Examples Of Anxiety In The Great Gatsby

Why do people become so easily attached to things that destroy them? The constant desire to be loved creates a vicious cycle of attachment for many. Lives become a game of what can be done to preserve a love they once had. Because memories run so deep and are so prominent, many people feel anxiety if another person does not love them the same. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald uses attachment anxiety to prove that when people only focus on staying with someone forever, they are blind to the fact that the relationship is destroying them through focusing their life on someone, fear of abandonment, and childhood experience. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald emphasizes Gatsby’s attachment anxiety by having him focus

Gatsby truly believes that Daisy only loves him, and he can not stand the idea that she does not. During his fight with Tom over who Daisy really loves, he says, ““She never loved you, do you hear?” he crie[s]. “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!””(Fitzgerald 130). Gatsby will not let himself believe that Daisy actually moved on with her life with another man. Instead, he creates an unrealistic scenario where she did not want to move on, and that she only loves Gatsby, not Tom. He is in denial because he is afraid that Daisy actually left him. This is because people with attachment anxiety, “fear abandonment and seek greater emotional intimacy than their partner typically prefers. They adopt affect self-regulation strategies that intensify distress and vulnerability”(Ricco). Losing love and being left alone frightens people, just like it scares Gatsby. Often they are extremely vulnerable if they believe they are losing someone they care about because they will do anything to stay attached. This lack of self control with love can lead them on a path to many problems. Because those with this illness are willing to risk their well being for love, they have a high chance of ruining their own lives. Fear controls them, like it

The way children are treated and perceived by their parents affects their attachment style. When Gatsby was younger, “his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all”(Fitzgerald 98). He creates poor attachment skills because he does not have someone to look up to or comfort him. Gatsby wants to be wealthy, not a farmer like his parents, so he does not accept “them as his parents at all”(Fitzgerald 98). Because he could never look up to his parents way of life, he does not feel close to them. In addition, the way kids are treated and feel is very important because, “the quality of child-parent attachment appears to be related to psychological functioning later in life; insecure attachment has been shown to be related to poor mental health outcomes”(Stevens). Children base their lives on how they remember being treated when they were young. Because Gatsby does not have much to go off of, he decides to create his own path. When he meets Daisy, he does not know the proper way to show affection because he is not used to it. If Gatsby knew how to handle his anxiety better he could have avoided ruining his life searching for love. Gatsby needed an adult figure to look up to to learn how to be properly affectionate without having anxiety, but he never got that. When children grow up without a parent to follow, they lose the ability to have the correct attachment