Eros, Thanatos, and the Ideal of the Ego in Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'Ligeia'
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31211/interacoes.n50.2026.a6Keywords:
Duality of life drive and death drive, Ego ideal, Ligeia, Edgar Allan PoeAbstract
Ligeia is a literary work written by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in 1838, which depicts the obsessive love of a narrator—often interpreted as the writer’s alter ego—for his deceased wife, Lady Ligeia, whose figure phantasmatically reemerges at the conclusion of the narrative. In this investigation, the authors explore the narrator’s mental functioning through an autobiographical analogy with the author, advancing the hypothesis that the narrative reflects significant aspects of the author’s psychic life, within the framework of a psychoanalytic content analysis grounded in the Freudian concepts of the duality of Eros and Thanatos and the narcissistic poetic sublimation of the ideal ego into the ego ideal.
This article is structured around a triangulation of data drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s existential and literary trajectory, the deconstruction of the fictional plot, and the selected psychoanalytic concepts, in order to identify traces of their manifestation within the tale, its characters, and the possible psychic functioning of the author.
The psychoanalytic content analysis revealed that the death drive operates through the compulsion to repeat the traumatic experience of the originary loss, continuously reenacted throughout the narrative and ultimately resolved through the phantasmatic narcissistic restitution of the idealized object, which restores the wounded ideal ego by reclaiming the idealized elation associated with Lady Ligeia. This process enables the ideal ego to maintain the idealized investment in the originary maternal love and hallucinatorily fulfills, within the poetics of the narrated dream, the egoic wish to overcome the primordial traumatic loss. Finally, the tale appears to configure a phantasmatic, dream-like reparation of the adult ego ideal of the narrator-author—or author-narrator—, operating in the mode of wish-fulfillment, through which the lost object is phantasmatically revived via its immortalization within the narrative discourse.
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