The Dissolution of Self in Guy de Maupassant's The Horla

Abstract

This paper explores the psychological complexity underlying the narrator in Guy de Maupassant's short story The Horla (1887) using the analytical tool of Freudian emotional ambivalence, a fundamental concept of psychoanalytic theory. Freudian psychoanalysis provides a rigorous structure for discovering the deep influence of the unconscious mind on human behavior, emotion, and thought, identifying repressed desires, interpersonal struggle, and childhood experiences as the main influences shaping personality. The ambivalent attitude of the narrator in The Horla toward his mental state, home, and very being represents a stark internal dialectic that swings between reason and mania, between love and destruction, between self-preservation and self-destruction. He is simultaneously convinced of his sanity and beholden to irrational urges that take control of his mind. His deep attachment to his environment is dramatically contrasted with his increasing desire to destroy it. This emotional ambivalence, as revealed through detailed textual examination, operates within the psychic structure of the narrator, eventually leading him to complete psychological disintegration, thus illustrating a universal aspect of human psychology where opposing instincts coexist and create psychic intolerance.