A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Crisis of Identity in Fantastic Stories: A Case Study on Le Horla by Guy de Maupassant

One of the fields of humanities which can interact with literature, is psychoanalysis which takes literature to explain its theories, especially fantastic works because of their fluctuation between reality and illusions. The synchronic flourishing of the fantastic and psychoanalysis and their common concepts, increases the richness of analysis. Maupassant, the French writer renowne for his fantastic stories and interest in psychoanalysis, opens the way, especially with a short story called Le Horla, fora comprehensive psychoanalytic analysis. For this reason, this article tries to examine the identity crisis of the main charachter of Le Horla from a psychoanalytic perspective, observing the appearance of fantastic factors, explaining the role of the Umheimliche and the double in this crisis, and finally studing the possibility of reconstructing identity.