Preface

I borrow the title of this issue from a book by Diane Sadoff (1982), as the phrase “monsters of affection” evocatively captures the common thread that links together the following four essays—the acts of emotional and physical violence that people often inflict on those nearest and dearest to them. As Aristotle recognized in the Poetics, tragedy affects spectators most deeply when its horrors occur among members of a family; and this theme readily lends itself to psychoanalytic elaboration.

There is probably no more famous monster in all of literature than that in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Employing an object relations perspective that draws chiefly on Winnicott and Bion, Lee Zimmerman goes beyond traditional readings of the novel that acknowledge the monster to be the double of Victor Frankenstein, but proceed to contrast Victor's abandonment of his creature with Victor's ostensibly loving upbringing at the hands of his mother and father. As Zimmerman argues, Victor's superficially glowing account of his childhood is actually a “defensive idealization,” and it is Victor's own “murderous rage (and guilt)” resulting from “a premature violation of his sense of early omnipotence” that “must be split off and disowned” in the form of the monster. Thus, the monster's murders of Victor's brother, best friend, and family servant are crimes for which not only Victor, but Victor's parents, may be held indirectly responsible. Zimmerman traces out the implications of his notion that Shelley's novel “centers on a creature defined by the impossibility of being seen,” proposing that the “failure to be seen” can be equated with a “failure of containment.” The consequences of these twin failures culminate in the monster's burning down of the house of the De Lacey family where his longings for human sympathy were most cruelly frustrated.

As Lee Zimmerman's essay on Frankenstein is exemplary in its deployment of object relations theory, so Nouri Gana's