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Joseph Conrad was a notoriously tormented writer for whom the creative act was often a punishment severe enough to drive him into paralyzing depressions that delayed the completion of his novels, sometimes for years. By far the most agonizing of these projects was The Rescue, a novel he began in 1898, abandoned a year later, tried unsuccessfully to continue several times over the next two decades, but was only able to resume in 1918 and to complete, after another tortured two-year struggle, in 1920. An explanation for this incapacity, that is powerfully suggested by the novel's evocative title and perhaps unintentionally ironic subtitle (A Romance of the Shallows) has not yet been explored. Using Freud's 1910 essay on the rescue fantasy, "Contributions to the Psychology of Love: A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men," and Emanuel Berman's instructive revision and expansion of the concept in his 2003 American Imago essay, "Ferenczi, Rescue, and Utopia," I argue that a substantial explanation for Conrad's tormented history with The Rescue is ascribable to its quite remarkably faithful treatment of a rescue fantasy with deep and disabling resonance for its author. More specifically, the difficulty was compounded by the novel's dramatization of the soul-crushing conflict between two such fantasies: one in the service of the masculine ideal of unflinching dedication to a heroic purpose, the other promising satisfaction to the equally potent demands of emotional and sexual desire. Features of Conrad's narrative fit so tightly and consistently with the theory as Freud (and Abraham) proposed and as Berman elaborated it that The Rescue offers itself as one of those rare and reinforcing instances wherein the literary text seems to validate the psychoanalytic theory at least as persuasively as the theory "understands" the text.

This article presents a revisionary reading of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Recognizing the power of Freud's meditation on a universal "death-drive" in living organisms, it argues that Freud makes a greater contribution by strengthening the compulsion to repeat to a form of figurative death. We recall that after shattering the presupposition of a universal pleasure principle, Freud demonstrates an equally strong pain-principle. The pain-principle entails a return to an old image in the mind, just as Freud identifies Eros, the transfigured pleasure-principle, with the movement toward something new, "a different individual." The moving backward toward old love in opposition to the moving forward to new love is an inspired narrative application of the Oedipus complex. The repetitive backward movement is a figurative death when the observing other or self encounters a deathlike affect of despair or persecution. Less persuasive because less experience-near is the concept of the death-drive. Freud writes in different voices, and the death-drive speculation is in the mode that privileges scientific speculation over other forms of thought, even as Freud shows a variety of stylistic modes for reaching the truth. Yet it is the mode that observes human interactions and transforms them to figurative narrative that moves most profoundly to the never-fully-knowable-human-unconscious. We discover the hidden motive for repetition as a return to the original rejection or rage that was a form of previous intimacy. The genre that these figurative narratives take is close to literary romance, and death, or the special suffering that Coleridge evocatively termed "life-in-death," is the hidden object of its dark quest.