On Raymond’s Search for Self in The Desert of Love

Abstract

François Mauriac's Nobel Prize-winning work, The Desert of Love, tells the story of teenager Raymond’s development in the context of indifferent family relationships. This paper will analyze the impact of the unhealthy family emotional field on the formation of Raymond's sense of self-worth from the perspective of family system theory, explore how he embarks on a path of self-absence, self-differentiation, disorientation and self-reinvention, and search for the root cause of Raymond's self-identity crisis within the family, with a view to reconstructing an “oasis of love", thus providing some implications for the family crisis and the growth of young people in society today.