The Inner Monster: A Freudian Reading of Creation, the Father Figure, and Guilt in Frankenstein (2025)

Abstract

This study examines Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025) movie adaptation within the framework of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach, aiming to demonstrate that narrative is not limited to gotchic horro or a critique of scientific progress, but also constructed as a psychoanalytic tragedy that renders visible the modern subject’s internal fragmentation,processes of repression, and guilt based conflicts. The study is grounded in the assumption the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the nameless Creature can be interpreted not as a confontation between two independent characters, but rather as the fragmented and conflicting dimensions of a single psychic whole. Accordingly, Freud’s structural approach of the psyche, drive theory, and the concept of the “discontents of civilization” are employed as a primary theoretical framework fort he analysis. Designed as a qualitative study using a hermeneutic approach, the research interprets the layers of meaning produced through the film’s narrative structure and cinematic language. The findings show that Victor’s act of “creation” is represented as a narcissistic desire enacted under the tyranny of the pleasure principle and as an Oedipal crime, while the Creature functions as the embodiment of Victor’s repressed primitive and aggressive drives, particularly in relation to return of the repressed and the concept of uncanny. The creature’s desire for recognition and acceptance, transforms into destructive rafe as a result of systematic exclusion, is explained through the inhibition of Eros and the dominance of Thanatos. The mutual pursuit and eventual self-destruction of the two figures are interpreted as a closure in guilt consumes the self as internalized aggression. Consequently, this study repositions Frankenstein through an interdisciplinary reading frames the narrative as a representation of the fragmentation of the modern consciousness along the axes of creation, responsbility, repression and guilt.