Using Psychoanalysis to Understand

the Popularity of Frankenstein

Frankenstein was written by Marry Shelley in the early 19th century and is by many

considered the first book to fall under the science fiction genre. It also shares many elements

of gothic horror. Shelley wrote the book as a part of an agreement with her friends to each

write a ghost story and share it among themselves. After brooding over what story to write,

the idea for Frankenstein came to Shelley in the form of a vision in a dream. Frankenstein is

one of the most enduring novels from the Romantic era and perhaps the greatest horror novel

ever written. Since the first 500 published copies in 1818, it has never been out of print, and

has gone on to inspire countless other writers, film makers and theatre producers to rewrite

and to reflect upon the story of the ambitious scientist and his monster. Frankenstein is a

name so famous, that even if they have never read the book, almost everyone knows it and

associates it with a scary man-beast that has a bolt sticking out of its head. Furthermore,

Frankenstein has become a symbol that is frequently referred to when wanting to bring up a

cautionary tale alerting to some dangerous human shortcoming.

For over 200 years Frankenstein has remained one of the most well-known and

popular novels. Today, perhaps more than at any other previous time, the story of

Frankenstein is alarmingly turning out to be an accurate metaphor for the situation in the

world. Human scientific capabilities have become so powerful that although they positively

influence every aspect of our life from health care to entertainment, they also pose dangerous

threats to everything we hold dear, including, potentially our very survival. Nuclear weapons

are powerful enough to turn the Earth into ash and dust, annihilating all life upon it. Pollution

and climate change pose an almost equal threat, but happen gradually, rather than suddenly at
an accidental, or adversarial touch of a button. In the meantime, scientists go on developing

artificial intelligence and gene editing technologies with consequences that will remain a

mystery until it is potentially too late to reverse them. These developments make Isaac

Asimov’s (1947) term, “the Frankenstein complex”, not an unreasonable complex to have.

With the book being as successful as it quickly became and then remained through the

centuries, and with its story being so relevant for the present day, it is intriguing to pose the

question what specifically it is that makes the book so popular. There are many books that are

very successful with only certain types of readers, there are books that become famous for

awhile and then die down without anyone hearing of them again, and there are some books

that do well in a specific culture or time period but remain quite unknown outside it. When

there is a book, like Frankenstein, which defies such limitations and becomes a hit across

different cultures, times periods and the wide spectrum of different individuals, it is sensical

to assume that the book is speaking to some deeper parts of the human nature which

transcend these various categories. In order to gain a better understanding of this I turn to

psychoanalysis, which is an area of study most suitable for analyzing deeper aspects of the

human psyche.

Carl Jung (1960) introduced the concept of the collective unconscious almost a

hundred years ago, explaining that “The collective unconscious appears to consist of

mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its

real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the

collective unconscious.” Together with his colleague Sigmund Freud, Jung was the greatest

contributor to our understanding of the human mind and the mysterious forces that hide in its

unconscious. I will analyse the concepts of the return of the repressed, the uncanny and the
double as they appear in Frankenstein and in so doing examine how these profound

psychological themes made Frankenstein into the success that it became by resonating with

powerful imprints in the collective human unconscious. Will Adams (2001) puts it beautifully

when he says that “We intuit the mystery that exists within and beyond our conventional

lives, but alas, letting ourselves be carried away by busyness or defensiveness, we often

overlook it. Frankenstein addresses this mystery and allows the mystery to address us.”

The story of Frankenstein came to Marry Shelley in the form of a dream. Shelley

(1818/1990) explains that her “imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided [her], gifting the

successive images that arose in [her] mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of

reverie. [She] saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision.” This description is not far off

from J.K. Rowling’s description of the story of Harry Potter coming to her all at once in a

single thought while travelling a long journey on a train. “It was the most incredible feeling…

out of nowhere, it just fell from above” (Bookstr, 20018). It is not unusual that authors get in

touch with their unconscious mind in the creative process of writing, managing to channel

some of the mind’s latent content into their story, however both Shelley’s and Rowling’s

descriptions of receiving inspiration for their books is not common. Frankenstein and the

Harry Potter series are extraordinarily successful stories, which as I explained, must be

because they resonate with some deeper aspects of the human psyche. It is however

interesting to see not only the effect that these stories have upon the readers, but also the way

in which they came about. It is common knowledge in psychoanalysis, that during dreams we

connect to the deeper aspects of our mind. Shelley explains that Frankenstein came to her as a

vision while being half asleep during a waking dream, and Rowling shares a similar

experience, daydreaming during a long train ride, Harry’s story came to her in a flash. It is

likely that both women managed to connect to their unconscious and in a unique, remarkable

way, bring the contents of it forth in the form of their story, which is why it became so
successful, containing a very significant and unaltered essence of the unconscious embedded

in it and then activating that very essence in the reader who, not necessarily knowing why,

strongly resonated with the story regardless of their age, culture or other surface variables.

One of the most important concepts in psychoanalysis is the idea that people

encounter experiences in their life which they find difficult to accept and integrate and

therefore resort to rejecting and repressing them into the unconscious. The most notable of

such experiences in Frankenstein is when Viktor’s mother dies from scarlet fever. This is

exceptionally traumatic for Viktor who never manages to reconcile with his mother’s passing,

describing his experience as a “void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is

exhibited on the countenance” (Shelley, 1818/1900). Viktor repeatedly refers to his mother’s

death as some “irreparable evil” rather than understanding and accepting it as a natural part of

life. Viktor admits that he feels the “bitterness of grief”, but he never actually allows himself

to go through the grieving process, rather, he uses an excuse of having too many duties:

“grief is rather an indulgence than a necessity, … My mother was dead, but we still had

duties we ought to perform.” It is clear that Viktor is traumatized by the experience, unable to

accept it. He represses his grief and he rejects death, seeing it as something “evil” to be

repaired rather than something natural to be allowed. It is Viktor’s attitude towards death,

fuelled by his mother’s passing, which drives him feverously to overcome death through

science.

The concept of repression is one of the most fundamental in psychoanalysis. There are

experiences and emotions which we find too difficult to allow in our life and hence we resort

to repressing them into our unconscious. These forces do no disappear but continue to fester

in the unconscious mind, forever seeking to be seen, accepted and reintegrated by the person.
One of the ways in which the repressed forces seek the person’s attention is by being

projected into the external world. Will Adams (2001) explains that

psychologists have been aware of the defense of projection. This is a phenomenon

wherein, mostly without reflective awareness, we repress feelings, ideas, urges, and

qualities of our self that feel painful and intolerable. Once these have been split off,

they do not simply disappear but rather return and are reexperienced (by the projector)

in an externalized (projected) form. Unwanted or misunderstood aspects of our self

can be projectively personified (sometimes in daemonic form) and experienced as if

they were external to us.

D. M. Dooling (1981) described, “a demon as a force that must be conquered in order that it

can become one’s ally, but which, if it is not conquered, becomes a scary monster” (p. 86).

We can see Frankenstein struggle with grief over his mother’s loss and with the non-

acceptance of death, likely because of fear. Viktor deals with his grief and his fear by

repressing them, he rejects them as valid human emotions and in so doing externalizes them

as something unacceptable, something other than himself, other than a natural part of life to

be allowed. Viktor isn’t conquering these psychological forces and hence they do not become

his allies, instead he is being conquered by them as they turn into a “scary monster”. The

monster that Viktor brings to life is a direct result of his rejection of death. Instead of

allowing death, Viktor wants to overcome it, instead of allowing his grief and other emotions,

he wants to never have to feel them again. In this way, Viktor is directly bringing into life the

deamons he has repressed. The monster is the externalization of Viktor’s repressed deamons,

and the fact that Viktor himself creates the monster, symbolizes that nobody else is

responsible for it, symbolizes that the monster and the externalized deamons it represents

never came from somewhere else, but manifested from within Viktor himself. The forces we
repress always return to us in one form or another, in the case of Frankenstein, they returned

to him in the form of the monster which he himself created. As Frank Cawson (1995) put it,

"the monster is the reification, the embodiment in a symbol, of an unconscious content in the

mind” (p. 161).

The theme of the return of the repressed psychological forces is closely related to the

phenomenon which Freud (1919) described in his article The Uncanny. In the Article, Freud

examines the feeling of the uncanny and in what way it differentiated from an ordinary

feeling of fear. The feeling of the uncanny has more psychological implications than simple

fear. Although the uncanny includes elements of fear, it goes beyond just being scared. It is a

mixture of feelings the combinations of which results in a psychologically profound

phenomenon, which Freud names – the uncanny. The mixture often includes the feeling of

revulsion and disgust, but strangely also a kind of desire and fascination. The mixture

includes fear and fright, but strangely also a sense of pity and compassion. The juxtaposition

of these feelings, which are otherwise seen as quite contradictory, but felt in certain situations

at the same time, can be seen as a trait of the uncanny.

The feeling of the uncanny is often elicited when we encounter something familiar, in

a strange and unfamiliar context. A picture of torn off limbs lying on the street in a war scene

or image of a parasite under the skin are examples that often elicit the uncanny response,

while "many people experience the [uncanny] feeling in the highest degree in relation to...the

return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts" (Freud, 1919, p.362) . The reason for this is

because as Freud (1919) explains "the uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but

something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated

from it only through the process of repression. … the uncanny is that class of the frightening
which leads back to what is known and familiar" (p. 363). Joseph Cohen (1996) puts it in yet

another way: "To experience the uncanny...is to experience something that is known, but

something the knowledge of which has been hidden or repressed."

Frankenstein’s monster is a perfect symbol for the uncanny. It must have, in many

readers elicited precisely that strange mixture of feelings called the uncanny. It certainly

created a strong uncanny feeling in Viktor himself who describes the moment when the

monster came to life:

I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive

motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe . . . ? . .

. now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and

disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I

rushed out of the room…

The reason why the monster elicits the uncanny feeling is different for Viktor and for

the readers. Viktor was putting the monster together for a long time and he never ran away

from it until it came alive. Viktor says of the monster: ” he was ugly then, but when those

muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante

could not have conceived” (Shelley, 1818/1990). It wasn’t the ugliness of the monster that

stirred such strong reaction in Viktor. He did not mind the different body parts and the ugly

appearance of the monster. Rather, it was when the monster came alive that Viktor became

overwhelmed with uncanny fright. The reason is that Viktor wasn’t afraid of the monster, but

of what the monster reflected to him. Viktor could not handle what the monster represented,

which were his own repressed feelings resurfacing and becoming conscious again by being

embodied and externalized in the monster.

 On the other hand, the reason why the monster feels so uncanny for the readers, is

precisely its appearance. The appearance of the monster is symbolical of what the monster is

meant to represent. The description of the monster allows the readers to feel some of the

uncanny feelings that Viktor himself experienced, and in that way connect to some repressed

feelings within themselves. The monster is a perfect symbol for the uncanny, as it is a form of

a human which is completely familiar to everyone, yet it is sewn together from various

different body parts which is highly strange and unfamiliar. The contrasting images being

merged into one in the monster is a perfect recipe to create the feelings of the uncanny,

Will Adams (2001) writes that:

metaphorically and psychologically, the creature is a daemonic manifestation of the

disowned forces in Victor’s life (such as anger, sadness, guilt, creativity, death, and

the yearning for connection and meaning). This helps us make sense of the fact that

even though the creature appears strangely alien—a singular, isolated, non-human

being with no kin nor friend—he is also strangely familiar, universally

understandable, and intimately connected to (even identical with) Victor.

Here, Adams is touching upon two important concepts. First is the concept of the return of

the repressed. Viktor’s repressed, “disowned” feelings and psychological forces manifesting

in the form of the monster. And second is a related concept, that the monster itself never

represented a separate, autonomous entity, but rather was always meant as a representation of

Viktor’s own double.

The theme of the double is not uncommon in movies in and literature. Perhaps the

most famous examples, apart from Frankenstein, are the movie Fight Club, the book series
Harry Potter and the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The double

represents the idea that we all have a shadow self. The shadow self is composed of all the

repressed aspects of ourselves, all of the feelings, experiences and thoughts we have rejected

and forced into the unconscious; they blend together in the unconscious and start to have a

life of their own outside of our awareness, crystalizing into a kind of seemingly autonomous

entity. The shadow self is often represented in literature in the form of the double, which is an

embodied externalization of the shadow. The double, is basically, once again, the returning of

the repressed, seeking to be reconciled and reintegrated into wholeness.

Viktor himself refers to the monster as ““my own vampire, my own spirit let loose

from the grave” (Shelley, 1818/1990, p. 57). The double serves the role of allowing the

character to interact with his shadow and through that interaction come to a healing and

reintegration as a unified self. For as long as the repressed forces remain in the unconscious,

the character continues living in oblivion to them, which means that they never get a chance

to be assimilated. The character would therefore remain in a stunted stage of development.

The externalization of the shadow poses a challenge to the character. The shadow is often the

character’s mortal enemy. In Harry Potter this is beautifully expressed in the prophecy about

Harry and Voldemort (his shadow): “neither can live while the other survives” (2000). This

challenge forces the character to go through a journey of maturation and change, and

hopefully through that journey, the character manages to learn the necessary lessons that

allow him to accept the previously seemingly unacceptable and in that way overcome his

internal division and conflict. The purpose of the double is for the character to learn to accept

that which he previously rejected.

 There is a psychological truth in the common misconception in the public that knows

the famous name – Frankenstein, but thinks that Frankenstein is the monster, not the scientist

who created the monster which itself has no name. The psychological truth is, that

Frankenstein in fact is the monster, the monster has no existence independent of

Frankenstein.

The relationship between Frankenstein and the monster is indicative of the way that

the repressed psychological forces operate in the mind. We can note that the monster seeks its

creator’s love, care and affection. It wants Frankenstein to notice it, to care for it, to introduce

it into life. Frankenstein is however too frightened. He is incapable of loving his own

creation. Literally scared of his own shadow. Unable to recognize himself in the monster, he

makes the monster into a scary other and chooses to run away from it rather than to embrace

it. However, just as one cannot run away from their physical shadow, the character can never

run away from their double. The monster continues to follow Frankenstein and turns

increasingly more violent.

It is interesting to point out a difference between the way that the theme of the double

gets resolved in Frankenstein versus Harry Potter or the Fight Club. The theme of the double

is always moving towards a union of the character and his shadow. The character may not

know it at first and believe that he fighting an external enemy. The story follows a plot of

conflict and fight between the character and the double. Each wants to hurt the other and kill

them. The character believes that by killing the monster, they will be free from it. This plot

can also be seen in Frankenstein where Viktor’s fear of the monster turns into range as the

monster destroys everything he cares about. But ultimately Viktor fails and when it becomes

obvious that he is going to die, the monster explains that without its creator, it has no more
reason to live also and disappears having decided to kill itself. As soon as Viktor was going

to die, the monster had no more reason to exist. In fact, the monster could not exist without

Viktor, it had to disappear and die because it and Viktor were never separate.

In Harry Potter, the two main character also follow a fight to the death. Each wanting

to kill the other, similarly as in Frankenstein. However, in Harry Potter, Harry ultimately

realizes that he and Voldemort are not separate. He literally has a piece of Voldemort’s soul

inside of him, and there is no way for him to continue to live if Voldemort is to be overcome.

In this way, Harry succeeds where Frankenstein fails. Frankenstein never understood that the

monster was his own reflection and he continued to want to kill the monster until the end.

Harry, on the other hand, realizes the impossibility of the situation. Furthermore, upon this

realization, Harry willingly offers himself to be killed by Voldemort, because he knows that it

is the only way to destroy the evil Lord. And it is precisely this offering of oneself for the

benefit of others. It is the realization that the evil does not exist outside but inside. The

realization that overcoming the evil is impossible by fighting it. It is this which is the true

transcendence of the evil. This is the point where the character comes to a true resolution of

all of all that they ever feared, rejected and repressed. This is where the division within the

self is remedied and the self achieves a true wholeness and unity for the first time. As Harry

offers himself to be killed by Voldemort, what in fact happens that only the part of

Voldemort’s soul inside of Harry dies, making Harry truly free for the first time. The only

way to overcome the shadow was not to try to kill it, but to surrender to it. In that surrender,

in the admission of defeat, the game is over, the self is freed from the shadow and reunified.

So it is the paradox that when the character ceases to fight, he wins the battle, which is the

only way it could be, since he is not battling an external enemy but only parts of his own self.
 In Fight Club the story had a similar resolution where the main character ceased

fighting his double and instead shot himself, which left him unharmed but killed the double.

In Frankenstein, the resolution was different in that Viktor never truly understood. He never

ceased trying to kill the monster and in fact in the pursuit he killed himself. While Harry

surrendered and was willing to die and as a result he survived and won, Viktor persisted in

trying to kill the monster and as a result died himself and failed. Frankenstein is in that way,

a story of failure. Viktor failed to accept his mother’s death and repressed his grief, he

thought he was succeeding in creating the monster, but as soon as it moved he ran away in

fright and the monster continued to haunt him for the rest of his life, destroying all that he

held dear, and the pursuit of the monster eventually killed him.

Will Adams (2001) writes that:

With Frankenstein, Mary Shelley has given us a precious gift, a symbolic offering that

calls for contemplation and even transformation. The wayward ways of Victor and the

creature are always present as possibilities in every human life. You and I may ponder

how we are like these two lost souls. And we may discover how to shape our destiny

differently.

Adams is right. Frankenstein is a story full of symbolism and deeply psychological themes.

The readers of the story may not be aware of these themes while reading the story, but

something in them resonates with it because the themes are significant for the human psyche.

The people may not know why they are drawn to the story, why they find it fascinating or

exciting to read and so easy to remember. I believe the presence of powerful psychological

themes in the story is an important part of the reason.

 References

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Psychoanalysis. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 41(4), 57-89.

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