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Fellman considers the cultural meaning of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, its images of destruction and helplessness, not only as evoked in the present nuclear threat, but in all science, technology, economics, psychology, and politics—in short, in all endeavors to reach beyond human limits to attain extraordinary power. Fellman refers to Civilization and its Discontents, noting that Victor Frankenstein's horror at his own creation reflects what Freud describes as our fear of upsetting inner equilibrium in exploring the unknown in human personality. The novel examines the power and destructiveness of the strange and fearful dimensions of human sexuality, particularly in their oedipal intensity, reflected in attempts at resolution, such as the way in which Frankenstein goes away with his mother and comes back with the wished-for baby of his own creation.
Woman and sexual activity are not involved in his creation; Victor's monster represents the male child's narcissistic fantasy which refuses to accept that children come only from women's bodies. Fellman suggests that Frankenstein is ultimately trying to become far more than a woman bearing life or a father contributing to the conception of a child; indeed Frankenstein is rivaling God. The murderous offspring of all these conflicted wishes is named Monster, Demon, Fiend, Devil, or simply "He." The demon represents both Victor's own anger and the anger he expects his father to unleash against him in retribution for his autonomy and ambition. Fellman recognizes in the monster the same danger that Freud described in fundamental aggressive and sexual impulses becoming destructive if not acknowledged and allowed expression. The author identifies the struggle between Frankenstein and the monster as the struggle between ego and id. Moreover, Victor's monster is seen as a masturbatory fantasy, a failed attempt to prove the anal theory of birth, as well as an attempt to at once subsume the capacity to bear a child and to h