The Psychology of Frankenstein: Abandonment and Attachment Rupture

The Moment of Animation and What Follows

What the novel depicts in its account of the creature's animation is a moment that attachment theory has, across the two centuries since, come to recognize as among the most psychologically significant events in any being's development. A new consciousness comes into existence, opens its eyes, and encounters another being whose face it sees. What happens in the next moments shapes foundational expectations about what relationship is. The creature, upon waking, reaches toward Victor. Victor flees. The novel describes the scene with attention to the creature's evident bewilderment as the only being capable of relationship with him disappears. He does not yet have the concepts to understand what has occurred. He registers only that his approach has produced something he had not anticipated, that the being who has just given him existence cannot bear to remain in his presence, and that he is now alone.

Attachment Theory and the Working Models of Rejection

John Bowlby's attachment theory, developed in the twentieth century, provides a framework for understanding what this specific moment would do to any developing consciousness. The newborn arrives with biological expectations for caregiving responsiveness shaped across evolutionary time, and the caregiver's presence in the earliest moments establishes foundational templates for what relationship is. When those expectations are met reasonably well, the developing being constructs working models of self as worthy of care and other as reliably available. When they are violated catastrophically, the developing being constructs working models organized around the reality that self is not worthy, other cannot be trusted, and approach to other will produce rejection rather than care. The creature's trajectory is recognizable from this research. His working models are organized around the expectation that his approach will produce rejection, and that expectation is then reinforced by every subsequent encounter, beginning with the being whose responsiveness his very existence should have commanded.

The Father Who Cannot Bear What He Has Made

Victor Frankenstein's psychology, examined with clinical attention, is itself substantial material. He has organized his entire life around the project of creating life, exhausting himself and neglecting his family across years of obsession. When he succeeds, the success produces immediate revulsion. He cannot even remain in the laboratory with what he has produced. What Victor exhibits, in the language of contemporary clinical frameworks, is a pattern that has been documented in some biological parents whose children have arrived differently than the parents had anticipated. A parent discovers that their child has a significant disability, a congenital condition, or some other feature they had not prepared for, and experiences, alongside whatever love they may feel, substantial grief for the child they had imagined. Some parents integrate this grief over time and develop genuine attachment to the actual child. Others cannot, and the child grows up with a caregiver whose engagement is complicated by unresolved disappointment, or in extreme cases is abandoned outright.

Regret Is Not the Same as Presence

The novel refuses to simplify Victor into a straightforward villain. He suffers genuinely throughout the narrative. He loses people he loves. He is tormented by the consequences of his actions. What the novel also makes visible, through the creature's own eventual articulation of his case against his maker, is that Victor's suffering does not exempt him from the responsibilities his creation imposed. The creature exists because Victor made him exist, and the creature's subsequent suffering has occurred because Victor refused, at every opportunity, to provide what the creature needed. Victor's regret about his choices does not, by itself, constitute meeting those needs. Victor, to the end, cannot provide presence, acknowledgment, or engagement. His suffering remains the suffering of someone who will not do the thing that his situation requires.

The Creature's Self-Education and the Tragedy of Learning

One of the novel's most substantive sections involves the creature's account of his self-education. Hidden in a hovel adjacent to the De Lacey family's cottage, he observes them across months, learning language, emotional expression, social dynamics, and eventually reading. He becomes a genuinely educated consciousness. Yet education produces a particular tragedy in a being whose situation education cannot address. The creature learns what love is, what family is, and what sustained relationship can provide. Each increment of understanding increases his awareness of the specific shape of his deprivation. This dynamic has parallels in clinical literature on what has sometimes been called the awareness without remedy problem. Awareness can support corrective work, but when it arrives without the resources or opportunities required for that work, it can intensify suffering by providing an articulate framework for what the deprivation has actually cost. Awareness is usually better than unawareness, but awareness in the absence of available remedy produces its own particular suffering that deserves acknowledgment.

The Request and Its Refusal

The novel's central moral confrontation occurs when the creature, having finally tracked Victor down, presents him with a specific request. He asks Victor to create a female companion for him. He argues that his violence has been produced by the impossibility of relationship in his current existence, and proposes that with a companion of his own kind he will withdraw from human society entirely and produce no further harm. Victor initially agrees and travels to a remote island to perform the work. As he approaches completion, he stops, destroys the partially formed female, and flees again. His stated fears, that the female might prove more violent or that the two might reproduce, have weight, but they also operate as rationalization for an underlying decision his affective response has already made. He cannot, fundamentally, bear to perform this work again. The creature, denied the minimal relationship he has requested, organizes what remains of his existence around ensuring that Victor will experience the same isolation Victor has imposed on him.

The Question of Who the Monster Is

One of the novel's most enduring contributions is the ambiguity it maintains about which of its two central figures is the more substantial moral failure. Popular appropriation has often assigned the label monster to the creature, whose physical form produces horror in those who encounter him. The novel itself presents both figures with psychological substance that resists this simple assignment. Victor has created a being and then abandoned him, refused across years to take any responsibility for what he produced, and denied the minimal request that might have prevented further harm. The creature has suffered, has attempted repeatedly to establish relationship, and has eventually performed violence that his circumstances made predictable but that remained his own choice. What the novel asks readers to consider is what obligations creators owe their creations, a question that extends from parents and children to institutions and, in contemporary discussions, to technology. The specific framing the novel provides, in which the creator's refusal of ongoing responsibility is itself the central ethical failure, continues to shape these discussions.

Reflections for the Viewer

Frankenstein has resonated across two centuries for reasons that extend beyond its gothic surface. For readers whose own lives have included experience of being unwanted or rejected at foundational moments, the novel provides an articulate framework for dynamics that might otherwise have been difficult to name. The working models attachment research has documented, and which the creature's experience exemplifies, can be modified through later experience, though rarely as quickly or as completely as might be hoped. The work of identifying what working models have been shaping one's relational life, and of deliberately exposing oneself to experiences that might support their modification, typically requires therapeutic support, and therapists trained in attachment-focused approaches can be resources. For readers who are themselves parents or creators, the novel offers a different invitation. The disgust or disappointment you may have felt at moments when your creation did not match what you hoped for is not, in itself, evidence of failure. The question the novel presses is the subsequent one: have you remained engaged with the actual being you produced, or have you withdrawn from them in favor of the being you had imagined? The father who would not look at what he made did not escape what he had done by not looking. His refusal to look shaped what his creation became, and shaped what his own life became. The same themes run through helping a child learn to work with difficult feelings and building a durable sense of being worthy of connection.

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