Emma Bovary and Ivan Ilych: Evidence of Psychoanalysis Thirty Years Before Freud

Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern day psychology and psychoanalysis, described human consciousness as the combination of three elements, id, ego and superego. The id is what controls our personal desires, the superego controls our ideas about where we fit in society and the ego is in between these two elements balancing their effects to help us make rational decisions. Despite the fact that these theories were developed well after Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary or Tolstoy wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych the main characters of each (Emma and Ivan) both represent people who have become dominated by one aspect of their subconscious. Whereas Emma is dominated by her id, seeking only selfish pleasures in life, Ivan is dominated by his superego, letting society 's standards run his life for him. Even though there is this major difference in their subconscious motivations, both Ivan and Emma are seeking essentially the same thing: fulfillment in life. To Emma this means romantic escapades with Dukes in the royal court, but to Ivan fulfillment in life is marked by proper career progression and a stable position in society. Interestingly, despite all these differences in their manner and means both characters find themselves confronted with the same problems in the end. Emma Bovary has every characteristic of a person living only to fulfill her own wishes and desires. Like a child, she seeks out pleasure, and when she is not actively being stimulated by something she wants to do she is plagued by boredom. As she searches for these stimuli she pays no attention to the consequences her actions will have on others. This attitude pervades her every action, to point that she does not even take the needs of her only child, Berthe, into consideration. The child has a wet nurse to take care of her from infancy, and she sees her mother less and less as Emma becomes more involved in her affairs with Rodolphe and Leon. This attitude of Emma is most apparent in a scene

Cited: Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. New York City: Bantam Books, 1989. Tolstoy, Leo. "The Death of Ivan Ilych." The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. Dana Gioia, and R.S. Gwynn. New York City: Longman, 2001. 1585-1624.