SOURCE: Zlotnick-Woldenberg, Carrie. “An Object-Relational Interpretation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice.” American Journal of Psychotherapy 51 (fall 1997): 542-51.

[In the following essay, Zlotnick-Woldenberg applies object-relational theory to Death in Venice.]

Gustave Aschenbach, the protagonist of Thomas Mann's tragic novella, Death in Venice, is a middle-aged acclaimed writer, who seemingly has been leading a rather conventional life. Upon noticing an exotic looking man near a Munich cemetery, he has a sudden impulse to travel. He winds up in Venice, a city with a warmer climate than Munich's, both in the literal and symbolic sense. There he becomes obsessed with Tadzio, a fourteen-year-old boy. Aschenbach follows him everywhere and thinks of little else. When soon thereafter, he learns of a cholera epidemic in Venice, which the authorities have tried to conceal from the tourists, not only does he not leave but he also fails to warn the boy's mother of the danger because he cannot bear to be separated from Tadzio. Aschenbach dies on the day the boy's family is scheduled to leave Venice.

In Freudian terms, the central conflict of the protagonist would be described as his struggle between id and superego. Pushed to achieve as a child, never knowing “the sweet idleness and blithe ‘laissez aller’ that belongs to youth”¹ (p. 9), Aschenbach has spent his life as a writer nurturing and developing his intellect and discipline (there are frequent associations with St. Sebastian, who repudiated desire in favor of self-control), while repressing his passions. These have been sublimated in his writing. In the course of the novella, he decides that he needs a rest from writing, i.e., a temporary suspension of his sublimation. In a complete reversal, he yields to his more primitive impulses, which he is initially able to rationalize. When, for example, his passions are aroused by the man at the cemetery, he claims that a trip would improve his work rather than admitting that his emotions had been stirred. Later, he justifies his lust for Tadzio by elevating him to an object of perfect beauty. Aschenbach's references to Phaedrus serve further to “explain” his “artistic” interest in the boy. However, it is clear in the orgiastic dream that Aschenbach's interest in the boy is not merely a pursuit of artistic form.

Freudians would describe the novella in terms of the conflict between id and superego, as seen in Aschenbach's overt behavior and dreams, and refer to the defenses, e.g., sublimation and intellectualization, as means, to avoid confrontation with what Aschenbach considers his baser self. Object-relations theorists would analyze the problem differently. Their primary focus would be on the way in which Aschenbach, unable to accept ambivalence, sees the world in terms of polar opposites, using splitting as his primary defense mechanism, both intrapsychically and in relation to others. Intrapsychically, the split is between the passionate, artistic self—his mother's inheritance, which he denies—and the disciplined, intellectual, moralistic self—his father's inheritance, which he accepts. The two parts of himself do not communicate with one another; they are, like Italy and Germany, the two settings in the novella, cultural opposites that cannot coexist. In his interpersonal relationships, he also tends toward polarization, demonizing or idealizing others but not relating to them as integrated wholes. In short, Aschenbach does not experience ambivalence interpersonally or intrapsychically, and, as Ogden² might explain, in place of temporal contiguity there is a constant creation and recreation of reality.

In his portrait of Aschenbach, Mann creates a character who lives a life of the mind, relegating much ego to his inner world and leaving little, if any, available for relationships with others. In fact, it is clear that Aschenbach is totally isolated and always has been. We learn that “by medical advice he was kept from school and educated at home. He had grown up solitary, without comradeship” (p. 9). Moreover, only a surprisingly brief mention reveals that he married young, was soon widowed, and had a daughter, now married. In an attempt to underscore what is missing from Aschenbach's life, Mann pointedly writes, “A son he never had” (p. 14). There is no mention of friends or even colleagues or acquaintances but only of “fellow-citizens” who honor him for his “intellectual eminence” (p. 14). We are told that Aschenbach travelled from place to place before settling in Munich, suggesting a lack of rootedness and attachment to others. Finally, we learn that he was dreading summer in the country, when he would be “alone with the maid who prepared his food and the man who served him” (p. 7). This portrait of Aschenbach matches the description of the schizoid character as enunciated by Fairbairn³ and Guntrip.⁴

That Aschenbach has trouble relating to others can be understood as conflict with what Mahler calls “separation-individuation” or dependency and autonomy. There is textual evidence suggesting that Aschenbach's early life was dominated by his parents' need for his success; hence his fear of merging or being swallowed up by the other. He has learned to relate to others from a safe distance in an effort to maintain his separateness. Yet this is not working for him at the moment. On some level he yearns for human contact and intimacy but is unable to get close to people. It is out of neediness that he reaches out to Tadzio, but that “relationship” exists only in fantasy, and it is only in his “fearful dream” (p. 65) that he experiences a loosening of the rigid boundaries he has maintained between himself and others. Instead of alleviating his loneliness, however, this dream of merging with others in an orgy leaves him feeling “ravaged” (p. 65) and degraded.

One might speculate, drawing on Fairbairnian theory, that because Aschenbach has experienced unsatisfactory object relations, he ultimately pours all his energies into Tadzio and resorts to an obsessional preoccupation with him in the absence of a real relationship. This is in contrast to the Freudian view that would explain the obsession as a failure to contain the instincts. Furthermore, unlike classical Freudians, who maintain that instincts are in constant search for objects to which they can attach themselves in order to reduce tension, object-relations theorists, acknowledging the primacy of objects, would recognize Tadzio as the object arousing Aschenbach's instinct. This is seen also in Aschenbach's encounter with the exotic-looking man in the Munich cemetery, who also arouses his instinct, generating a fantasy about a journey to a primitive place. The antithesis of the graveyard, it is a place seething with life and passion and inhabited by a “crouching tiger” (p. 6), a representation of Aschenbach's more primitive self.

Splitting is a defense frequently employed by infants, who are in what Klein refers to as the paranoid/schizoid position, but is continued into adulthood among those whose early object relations are particularly problematic. This defense is seen in Aschenbach's demonization of the man in the Munich cemetery, the gondolier, and the street performer in Venice—all of whom, in their association with the devil and with death, foreshadow Aschenbach's moral decline and ultimate death—and in his idealization of Tadzio. In contrast to these demonic figures, Aschenbach calls Tadzio's beauty a “perfect beauty,” claiming that his “face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture” and that his expression was one “of pure and godlike serenity” (p. 25). Later, Aschenbach refers to Tadzio as his “idol” (p. 51) and as a “masterpiece from nature's own hand” (p. 31). Idealized in Kleinian terms (but viewed as an “exciting object” by Fairbairn), the boy is repeatedly likened to figures of beautiful and innocent youths from Greek mythology, including Eros, Hermes, Hyacinthus, and Narcissus.

Aschenbach cannot accept any flaw in Tadzio and, in order to maintain his idealized view of the boy, distorts reality. For example, when the boy's brow darkens and his features are “distorted … in a spasm of angry disgust” (p. 30) as he frowns on the simple Russian family on the beach, Aschenbach takes this demonstration of snobbishness as proof of Tadzio's superiority and confirmation of his “godlike” (p. 31) status. He further idealizes Tadzio by imagining him to be a privileged and pampered child, favored over his dull, nunlike sisters.

As suggested earlier, the fact that Aschenbach is unable to integrate contradictory aspects of others, as well as of himself, is evidence that he is functioning in what Klein would call the paranoid/schizoid position. In order to understand why he maintains such a position at this stage of his life, it might be fruitful to speculate briefly on the protagonist's early family history.

It can be assumed that Aschenbach's parents' need to have their son succeed took precedence over their interest in his needs. The text explicitly states that “he was pushed on every side to achievement” (p. 9), suggesting that, if their childrearing patterns were consistent, even as an infant he was not valued and protected as an individual in his own right. It would seem that Aschenbach's mother, despite her “artistic” heritage (she was the daughter of a Bohemian musical conductor), allowed his father, whose “forbears had all been officers, judges, departmental functionaries—men who had lived their strict, decent, sparing lives in the service of king and state” (p. 8)—to determine how their child was raised. It is not farfetched to posit that the strict discipline characterizing his upbringing might have fed into the infant's experience of the “bad” mother. That she may have withheld the breast or that he experienced her as destructive is suggested in the orgiastic dream, where Aschenbach, instead of gently sucking the nurturing milk of his mother, licks blood in a wild frenzy (p. 65).

There are differences in the views of Klein and Fairbairn regarding the degree to which the infant's experience is an accurate reflection of the mother's behavior or a product of his projections. As Skolnick⁵ explains, Fairbairn would argue that the infant's earliest knowledge of the world is through the introjection of the actual “bad” mother, while Klein would claim that the infant's earliest knowledge of the world is via the projection of his own aggression. For Fairbairn, then, the “bad” mother is not a product of the infant's fantasies and projections but a product of something very real in his world: a mother who is causing him not physical but emotional frustration. The infant, faced with an impossible situation, splits his mother, taking in (reintrojecting) the “bad” mother so that he can see the “external” mother as good. In this scenario, as Greenberg and Mitchell⁶ explain “the turn inward, [and] the establishment of internal object relations … are substitutive replacements for what is missing in actual relations with the parents. Thus … internal object relations are considered to be essentially masochistic and defensive, rather than the underlying foundation and resource that Klein and Winnicott take them to be” (p. 224).

Klein (and Winnicott) would not be so inclined to place all of the blame on the mother, believing that the child splits because of innate aggression and that “the inner world of ‘idiosyncratic fantasy’ is primary and the external world of ‘real others’ is secondary” (p. 222). Klein would argue that some infants are born with an unusually strong aggressive drive, which may account for the fact that the cycle of splitting, projection, introjection, and reintrojection, characteristic of the paranoid/schizoid position, pervades their adult life. Still, she would concede that had the mother been “good enough,” i.e., less concerned with her own needs and more concerned with those of her child, her responsiveness, nurturing, and love over time would likely have resulted in the infant's introjecting more of the good mother. This would have allowed him to reach the depressive position, characterized by the ability to integrate good and bad and mourning over the loss of his idealized object, ultimately leading to more satisfying relations with others.

In seeking to understand Aschenbach's object relations as an adult, Ogden might argue that his mother had failed him in a different way. He would explain his splitting behavior as an adult in terms of her failure in projective identification. Had she been able to serve as what Bion calls a “container” for the child's overwhelming and unbearable feelings, taking them in, containing them, digesting them, and finally giving them back in a more bearable form via projective identification, the child would not have continued his splitting behavior into adulthood.

It would seem that Aschenbach, who has not emerged from the paranoid/schizoid position, has internalized a relational pattern established in infancy that is exhibited in his failed attempt to have Tadzio, an unlikely candidate for the job, meet his needs and do what his mother should have done years ago. Like Aschenbach's parents, who were too preoccupied with their own interests to meet their son's needs, Tadzio, who is, after all, only a child with his own needs, also fails to do so. In fact, Aschenbach cannot even approach the boy, nor can he speak to him, and one way or another, he cannot stay with him for long, since the boy will either leave Venice or die.

Although Aschenbach's effort to use Tadzio as the “container” his mother should have been years ago is doomed, he persists in this course of action, unconsciously wishing that the boy will “contain” and not be destroyed by the lustful impulses Aschenbach finds unbearable. Toward this end, he projects his own seductiveness onto Tadzio. Aschenbach imagines, for example, that “the lad would cast a glance, that might be slow and cautious, or might be sudden and swift, as though to take him by surprise, to the place where his lover sat” (p. 58). On another occasion, he imagines that the boy deliberately parades in front of him so “unnecessarily close as almost to graze his table or chair” (p. 49) and that he sees “his lover” following him and does not “betray” him (p. 69). In the final scene, he describes Tadzio as posing seductively on the shore and beckoning to him (p. 73). In each instance it is doubtful that the behavior attributed to Tadzio by Aschenbach accurately represents the boy's actions.

Aschenbach's efforts to use Tadzio as a container suggest an identification of the boy with Aschenbach's mother. There are, moreover, a number of recurrent images that buttress the identification between the two, the most obvious ones being the boy's red breast knot, associated with the mother's breasts, and the overripe strawberries, representing her nipples. (That they are overripe suggests that they were withheld when most needed. If given at the right time, when ripe, they would have been nourishing and sustaining. Now that they are “dead-ripe” [p. 32], these berries are dangerous, and it is as a result of eating them that Aschenbach contracts cholera.) The boy, moreover, as an artistic object of perfection with slightly effeminate traits, represents Aschenbach's mother's heritage, and it might be argued that in his pursuit of Tadzio, Aschenbach seeks to reclaim the oedipal mother, who earlier had been renounced in favor of identification with the father. Later, when he fails in his attempt to claim her through his relationship with Tadzio, he seeks to destroy her, which is once again demonstrated through his actions toward the youth.

Another issue salient to a discussion of object relations is the association of love with destructiveness. Guntrip explains that, according to Fairbairn, “… love made hungry is the schizoid problem and it rouses the terrible fear that one's love has become so devouring and incorporative that love itself has become destructive” (p. 24). This connection between love and destruction is evident in Aschenbach's vivid dream. In this orgiastic scene depicting Aschenbach's phallic worship of Tadzio, lovemaking is associated with “the odor of wound, uncleanliness, and disease” (p. 66). Similarly, the strawberries, an image evoking not only the nipples of the breast but also the penis, are contaminated, even deadly, and love, disease, and death are inevitably linked together in Aschenbach's pursuit of Tadzio in a plague-ridden city. Clearly, Aschenbach is putting Tadzio at risk, first by eliciting a sexual interest that is far from appropriate but, more importantly, by withholding information from Tadzio's mother regarding the cholera epidemic so that the boy will remain in Venice. It is even suggested, through a remarkable similarity between the language describing Aschenbach's fantasy in Munich (p. 6) and a later discussion of the origins of the cholera epidemic (p. 62), that Aschenbach is—at least in a symbolic sense—himself responsible for bringing the epidemic to Venice. Throughout the novella parallels are drawn between his moral “sickness” and the physical illness that permeates the city.

An interesting idea to consider in this regard is Klein's view, as articulated by Guntrip, that the depressive position is the stage at which moral feeling develops, with the paranoid/schizoid position being premoral and allowing for no concern for the well-being of others (p. 57).

The association between love and destructiveness has been explained by Skolnick as rooted in the fact that as the child incorporates the “badness” of the mother, taking it inside of himself because it is less threatening that way, he identifies with that badness and feels that his love is dangerous to the other, thus curtailing, if not eliminating, interpersonal relationships. Destructiveness is, moreover, a major component of envy which, according to Klein, is particularly operative in the paranoid/schizoid position. Aschenbach's envy is increasingly evident as the story unfolds. From early on, he seems to take delight in Tadzio's decaying teeth, which he sees as an indication that the boy will not live long. Later, “compassion struggled with the reckless exultation of his heart” when he notices Tadzio's habit of “drawing himself up and taking a deep sighing breath,” from which he concludes that the “sickly” boy “will never live to grow up” (p. 61). This envy can be understood in view of the fact that Aschenbach has devoted his life to the creation of beauty, neglecting his emotional needs and sacrificing his life for art, while Tadzio is the possessor and embodiment of such beauty, the creation of which has required no work and no dedication on his part. Aschenbach becomes aware, moreover, that while he can describe beauty, he, unlike Tadzio, cannot be beauty.

It is not surprising that Aschenbach experiences guilt and shame. He is ashamed of his “exotic excesses of feeling” and imagines how harshly his forbears, with their “stern self-command and decent manliness” (p. 55), would have judged him. He is also appalled at his morally corrupt behavior, which prevents him from warning Tadzio's mother about the epidemic and throughout the novella is likened to the depraved actions of the Venetians, who for their personal gains put tourists' lives at risk. That he perceives himself as monstrous and uncivilized, both because of his lust and his failure to warn Tadzio's mother, can be seen in the dream sequence that occurs towards the end of the novella in which he devours raw flesh and licks blood, seeing himself as a secret murderer (p. 65).

It may be argued that Aschenbach has several things to gain from Tadzio's death, one of which is the guarantee that his idol will never fall from grace, the other being that it fulfills his own self-destructive tendencies, as well as unleashing his anger toward his mother. If Tadzio is a projection of one side of Aschenbach (the artistic/passionate side), then in putting Tadzio in danger, he risks annihilating that part of himself, which on some level he has been trying to do all along. Feeling as he does about those qualities he has projected onto, and idealized in, the boy, an idealization seen by Klein, although not by Winnicott and Kohut, as a defense against aggression, it is no wonder that a part of him wishes to destroy the embodiment of those qualities. The suicidal impulse and the identification between Aschenbach and the boy can also be seen in their names, Aschenbach and Tadzio. Both suggest death, Aschenbach through its association with ashes, and Tadzio, the first syllable of which is strikingly like “Tod,” the German word for death.

As suggested earlier, the sickness and death that pervade the city are emblematic of Aschenbach's own sickness (physical and mental) and ultimate death, which are rooted in his inability to integrate whole objects. What Mann seems to be saying is not so different from what object-relations theorists have posited: that to achieve mental health it is essential to relate to whole objects, not parts, neither idealizing nor demonizing them. This must operate not only on an interpersonal level but also on an intrapsychic level, with individuals accepting and owning the contradictory parts of themselves. Focusing specifically on the plight of the artist, Mann is insistent that it is necessary for him to achieve integration between the passionate, primitive impulses and disciplined restraint. As seen in Aschenbach, who begins by rejecting the passionate side of himself in favor of discipline and intellect and ends by embracing the passionate, primitive self, totally disregarding moral restraint and discipline, either extreme is destructive. In fact, as Ritter⁷ explains, this sequence is inevitable: “One extreme leads inevitably to its opposite: from asceticism to debauchery, denial to excess, anorexia to bulimia” (p. 87).

A positive outcome for Aschenbach, according to the object-relations theorists, could have come about through changing his perception of, and relationship to, others. According to Fairbairn, such a person would benefit tremendously from a new relational experience in therapy, which would provide him the opportunity to move into the depressive position, a far more adaptive and less regressed position than the one Aschenbach is in. This is different from the way in which Klein, who is more in agreement with Freudians on this issue, would describe a positive outcome. For her, successful treatment would necessitate the interpretation of drives by the analyst. For classical Freudians, a positive outcome would come about from Aschenbach's relinquishing or at least neutralizing his drives. This is ironic, considering that relinquishing his passion is precisely what Aschenbach has tried to do for most of his life and that this has led to his problems, not resolved them.

A further irony is apparent when one considers the relationship between the author and his protagonist: while splitting is destructive to Aschenbach, it might be construed as having a different outcome for Mann, who appears to be separating parts of his ego from the rest of himself and projecting onto Aschenbach his own needs, conflicts, fears, and hopes. After all, when he first published the novella in 1912, Mann was an aspiring author, hoping one day to achieve Aschenbach's acclaim and perhaps thinking of his own mortality. It is known, moreover, that Mann himself struggled with his own homosexual impulses, as well as with the conflicting elements within the artist, a topic he explored in many of his works. But it would appear that Mann, unlike Aschenbach, managed in his own life to maintain a better balance between the two key components of art (passion and discipline) than did his doomed protagonist. Such phenomena as splitting and projection may be commonplace and perhaps even necessary in the creation of art, at least art which is autobiographical, but their consequences are shown by Mann to be far more destructive when they occur in the “real” life of his fictional character, Gustave Aschenbach.

SUMMARY

The protagonist of Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice is examined in terms of object-relational theory. Splitting, his primary defense mechanism, which is employed both intrapsychically and interpersonally, is discussed at length. Intrapsychically, there is no communication between the artist's primitive impulses, which he consciously denies, and his disciplined, moralistic views, which he appears to embrace. On an interpersonal level, he idealizes or demonizes others, rarely seeing them as integrated wholes, which leads to his social isolation and loneliness. In Kleinian terms, he is functioning in the paranoid/schizoid position. That he is unable, even in middle-age, to move on to the more integrated and mature depressive position can be attributed to his family history, which is discussed at length in this paper, as is his obsession with Tadzio, a young boy who becomes the object of his idealization and the recipient of his projective identifications. Distinctions are made not only between the differential interpretations of classical Freudians and object-relational theorists but also among object-relational theorists themselves, including Klein, Fairbairn, and Ogden. Finally, suggestions are made regarding treatment that might have prevented the tragic decline and death of the protagonist.

Notes

1. Mann, T. (1989). “Death in Venice.” In H. T. Lowe-Porter (Trans.) Death in Venice and seven other stories. New York: Random House, pp. 3-73.

2. Ogden, T. (1986). The matrix of the mind: Object relations and the psychoanalytic dialogue. Hillsdale, NJ: Jason Aronson.

3. Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic studies of the personality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

4. Guntrip, H. (1958). Schizoid phenomena, object relations and the self. New York: International Universities Press.

5. Skolnick, N. J. (1996). “The Good, the Bad, and the Ambivalent: Fairbairn's difficulty accounting for the good object in the endopsychic structure.” Paper presented at the Fairbairn Conference. New York Academy of Medicine (available from Carrie Zlotnick-Woldenberg).

6. Greenberg, J., & Mitchell, S. A. (1983). Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

7. Ritter, N. (1992). “Death in Venice and the Tradition of European Decadence.” In J. Berlin (Ed.), Approaches to teaching Mann's Death in Venice and other short fiction. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, pp. 86-92.