This article applies some concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis to Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Oval Portrait". It also in a specific manner tries to make parallels between Poe's own character and his projections onto his tales and poems, in here "The Oval Portrait". The main focus will be the traces of Freud's ideas on the "Life and Death Drives", "Guilt Complex", "Fixation", "Sublimation", "Dream work" and "Ideal Female complex" in this short story. Furthermore, this paper examines the psychological themes, motifs and symbols available in the story. The whole thing happening in the story will be presented as a dream analysis of the narrator. In addition, the Gothic tradition in literature, Dark Romanticism and the challenging effects this genre of writing has on human mind, whether for the writer or the reader of horror stories will be debated. This study wants to conclude how Poe's hard life in childhood was the major cause for him to have a sad, tormenting ,dejected personality for the rest of his life and the reason why he could not find any solace from his relationship with other woman throughout his lifetime. Finally how Allan Poe equates horror, macabre and death with Art and divine in the form of transcendental aestheticism and the way they are psychoanalytically inter-connected.
Keywords: Freudian Psychoanalysis, Complex, Vampirism in Art, Eros and Thanatos, Women, Death, Immortality.
1. Introduction .
Edgar Allan Poe once said "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." This strain in Poe's thinking and philosophical outlook leads us to psychology of his inner personality and is also one of the key techniques he employed in writing most of his stories.