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This Freudian reading of The Fall of the House of Usher understands Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story as a dream analogy of an overly anxious narrator processing his extreme fear of death that is provoked by his repressed but continuously reemerging narcissism. The analysis of the latent meaning of Poe’s dream story shows that the extremely aged Roderick Usher as well as Roderick’s dying sister Madeline are not real characters within the skull-like gothic mansion, but dream manifestations of the narrator’s approaching death. As such, they are projections of the narrator’s psyche inhabiting the House of Usher, the architectural representation of the narrator’s mind. As a consequence, this psychoanalytical reading of Poe’s text expresses the need to understand The Fall of the House of Usher as a story about the narrator’s suffering from a traumatic obsession neurosis becoming a self fulfilling prophecy, and not—as has been believed for so long—about a mentally disturbed Roderick Usher fearing the loss of his sister, his estate, or his sanity.
