Freud's impact on Bronte's Wuthering Heights and The Vexations of the Thinker by Giorgio de ChiricoThe 1920 publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle formalized a significant change in Sigmund Freud's theory of the sexual drive: his The original hypothesis distinguished ego instincts from sexual instincts. Subsequent psychoanalytic research forces him to refine this configuration:. . . psychoanalysis has observed the regularity with which the libido is withdrawn from the object and directed onto the ego (process of introversion); and, studying the libidinal development of children in its early stages, he came to the conclusion that the ego is the true and original reservoir of libido and that only from this reservoir does libido extend to objects. [1]Freud recognizes the narcissistic nature of the sexual instinct but clings to a dual (read: non-Jungian) model for the instinctual drive. He “…describes the opposition as not between ego instincts and sexual instincts, but between life instincts and death instincts” (Freud 64). Freud sees the natural purpose of the sexual drive as reproduction - life - and the natural purpose of the ego as death. This new polarity leads Freud to explore the so-called "perversions", sadism and masochism, as they characterize the death instinct. It may seem strange to equate sadism with narcissism considering that a sadist only receives pleasure from the pain of another. "[But] it is not plausible," Freud asks, "to suppose that this sadism is in reality a death drive which, under the influence of the narcissistic ego, has been distanced from the ego and consequently has emerged only in to the ego? He goes on to explain that... halfway through the card... Irico builds a wall of narcissism to trap his solitary figure. This fact leads me to draw a parallel between the figure in de Chirico's painting and Charlotte Brontë's Heathcliff. Both suffer needlessly. It would probably be better for both of them to die. But their pain keeps them going even as it slowly kills them. Life is useful, death is useful. . . life. Yes, we are moving slowly towards death, but every step is brisk. Works Cited[1] Sigmund Freud. Beyond the pleasure principle. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961 (62). Cited below in parentheses.[2] During the oral phase of libido organization, the act of gaining erotic dominance over an object coincides with the destruction of that object (Freud 65).[3] Charlotte Bronte. Wuthering Heights. New York: TOR Books, 1989 (177). Mentioned below in parentheses.