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April 9, 1963. PSYCHOANALYTIC STUDIES ON JOSEPH CONRAD: THE FAMILY ROMANCE. Bernard C. Meyer, M.D.
The family romance fantasy played an extraordinarily large role in the life and works of Joseph Conrad. It led him to massive attempts at acting out his fantasy identifications with great masculine figures—which attempts invariably
ended in humiliation, disaster, and disease. His preoccupation with Stanley and his world-acclaimed African rescues led Conrad to his ill-fated effort to pilot a boat up the Congo. Other attempts at acting out resulted in periods spent as a French sailor-adventurer, as a master mariner in the British marine, as a great lover on the island of Mauritius. The 'protector-protegé' aspect of the family romance, which Kris demonstrated as characteristic of the artist, was exemplified in his relationship with several men, especially Ford Madox Ford (also an 'author in search of a character'), with whom Conrad had a mutually shifting father-son relation, to the great enrichment of his own creativity.
The 'rescue', or 'need of rescue', element in the family romance was not confined to the Stanley episode but permeates Conrad's writings and characterizes an astonishing number of heroes, heroines, and even villains: Alice Jacobus (A Smile of Fortune), Razumov (Under Western Eyes), and especially Rita de Lastola (Arrow of Gold). Conrad himself can be recognized as Rita's swashbuckling lover, wounded in a duel for her sake and nursed back to health by her. Here the various elements of his own family romance are grouped: the rise to lofty station, the herosim, the rescue.
Conrad's personal identity was inconstant throughout. His avowed rejection of Catholicism and the accompanying nostalgia for it is paralleled, in the professed Englishman, by a lifelong passion for the suffering of his native Poland and extreme sensitivity to charges of betraying her cause (vide: the Patna episode in Lord Jim). As a boy, Conrad exemplified another special ele