H. P. Lovecraft

That horror stories are externalized psychology is a commonplace of literary criticism, but readings based on sex and aggression (the two themes literary critics have tended to pick up from Freudian psychology) do not quite fit H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself warns readers away from interpretations of his work based on the fear of retribution for specific acts or impulses. His horrors are (as he says again and again) “cosmic”; he declares the worst human fears to be displacement in space and time (as in “The Shadow Out of Time”); and in a letter quoted on p. 388 of L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft: a Biography (Doubleday, New York, 1975) he speaks of “the maddening rigidity of cosmic law,” and his insistence on creating a non-fantastic and materialistic fiction world – i.e. science fiction – all imply a concern with the conditions of being, not with particular acts or situations. When the conditions of existence are themselves fearful, when such basic ontological categories as space and time break down (as does the geometry of space in so many stories, for example “The Call of Cthulhu”), we are dealing with what the psychiatrist R. D. Laing calls ontological insecurity (The Divided Self, Penguin Books, 1965, Chapter 3). If one fears that one doesn't exist securely, or that one is made of “bad stuff,” any contact with another becomes potentially catastrophic.

Everyone shares, to some degree, doubts about the psychological solidity or reliability of the self and the possibly devastating effects of others on that self. Lovecraft, although certainly not psychotic, did, according to de Camp, have a lifelong sense of marked isolation from others, an intense emotional dependency on things and not people, and the kind of overpossessive bringing up which makes it reasonable to expect that such issues would appear in his work. They do – strongly enough to make him an innovator in weird fiction – for they take precedence over either the beastliness of aggression (embodied, for example, in werewolves) or the lethal possibilities of sexual abandon (e.g. the figure of the vampire), both of which themes figured largely in nineteenth-century supernatural fiction. Sex and aggression presuppose a self existing securely enough to have desires and a relatively non-threatening (or at least limited) Other toward whom such desires can be directed.