“The Magic Skin”: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation

In his novel The Magic Skin, Balzac demonstrates profound insight into the sources of human suffering. The theme of this book is the devil's pact—that pact in which a human being sells his soul for glory and unlimited power and pays the price of self-destruction and death. In the light of modern psychoanalysis this pact expresses the neurotic individual's attempt to escape from his conflicts by erecting and worshipping an illusory, glorified self, which results inevitably in his becoming increasingly alienated from his real self and finally in turning destructively and vindictively against it.

The three elements in the devil's pact are (1) the person in crisis, (2) the pact, and (3) the resulting descent into hell.

Raphael de Valentin is the protagonist of Balzac's human tragedy. We meet him at the moment of crisis in his life when he is about to commit suicide. Subsequently we are given a short biography of his previous life, through which we learn enough about him to understand something of the neurotic development of his character which brought him to the point of crisis.

Of his family origins we know only that there was a great deal of family pride in aristocratic ancestry. Raphael was an only son. We know nothing of his mother who died early in his life, so that the dominant person in his childhood was his father. His father is described as “tall, thin, slight, hatchet-faced, pale, silent, fidgety, exacting, flinthearted and frigid,” a man who covered the boy's merriment with “a leaden pall” and received the boy's effusive demonstration as “childish absurdity.” Here was a man who was apparently devoted to his son, but we can recognize in this devotion the disregard for the child as a person in his own rights which is so damaging to a free and healthy development of the self. Much of the father's interest in the boy lay in his desire to “make a statesman out of him” so that he could thereby restore the glory of the family. The father's predomina