Psychoanalyzing Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender is the Night’

(2018. I wrote this as an essay for my American Novel class. It’s not super important, but I had fun with it and I think it’s kind of cool. It went way longer than it was supposed to cause I had too much fun.)

Scott Fitzgerald considered his final novel, Tender is the Night, to be his finest work. It is heavily based in the reality of his own life in Europe with his wife Zelda, who had various mental disorders, and their fashionable friends. The book has relatively little plot; the focus is on the complex relationships between the main characters. During the 20s and 30s, when the book was written, the psychoanalytic practices and theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were a major intellectual influence. Fitzgerald studied psychoanalytic thought in depth due to his personal struggles with Zelda’s mental health. As a result of this, Tender is the Night is a masterpiece of psychoanalytic fiction, and viewing the book through this lens reveals a treasure trove of meaning that bubbles just beneath the surface of the text. The novel has an elusive but occasionally tangible unconscious. Reading the novel for psychoanalytical meaning allows us to see the intricate way in which fundamental psychological forces drive the main character developments over the course of the story and interact with each other in tragic ways. The struggle between the superego (which is directly derived from parental relationships) and the ego and id is the source of most of the novel’s tension, and the concept of “transference” is responsible for the evolution and entanglement of relations between Dick Diver, Nicole Diver, Rosemary Hoyt, and the other major characters. Through this lens, we can see that the true, overarching role played by Dick Diver in the novel is the role of a magnetic object and subject of transference and countertransference.

Dick Diver is a psychiatrist following in the footsteps of Freud and Jung. When we get Dick’s backstory in the beginning of Part II, he is described as first going to Vienna to explicitly see Freud before it’s too late, and then he ends up writing his major work in Zurich in 1920, which is where Jung was active (115). This establishes the connection between Dick and psychoanalytic thought. However, it is important to establish the relevant specifics of this thought if we would like to analyze the novel through that lens. Psychoanalysis is based on a conception of the human mind as the battleground of competing impulses and urges, the roots of which are typically sexual, since like all animal creatures we’re driven by reproduction. Because humans are more complex and socialized, complications often arise when there are conflicts between an individual’s “id” (their base, instinctual, sexual urges), “ego” (their constructed identity of “self”), and “superego.” The superego is most relevant in Tender is the Night. The superego is the part of an individual which acts as the censor or authoritative spectator for the ego; it is based upon internalized socialization, what one ought to do or think; it is responsible for guilt and repression; and importantly, it is largely the result of the molding of an individual by one’s parents, since parents are the first and most important form of authority. Each of the three main characters in the novel have issues with their superego as a direct result of their parents. The other major psychoanalytic concept in the novel is the concept of “transference.” Transference is a process which occurs between the patient and the therapist during the treatment process. Whatever repressed memory or psychical problem is weighing on the patient will come out over the course of conversation with the therapist and free association; most psychoses are based on sexual or parental relationships; oftentimes, over the course of therapy, the patient will begin to subconsciously identify the person who caused their issue with the therapist to whom they discuss it with; the patient will begin to reenact the relationship between themselves and the person in their memory through their relationship with the therapist, literally “transferring” the relationship onto them. 

Dick Diver’s psychological profile forms the center of the novel, because by his nature the other characters are naturally drawn into him. Dick has an enormously high libido, which is not expressed just sexually, but rather is sublimated widely to everyone he meets. “He felt so intensely about people” (87) that he is constantly giving of himself, and Nicole observes that “those who possessed that pleasingness had to keep their hands in, and go on attaching people that they had no use to make of.” The use of the word attaching here without preposition shows the mutual nature of Dick’s connection with other people. One patient at his clinic he feels particularly sorry for, and “in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually” (185). Here we can see the libidinal source of his love, which of course in a Freudian view is the source of all love and connection. Furthermore, this quote shows the defenselessness of his love, it’s unreserved openness. This makes him incredibly magnetic, but also vulnerable. When he connects with others, they are absorbed: “The personalities had pressed so close to him that he became the personality itself… he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people” (245). This is incredibly burdensome, and will take its toll on Dick over the course of the novel as his libido flags with age. His father was a pastor, and so Dick has a desire to help people and to embody all of the good qualities his dad modeled for him and which are maintained in Dick’s superego; however, “[w]anting to be all brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved” (302). His love and his desire to be loved, reciprocally powerful forces, will ultimately be his downfall, as foreshadowed in the early battlefield scene when Dick says that “[a]ll my beautiful safe lovely world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love” (57). His libido, his id, does exactly that— it blows up his ego once the walls of his superego weaken. But before this happens, Dick’s powerful love coupled with his psychiatric training makes him the ultimate agent of transference. The other characters in the novel transfer onto him like a psychological lodestone, and it is the interplay of these transferences which drive the novel. Dick provides the stage for these various emotions to play upon, and acts as both subject and object of transference.

The main transference is of course that of his wife Nicole. Nicole’s particular psychoses developed as a result of her close relationship to her father, who rapes her, leading to repression and a pathological fear of men. She enters the psych ward and, after meeting Dick briefly, begins sending him letters. Over the course of these letters, Nicole goes through many changes in mental states, but notably associates Dick with her father, asking him to write her back “unless they will let me write my father, whom I love dearly” (122). She eventually grows attached to Dick from afar, creating a sort of transference onto him— Dick’s partner Franz says “It was the best thing that could have happened to her, a transference of the most fortuitous kind” (120). When Dick and Nicole begin their romance, he is wary at first due to the professional relationship and the fragility of her psyche, but when he realizes that the Warrens will buy a doctor for her to marry anyway, he gives in to her advances and ends up falling in love with her. Nicole remembers standing waiting for Dick in the garden, “holding all my self in my arms like a basket of flowers… waiting to hand that basket to you” (155), which clearly alludes to her willing transference from her father Devereaux Warren to Dick Diver. Their love becomes a pure mixing, a transference of the most intimate kind, “a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye” (217). Of course, this comes with dangers, since Nicole’s negative feelings towards her father lie under the surface: when she’s having her breakdown in the bathroom, she screams “don’t come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them,” an allusion to her father’s rape. Dick, playing the role of the father figure and the superego, can only resort to brute repression, to repeatedly shouting “Control yourself!” (112). Their mixing is total, and their problems and destinies are shared; this means that they can both go down together, as symbolized by Nicole’s flipping of the car with them both in it. She literally has the power to crash them both, and it is telling that, just after their first kiss, the weather and descriptive language turns violent, destructive, stormy, and dark (156).

It is Rosemary’s transference with Dick that destabilizes Dick’s psyche and begins the tragedy of the novel, which is why I believe Fitzgerald chose to begin the novel with Rosemary’s part despite its non-chronological placing. Rosemary Hoyt has no father, and her mother is her world; she plays both father and mother to Rosemary and represents a strong superego. However, at the novel’s start Rosemary’s mother is looking to allow Rosemary to develop on her own, much like Dick’s wishes for Nicole. Rosemary is unsettled by this, feeling that “this final severance of the umbilical cord disturbed her sleep” (40). She begins to transfer her feelings of ideal authority onto Dick: “his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her” (16), “she saw him as something as fixed and Godlike as he had always been, as older people are to younger, rigid and unmalleable” (104). After kissing Dick “she was conscious-stricken because she did not miss her mother at all” (76). And indeed, when they fight after their briefly consummated romance later on, she says “I feel as if I’d quarrelled with Mother” (219). She worships Dick as ideal authority, and you can be sure he loved being worshipped.

The relationship between Dick and Rosemary exemplifies the Freudian Oedipal complexes that are essential to the novel. Freud posited misplaced sexual relationships between fathers and daughters as a major source of many of his patient’s neuroses. The idea of father/daughter incest pervades the novel. Dick, for his part, constantly infantilizes Rosemary in defense to Nicole, saying “she’s an infant” and “there’s a persistent aroma of the nursery” (167). And, as established above, Rosemary sees Dick as this Godlike father figure, to whom she is very sexually attracted. Nicole’s neurosis is the result of her father raping her, and her relationship with men is forever tainted by this. Dick sees youth in her just as she sees her father in him; Nicole’s smile “was like all the lost youth in the world” (134). Ultimately, it is Dick’s id desires to have sex with his daughter figure, embodied by Rosemary, that leads to his divorce from Nicole and to his demise. His poise as a charming psychiatrist depends on his feelings of control; when he starts falling in love with the beautiful Rosemary (who, as a young blonde, likely replaces the void left by Nicole who has aged), his transference connection with her destabilizes him. When he learns from Collis of her possible love for another boy on a train, “Dick felt a change taking place within him” (88), and from then on he is haunted by the phrases “Do you mind if I pull down the curtain? Please do. It’s too light in here.” Not only do these phrases represent Rosemary’s possession by another man, but it also brilliantly symbolizes the actions of a repressive superego, his mind literally pulling the curtains down on his id desire for Rosemary, leading ultimately to worse outcomes as repression is wont to do. From this point on he get less and less stable as his superego weakens against the onslaught. On page 91, he faces a turning point outside of Rosemary’s studio, where he breaks from his model of correctness: “Dick’s necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled… molded plastically… Dick was paying some tribute to things unforgotten, unshriven, unexpurgated.” This section illustrates the battle going on in Dick’s subconscious between his molded superego, inherited from his father, and his “unexpurgated” desire for beautiful little girls like Rosemary. After this, he starts to feel antipathy towards Nicole, and begins “subconsciously… hardening and arming himself” (100). The chinks in the armor begin to show, and it is the beginning of the end.

However, Dick’s superego maintains for quite a while longer, due to the stabilizing force of his father. “Momentarily, he sat again on his father’s knee… while the old loyalties and devotions fought on around him. Almost with an effort he turned back to his two women at the table and faced a whole new world in which he believed. — Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?” (101). In this quote, sitting with Rosemary and Nicole at the beginning of this weakening, we see that Dick’s superego, id, and ego are struggling, the ego fighting to stay faithful to his father’s teachings, the id urging indulgence, and the superego attempting to “pull down the curtain” and repress the conflicting energies. But Dick’s poise has been shaken, and he weakens more and more. Nicole is so intertwined with Dick that she begins to subconsciously sense his wandering desire for Rosemary, which causes her to have a mental collapse after a woman accuses Dick of “having seduced her daughter,” a patient, and wants Mrs. Diver to “learn what her husband was ‘really like’” (187). Nicole has her breakdown a few pages later, yelling at Dick, “Don’t you think I saw that girl look at you, a child not more than fifteen” (190). While neither of these events are necessarily “true,” they do speak to the change in desires in Dick’s head. In Freudian psychology, it is not the deed but simply the intention that is sufficient to create a sense of guilt from the superego; and indeed, on page 190 Dick “had a sense of guilt as in one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as something undeniably experienced, but…have not committed.” This is quintessentially Freudian. Nicole’s breakdown, followed by the death of Abe North, further destabilizes Dick’s psyche, and he begins to see other women as vaguely attractive forms: “he was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on a wall” (201), “His heart beat loud in contact with the unprobed, undissected, unanalyzed, unaccounted for” (202). However, he turns away from them all at the last second, reasserting control. This control finally snaps with the death of Dick’s father. Dick’s father was the seat of his superego’s strength; when “this earliest and strongest of protections is gone” his superego loses the battle. Receiving the news, Dick “felt a sharp wince at the shock, a gathering of the forces of resistance; then it rolled up through his loins and stomach and throat” (203). This line demonstrates his superego’s attempt to stay strong, the “forces of resistance” losing to the id, as symbolized by his more carnal loins, stomach, and throat. After this, he says “Good-by, my father— good-by, all my fathers” (205), thus renouncing his old self and diving into his destruction. Within the next thirty pages, he has sex with Rosemary, fights with her, and then gets arrested for brawling with Italian police officers.

Dick’s role as the lover, the romantic, the Fitzgerald-ego ideal man of charming repose, the open-veined & vain American dreamer, the site of transference which brings together the major characters of the novel— this starring role features a tragic flaw of loving too blindly, leading to a professional failure of the psychiatrist to recognize the pernicious power of countertransference. Countertransference is the result of the patient’s transference on the therapist’s own psyche, how the therapist responds to the transference and how they are changed by it. Freud warns psychotherapists against succumbing to this intriguing rebound effect of psychoanalytic treatment “which arises in the physician as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings… Every analyst’s achievement is limited by what his own complexes and resistances permit, and consequently we require that he should begin his practice with a self-analysis and should extend and deepen this constantly while making his observations on his patients. Anyone who cannot succeed in this self-analysis may without more ado regard himself as unable to treat neurotics by analysis “(Freud, The Future Prospects of Psycho Analytic Therapy, p. 289).” Human love is reciprocal; it warms both ways, it burns both ways. Lucky Dick with all his wit and grace charmed his way to a life of wealth glamour and love, but he never did get around to finishing that book…. Dick loves and is vulnerable, and his libido is powerful enough to sustain that love, to give and give like the sun over their beach, but ultimately everyone ages and tires, and Nicole is a powerful force of beautifully madenning madness. Dick just wasn’t a good enough psychoanalyst to handle it. He doesn’t analyze himself during the treatment as he should; if he had, he would have realized the effects of countertransference far before it was too late. If one analyzes the book through a psychoanalytic lens, they can see that the clues were there the whole time warning the reader, and Dick, of his unfurling descent due to countertransference.

Now, let us view the remainder of the tragedy through this tragic trajectory of unrecognized countertransference. Countertransference began taking place very early, probably with the letters themselves, as Dick sees Nicole as the embodiment of youth when they meet. He falls in love with her, and as they mix and transfer on each other, he becomes more and more like her father Devereaux Warren, seeing her through those eyes. As I described earlier, she symbolically gives her whole self to him, and he becomes her father, her lover, her husband, her doctor, and in essence her superego. This is exemplified when we see him yelling at her to control herself. As she transfers onto him, she gets stronger and stronger, while he bears more and more weight for them both out of his open romantic love and his enormous libido. He eventually is tempted by Rosemary Hoyt, which is how the tragic drama begins; it is fitting that the truest thing Rosemary ever says is that “Oh, we’re such actors, you and I!” (105) to Dick. They are the actors in the tragic replaying of Devereaux Warren’s mistakes, the marring of youth, displaying the tragic determinism implied by psychoanalysis. They are the stars of a movie chillingly called “Daddy’s Girl.” He doesn’t love Rosemary, but she worships him the way Nicole did at first. Nicole countertransfers onto Dick, and Rosemary countertransfers on him as well, since she falls under his spell intensely due to her own Freudian parental complexes. Dick’s superego is able to hold himself steady through his powerful repressions, but the death of his father removes the strength of these barriers, and he commits the fatal sin. He has sex with Rosemary, who he then realizes he does not love. She doesn’t conform to his illusions about her innocence, and he reacts irrationally to the disillusionment. Like Devereaux, he turns away from her and dismisses her out of guilt, going through his irrevocable change, his hurt love breeding darkness: he resolves “if he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred in the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again” (219). Dick’s hamartia is that he is too romantically needy of love, letting as much in as he lets out, and this blinds him to what he as a good psychiatrist should have known. Freud specifically warns therapists to be watchful for the dangers of countertransference, yet Dick Diver dives in too deep and never comes up for air. After consummating his relationship with Rosemary, thereby recreating Devereaux’s molestation of Nicole, he fully commits himself to the role. After the brawl with the Italian police and his bitter time arrested, he leaves jail and is booed by the crowds, who mistake him for another man who had earlier raped and slain a 5-year old girl. Dick says “I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did,” (235). He becomes Devereaux Warren, guilty of a crime he didn’t necessarily commit; as we know from Freud, it is the thought that counts. 

The completion of the countertransference leaves Dick a forlorn old man and Nicole a revitalized woman. He loses his old charm, his father’s charm. He loses his energy. His alcoholism becomes a personal and professional liability, and he loses social standing; Devereaux nearly drinks himself to death, a death which would be “merely a weakening and sinking” and of which it is noted that “the precipitating factor is alcoholism” (247). Dick mirrors this slide into alcoholism, repudiating Nicole when she reaches out to him, she now the strong one, he the weak. She sensed his evolution into Devereaux when she broke down out of worries about him and young girls, she sensed the guilt through their close transference relationship. Due ironically to her healing, she began to sense the bad parts of her father in Dick. He loses his youth, and loses interest in Nicole, much like Devereaux did before he ultimately dropped her off in a European mental institution and abandoned her for good. Nicole reaches out on the boat because “now she was unexpectedly free” but “Dick turned his back sighing” (274), while Tommy Barban comes up behind her to symbolically take Dick’s place. Dick has become weak physically and mentally, as represented by his inability to perform his old stunts on the water. Meanwhile, Nicole is nearly cured; “Her ego began blooming like a great rich rose,” and she felt that “I’m practically standing alone, without him” (289). Finally, Nicole approaches sad Dick sitting forlorn and alone and reaches out one last time, literally putting their heads together again, and he rejects her finally, bitterly trying to save himself (301). He is no longer the inexhaustible energy he was, which she needed him to be, and she grapples with his imprint in her mind, empowered as an independent woman “with her nascent transference to another man”; finally “she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever” (302). Tommy becomes her new man and her new superego. When Dick blesses the beach for the final time, Nicole makes to go to him, and Tommy forces her back down firmly and tells her she will not, demonstrating his superego surrogacy. And Dick is left spent of his libido, a sad alcoholic husk. That was the end of Dick Diver; “The case was finished.” The unconscious undercurrent of unfurling countertransference drove the chiasmus of the tragedy.

The psychoanalytic reading breathes immense life into this subtle book, and although I did not understand the novel at first, I thoroughly appreciate it now after rereading it with all my underlines, knowledge of the whole arc, understanding of psychoanalysis, and research into the author’s life. I have now entirely fallen in love with the book as the perfect exemplar of a psychoanalytically driven narrative and personal romantic tragedy. A Freudian novel made perfect sense looking back at the moment. Freudian thought and psychoanalytic thought in general was not only extremely influential in the intellectual world, but it was also quite fashionable. Scott had a further reason for learning deeply about psychoanalysis beyond his intelligent sensitivity and nouveau-riche anxieties— his beloved Zelda was mad, as many brilliant female artists tended to be in such repressive times. His psychoanalytic learning found its way into the core of his writing, as it became a core element of his intellectual being because he loved Zelda and wanted to help her. Fitzgerald wrote the perfect novel for these times of aristocratic self-scrutiny, and it was intensely personal— Tender is the Night is a powerful semiautobiographical tragedy. He based Dick and Nicole off an interesting synthesis of himself and his wife Zelda with their glamorous friends Gerald and Sara Murphy. This is a novel of the post-Wilson post-Princeton Atlantic aristocracy, the world of American expatriates interacting in the 20s Parisian modern scene, where “the 20th century happened” according to Gertrude Stein. The Murphys were the quintessential Americans of this international community. All their friends viewed their perfect relationship with awe and looked to them as representatives of American culture. This is why the book is a great American novel fitting with the American Dream aspect of The Great Gatsby, despite its setting in foreign lands. Fitzgerald dedicated the book “To Gerald and Sara—Many Fêtes.” In a letter to them he wrote “The book was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of it is Zelda and me because you and Sara are the same people as Zelda and me” (The New Yorker, 1962, Tomkins, “Living Well is the Best Revenge). Fitzgerald essentially transferred onto the enchanting Murphys, who he studied with a deep, sensitive, and often unsettling eye. Sara was offput by how Scott seemed to analyze their lives, but Gerald later noted how immaculately accurate Scott’s detailed memories of them were. Sara’s signature beads inspired Picasso paintings as well as Fitzgerald’s beautiful line about Nicole’s “brown back hanging from her pearls” (16). The Murphys’ outdoor patio had many nightingales, undoubtedly inspiring Fitzgerald to name the book Tender is the Night after a line in Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Fitzgerald sees his and Zelda’s ego-ideals in the Murphys, and he relays this idyllic view through the rose-colored goggles of Rosemary Hoyt.However, the drama of the Divers comes not from the perfect Murphys, but from the self-destructive Fitzgeralds. Over the process of writing Tender is the Night, the Fitzgeralds spiraled in view of their friends, who worried deeply about their increasingly dangerous behavior— Zelda almost overdosed on sleep medicine while at the Murphy’s house on the Riviera. The Divers’ flaws are based on the Fitzgeralds’ flaws, and Dick Diver’s fate is so poignant, so unhappy, so intoxicatingly tragic precisely because it is how Fitzgerald forlornly sees his own fate. He, too, suffers loss of social standing and he, too, didn’t really made much real progress on his writing for a while. Scott develops a wicked alcoholism, and is haunted by his inability to save Zelda. He considered this book his masterpiece, which one can see only if they embrace the intentional fallacy in order to see the tragic romanticism of failure embodied by the author himself and sublimated into his art. He feels responsible for his failure, and this book is an exploration of that in an interesting act of “transference” of Gerald Murphy’s ego-ideal plus Fitzgerald’s own guilt-ridden ego into the dream-world of fiction, into the mirror he creates of Dick Diver, a blending of dream and reality. In a letter about Zelda he writes “For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages) … I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her” (New Yorker). Is the fictional Dick Diver that tenderly close to the reality of Scott Fitzgerald, or has the novelist imagined his narrative into his reality? The image of a sad Fitzgerald, this sensitive soul who took on a spirit that burned too much, sitting in a chair late at night drinking away these psychoanalytic thoughts— it is this image that the reader is ultimately left with as they consider the sad reality of the title in relation to “Ode to a Nightingale,” a poem in which the word ‘forlorn’ haunts a lonely drinker fading into a tender night, an embalming darkness within which the author is too drowsy, drunk, and dejected to tell whether they dream or wake.