2
gates of the royal family of a distant city, Corinth. As
a young man, however, Oedipus hears the prophecy
as well, thinks that it is in reference to his adoptive
Corinthian parents, and flees. Ultimately, the proph-
ecy comes true as he kills his real father, Laius, in
self-defense and marries Laius’s widow, Jocasta, his
real mother. Jocasta then hangs herself, and Oedipus
blinds himself with the pins from her dress. Obvi-
ously, in this case, grave tragedy resulted from the
child’s abandonment, implying that this fate might
have been better avoided by keeping him close.
Perhaps abandonment appears so frequently
in art and literature because, as some philosophers
and psychologists believe, the fear of abandonment
begins at birth. Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psy-
chiatrist regarded as the father of modern psycho-
logical thought, believed that when we are born,
and thus physically separated from our mothers,
this trauma becomes a central force in our lives. We
must, according to Freud, spend a great deal of our
lives coming to terms with this separation, which we
internalize as an abandonment.
Later psychologists would delve deeper than
Freud into the fear of and effect of abandonment
on our young psyches. In his highly influential
three-volume work Attachment, Separation, and Loss
(1973), the British psychologist John Bowlby dis-
cusses his decades-long studies of children and their
attachment to their caregivers, specifically their
mothers. Bowlby notes that infants seek to find their
mother when she leaves the room as soon as they are
able to crawl. Additionally, the child will follow any
familiar adult in lieu of the mother if she is unavail-
able (200–202). Infants demonstrate distress upon
their mother’s impending departure as soon as they
are old enough to sense the signs that she is leaving,
around six to nine months of age (204). For Bowlby,
the infant is exhibiting the innate fear of abandon-
ment, which produces anxiety. The psychologist Yi
Fu Tuan calls fear of abandonment a “central child-
hood fear” and points to the frequent use of the
motif in fairy tales as a method of playing on that
fear and keeping control of children (Salerno 98). If
this abandonment does happen and it is prolonged,
the anxiety becomes a part of the infant’s, later the
child’s, later the adult’s personality. Yi Fu claims
that adult anxiety disorders can be attributed to
specific child-rearing practices; in particular, he says,
frequent and regular separations, or even frequent
and regular threats of abandonment have huge con-
sequences later in life (Salerno 97).
Modern philosophers have also considered the
fear of abandonment as a central component to
modern consciousness. Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-
century Danish philosopher, defined modern angst
or anxiety as a feeling of looming danger where the
source of the threat is unknown. G. W. F. Hegel, a
German philosopher of the same era, claimed that
the true mark of becoming human is not to desire
but to want to be the object of someone else’s desire.
Combining these theories, then, and remembering
as well Bowlby’s infants, can lead to the theory that
humans innately fear being abandoned and that
as we grow older, we are consumed by a feeling
that we will lose our most prized object: another
human being. In other words, we live as adults with
a constant fear of being abandoned, and if we were
indeed abandoned as children, either actually or
metaphorically, this fear can be the source of debili-
tating anxiety.
Twentieth-century philosophers have taken
these ideas and demonstrated how the detached,
impersonal modern world exacerbates the natural
fear of abandonment. The Industrial Revolution—
the 19th-century shift from rural, manual labor to
automated, technologically advanced work in the
Western world—took control of the future out of
the hands of the family and placed it in the hands
of a stranger. Philosophers such as Theodor Adorno
have theorized that this led to the breakdown of the
family, as the father figure, who perhaps felt aban-
doned himself, abandoned his own family in search
of strong, authoritarian figures outside the family.
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the pri-
mary figure in the school of philosophical thought
known as existentialism, rejected the very idea that
the world is ordered and that human beings can
make sense of it. Thus, he argued, we realize that we
are alone, abandoned in the world.
In literature, we see this crisis of abandonment
in the works of many different writers. In Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, for instance, Victor Fran-
kenstein, the doctor who creates the famous mon-
ster, wants only to intellectualize, to think, never to2 abandonment