The Artistic Communication and the Recipient—'Death in Venice' as an Integral Part of a Psychoanalysis

A young graduate student found himself unprepared for adult life because of fixation at the oral level of personality development, causing inability to leave his mother and symptoms of depression and homosexuality. A chance acquaintance with the novel, Death in Venice, led him to see himself more clearly, and served both as a threatening and a reassuring experience, with the result that he was able to enter analytic treatment. It appears that during this process threads of the story were associated with memory traces from the patient's past. Then he, as it were, in the company of the author, was able to re-create and re-experience figures from his own past with emotional intensity. Under the influence of the transference, these figures merged and blended with that of the analyst and gradually developed into realistic objects. It appears that reading the story and undergoing analysis worked together to advance the patient's hitherto arrested ego development through induced regression, with ego

disintegration and reintegration, and subsequent development of more mature object relationships.