Loss, Abandonment And Recovery Essay, Research Paper

Loss/ Abandonment and Recovery

In choosing on how to write this essay I chose to work with dealing on loss and recovery. Loss, abandonment, recovery, and creation are all feelings human beings have had to deal with throughout the history of life and even more so in our readings the characters take it to a whole different level. There were quite a few readings we’ve perused through this semester that dealt with topics such as loss and abandonment or recovery. Narcissus was all splattered with a sensed of loss and abandonment and even recovery. How more tragic abandonment could take place when the person you fall deeply in need for disregards your every notion and rejects your offer. Narcissus thrust echo away from himself because she didn’t come close in beauty to himself and to the expectations he had set forth for himself. Further yet how more tragic and incident of recovery could have taken place when narcissus discovers himself in a mirror resembling pond. Finding the most beautiful being he had ever seen but yet not being able to embrace it, hug it, kiss it. I could even say that Narcissus experienced quite a sense of abandonment when he realized the figure he saw didn’t want him back, yet really not knowing that it was himself.

Among the classic abandonment stories is the one that was written by Jean Jacques Rousseau. I find it quite horrific the way in which he was dealt with by his father in his early childhood. Agreeing with Rousseau on whether or not it was his fault that his mother died is all irrelevant. While thinking about it, could Rousseau really have felt any other way about it? His father constantly let him know how much his mother had been missed, “Give her back to me, console me for her, fill the void she has left in my heart! Should I love you so if you were not more to me than a son?” (Gunner p 278). What’s possibly the quite worst of all is what all of this left upon Rousseau as a kid. For he never really grew up emotionally normal due to the burden that was quite unfairly placed on him, and this in turn led to the many misfortunes that would fall him throughout his life.

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” was filled with tales of loss and abandonment and creation and recovery. Creation and recovery start off the tale of Frankenstein but soon abandonment and loss soon beset the stage of fate. Upon the discovery of his newly found abandonment the creature by who Victor Frankenstein created really got to show us the effects of abandonment on a man-child. The story in my eyes has quite a few hidden subplots that are made to be discovered and interpreted differently by every different reader that crosses paths with this story. For I see in parts of this story I see Mary Shelley trying to tell us that creation falls upon the duty of no man and that only God shall be the all mighty maker of man. That’s one of my interpretations of the story. Again one can only conceive upon what it would be like to create such an atrocity, yet Victor gives us quite a description, “he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived. So if by ranking all of the texts in accordance with having loss/abandonment and recovery/creation as pre-requisites for the order than it would be clear that this by far outranks any of the texts that we have read up to. Again that’s my personal opinion, which is in itself questionable, but nonetheless I give it to you

When I start to read the works of Sigmund Freud I get the overwhelming sense that he mainly deals with recovery and creation. The work I read of his in class was “The Interpretation of Dreams”. I’ve read a few of Freud’s other works on my own and I know doubt come to the conclusion that he is crazy with dealing with recovery and creation. In reading his incerpt Freud goes on talking about dreams and what they mean through our subconscious minds. Freud deals a lot with sexual subconscious thoughts to and what they mean as far to our normal thinking. A great example of how he worked this way was that, he said if people had a lot of dreams about being in a train with a member of the opposite sex or even a member of the same sex that they knew and they were constantly going in and out of tunnels, then it meant that their subconscious was telling this particular individual that they wanted a great deal to have sexual intercourse with this person. Some of his notions and theories on the human sub-conscious and sexuality were quite strange and off the wall, but they all had a sensibleness to them that made it hard to ignore that he could be on to something. In the scheme of things though it just seems to me that he is always intrigued by and interested with recovery and creation in the sense that he is always trying to recover the actual meaning behind dreams so that he could find out what’s going on in our sub-conscious and therefore create a little knowledge into what the sub-conscious really can tell us about a person true feelings, emotions, and thoughts. Sigmund Freud if he was around this day and age could have discovered far more now than he ever did back then with all of the new technology and other equipment that could have been at his disposal. I also felt that he was always onto something but could never really get over the top of the hill, nonetheless he was right there, “The relation of our typical dreams to fairy-tales and other fiction and poetry is neither sporadic nor accidental.” What does this mean. In my opinion it meant that he knew what the truth behind it was, but that he couldn’t back it up with the scientific proof yet to show the people that he was right.