The Lost Phoebe is a work by Theodor Dreiser that narrates a life of a man (Henry)

who cannot bear the fact that his wife (Phoebe) has died. The id of Henry seeks pleasure by
demanded him to be with Phoebe all the time. The passage once stated that “[p]erhaps she
would stay with him most of the time. At least during the night. That would make him less
lonely.”. However, in this case, Henry could not afford the fact that Phoebe is gone forever.

Henry’s super-ego realized that Phoebe is already dead, “he tried to interest himself in
farming to keep himself busy.”. It can be concluded that Henry once realized that he would go
through life without Phoebe. His ego pretends that Phoebe just went somewhere is empowered
by the past that stored in his unconscious mind, “‘I’ll leave you I’ll get up and walk out of here
one day.”. By this passage, Phoebe’s caution that day gave an impact to Henry’s psyche caused
him to worry about his future if she ever left. Loneliness and the fear of losing are the main
reasons of Henry’s self-defense mechanism.

The id of Henry’s could not satisfy by only “… thinking of Phoebe and the years they
had been young together.” so, he started to manage the anxiety by creating a denial self-defense
mechanism and expect for Phoebe’s return. In this case, Henry’s denial caused him a
personality disorder which known as hallucination. “He watched her until a breath of wind
blew the mist away.”, the phrase the mist refers to the figure of Phoebe. However, this
represents that Phoebe’s death bring a great suffer to Henry. “‘Why no, Henry, I haven’t seen
her,’ or ‘[n]o, Henry, she hasn’t been here today,’”. The passage reveals that society allowed
his hallucination and made it developed severely. Furthermore, the tendency of society that
pretends to support his hallucination and refused “… to send him to the country hospital,” made
his mind out of control gradually, “[t]he longer he walked in this manner the deeper his strange
hallucination became.”.

In this story, the super-ego of Henry was driven away by the action of ego that lead his
id into Thanatos. The phrase dementia refers to Henry’s actions which convinced by society
that Phoebe was still alive. “‘I surely thought that I saw her.’, ‘Dead? Not Phoebe! She left me
early this morning while I was sleeping, …’”. In this case, the urge of id has got him irrational.
Moreover, the event that once frightened him held great influence to the reaction Phoebe’s
death. Meanwhile, Henry is fully controlled by his id that desired to find Phoebe and “[o]nly
his hallucination that kept him going.”. In addition, the statement that “… his breath was gone,
his mind quite gone when he came to the edge of the cliff,” is the sign of Henry’s id that gives
him a dissolution; a fundamental tendency for life to seek the perfect equilibrium of entropic
non-activity in other words, a death-instinct (Freud, 1910).