachment, identity, loss, and moral disintegration that structure human psychology.

The novel asks the question central to all psychology: What makes us human? Shelley’s answer is neither anatomical nor scientific but profoundly relational and psychological. We become human through recognition, through language, through the capacity to love and be loved. Victor and the creature fail to achieve this humanity not because of their biological nature but because of the psychological wounds that prevent them from connecting. Victor’s unresolved trauma transforms him into an abandoner; the creature’s social rejection transforms him into a killer. Neither is capable of the psychological work—the confrontation with grief, the taking of responsibility, the capacity for repair—that genuine humanity requires.

The tragedy is that neither character achieves what Winnicott called a “good enough” psychological existence. Victor’s obsessive flight from death mirrors the creature’s flight into violence—both are attempts to escape an unbearable internal reality through projection and action. The novel offers no redemption, no therapeutic resolution, only the stark portrayal of how psychology—shaped by trauma, attachment failure, and moral disengagement—can lead even the most capable minds toward destruction.

For readers and students of psychology, Frankenstein remains invaluable: not as a warning against scientific hubris, but as a profound exploration of how the psyche, wounded by loss and isolation, can fragment into versions of itself incapable of love or connection. It is, in the end, a novel about the psychology of abandonment—and about how abandonment, if unhealed, repeats itself across generations in ever-more destructive forms.

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