Emotional Detachment and Broken Dreams Love, /lv/: a quality or feeling of strong or constant affection for and dedication to another. What every relationship in The Great Gatsby lacks. This scarcity of emotion and romantic relationships is evident when the book is read through a psychoanalytic lens. A psychoanalytic lens enables the reader to discover the characters' unconscious and conscious fears, motivations, and desires that would otherwise be disregarded. All relationships shown or hinted at in the novel either fall apart or are never stable from the start. Daisy and Tom’s marriage was built on money and status and contained no love from the start. George and Myrtle’s may have started well, but came crashing down after Myrtle began her affair with …show more content…
This description becomes ironic when the reader finds out through Nick Carraway, the narrator, that George’s wife is cheating on him. George is also affected by the nearby billboard advertising a since-retired osteopathic doctor by the name of T.J. Eckleburg. Eckleburg's eyes being plastered on the billboard gives George a sense of constant judgment and fear that forces him to stay moral and honest. These factors combined ultimately cause George to slide from a superego character to an ego, to, at the very end, an id. Goerge's original superego character is present throughout the beginning chapters when he is blissfully unaware that his wife, Myrtle, is having an affair with Tom. Then, when he finds out about her affair he immediately slides into an ego character with his mind fixated on her affair and doing everything in his power to keep Myrtle to himself. When talking to Tom and Nick he relays "She's going to stay there till the day after to-morrow, and then we're going to move away" (Fitzgerald 105). An ego personality is shown because of his immediate reduction of