The return of the unreachable object of desire. A reading of the short story “The Altar of the Dead” by Henry James

Abstract

Authors like Freud and Lacan often recurred to fiction in order to illustrate psychopathological structures. Starting from a psychoanalytical perspective, this paper focuses on the main character of the short story ‘The Altar of the Dead’ by Henry James. We argue that the different strategies he displays during his life, as described by the author, are in fact a way to avoid confronting the object of desire and suggest an obsessional structure. For the obsessional subject, all that matters is to assure the object’s subsistence while making it untouchable. Desire is thus conceived as impossible, and this is one of the ways of granting the ex-sistence of the object that arouses it. The idealization of death, the inhibition of sensual love and the ritualization of his existence are the symptoms of a personal struggle that will prove to be absolutely unsolvable.