Fear of Flying

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a medical doctor and founder of psychoanalysis. He was interested in the scope of human experience and began his career using hypnosis to treat hysteria. When he realized that the benefits did not last, he turned to the use of “talk therapy” to help patients uncover past traumas that he believed caused their present emotional pain. The novel begins with Isadora and her analyst husband, Bennett, traveling to Vienna for the opening of the Freud Museum; she has been a patient of six different analysts for the past 13 years. Thus, she is well-versed in psychoanalytic terminology and frequently refers to Freudian constructs and concepts throughout the work. An understanding of Freud’s ideas helps the reader to understand the main characters, including Isadora herself.

Isadora regularly associates her husband, Bennett Wing, and the analyst with whom she has an affair, Adrian Goodlove, with elements of Freud’s theoretical model of the mind. Bennett is connected with the superego, the aspect of the psyche that regulates behavior according to internalized societal rules and norms. Bennett is always trying to get Isadora to live up to an ideal as a wife and a woman, wielding guilt like a weapon when she fails to meet his expectations. Conversely, Isadora links Adrian with Freud’s id, the part of the mind associated with desire, eroticism, and instinctive drives that may run counter to societal expectations. To Isadora, he represents freedom, compared to Bennett’s restrictions, and Adrian constantly encourages her to have more fun and try new things (such as having an affair with him under her husband’s nose). As the ego emerges from the tension between the id and the superego, Isadora feels torn between the two men, attempting to temper the id’s demand for immediate gratification of sexual desire with the superego’s morality and virtue. Her sense of ambivalence—whether she should stay with Bennett, who provides security, or escape her passionless marriage and run off with Adrian—pervades the text and typifies her character.

This love triangle also recalls Freud’s concept of the Oedipus Complex, which he attributed to young children. In this stage, he argued, children experience intense sexual feelings for the parent of the opposite sex. If the familial relationships are healthy, then the stage ends when the child represses their sexual urges and identifies with the same-sex parent instead of viewing them as competition. For Freud, the overcoming of the  Oedipus Complex is a universal stage of maturation and is responsible for the development of the superego. Bennett believes that Isadora has become fixated on Adrian for this reason because she has not peacefully exited the Oedipal stage, perhaps because she never learned to identify with her mother. He says to her, “You’re always reliving your childhood whether you admit it or not—what the hell do you think you’re doing with Adrian Goodlove? He looks exactly like your father—or maybe you hadn’t noticed” (189). In his jealousy, Bennet ascribes Freudian theory to his wife’s desires to invalidate them. He places himself in a position of power over her, making himself the authority on why she wants what she wants. 

The ideas about artists expounded by one speaker at the Viennese conference demonstrate how readily psychoanalytic theory lends itself to the interpretation of art: “By recreating the quality of the Oedipal infatuation, the artist could recreate his ‘family romance’ and thus recreate his idealized childhood world” (227). Isadora is an artist herself, and she continually applies this theoretical framework to her own artistic production. Her status as a male analyst’s wife and as the patient of other male analysts robs her of authority to define her own inner life, emblematizing the fraught gender politics of early psychoanalysis. In the influential theory text Speculum of the Other Woman, published just one year after Fear of Flying, the feminist theorist Luce Irigaray famously took Freud and his male contemporaries to task for setting themselves up as authorities on the nature of female desire. As a work of fiction, Fear of Flying dramatizes this same dynamic: A woman seeks to understand her experience on her own terms while half a dozen men pathologize her desires. 

Isadora feels that she’s been pursuing the perfect man since high school, that her life has been characterized by a focus on sex and the “manhunt” since adolescence. Her life thus lends itself to Freudian psychoanalysis, which likewise “[gives] sexual drives an importance and centrality in human life, human actions, and human behavior […], arguing […] that sexual energy (libido) is the single most important motivating force in adult life” (“Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)”). Isadora rhetorically asks the reader, “What doesn’t come to fucking in the end?” (43). The implied answer is “nothing,” that everything is related to sex and desire. Freud conceived of human instinct as having “two broad generic categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty. […] Thanatos is the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual energy in the annihilation of the self” (“Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)”). Isadora first connects Bennet with death and Adrian with life, as Bennett “made his life resemble death. And his death was [her] death too. [She] learned to keep [her]self alive by writing” (155). However, it could be that “Bennett was life and Adrian death. Maybe life was compromise and sadness, while ecstasy ended inevitably in death” (162). So, she not only feels conflicted by the demands of the superego and id, but also by the twin instinctive drives toward life and death. She wants to live, but she also recognizes that the pursuit of pleasure—which makes her feel so alive in the moment—is also the pursuit of self-annihilation. Ultimately, the tenets and concepts of psychoanalysis play such a major role in Isadora’s life that she interprets her own experiences and others’ within its framework—a framework authored by men, and one that both aids and constrains her in her efforts at self-definition.