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It is by now well recognized that Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” is rich in Freudian symbolism. The Blisses (1949) pointed out its sexual imagery; Sloane (1972) maintained that it represented a “birth dream.” This article is not, therefore, groundbreaking. Rather its purpose is to extend the Freudian interpretation, to point out that meanings carried by the words in the poem may be even richer than previously suggested, and to suggest that multiple themes, covering the range from Eros to Thanatos, coexist: Freud's principle of condensation in unconscious symbolism.
“Kubla Khan” is powerful because it works at many levels—as poetry it is exquisitely crafted in its meter and in the intricate repetition of sets of sound patterns; the imagery is exotic and compelling “on the surface” even without further interpretation; and its deeper symbolic meanings are extraordinarily rich. The poem contains many coexisting layers of symbolic meaning (Freud's principle of condensation), plumbing the breadth and depth of the human psyche and accounting for the poem's great emotional power as it subliminally evokes in the reader primordial images and emotions.
In Freudian thought the unconscious contains the two primordial motives: libido (Eros) and the death wish (Thanatos), both of which reflect a more general tendency toward repetition compulsion—the striving to recreate a preexisting state of the absence of all tension. The unconscious contains as well memories (generally repressed) from early life: birth, the oral and anal stages and their fixations, and the phallic stage with its oedipal longings. Repetition compulsion also applies to these early life memories, as there is a tendency to relive these early life stages.