Negotiations of Anxiety in the Discourses of Melanie Klein and Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

In my discussion of a selection of Poe’s tales, I intend to reveal the latent Kleinian dynamics which abound in texts that pivot on the dialectic between aggression and reparation: the narrative can be thought of as negotiating the representation of phantasies which are deployed to avoid intolerable anxiety, requiring most often than not a withdrawal from reality. The texts under analysis seem to play out with acute awareness the pain of fragmentation and disintegration and the ambivalent phantasies arising from the need to mitigate the pain of the internal situation. Poe’s characters’ traumatic encounters will foreground the struggle, fraught with ambivalence, to separate from and discern that which is other.