Helplessness and Omnipotence in the Life and Work of Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac is one of the few writers who reveals his unconscious conflicts almost without masking through the characters of his novels. The writer speaks to the reader through his work, not only revealing his personal history, but also voicing the dreams and fantasies of his contemporary society, which for the most part are unconscious. Reflecting on the fate of the heroes of the works, we make a reference to the life path of their authors. From work to work, from romance to romance, the true Self of a person who speaks with us, as in the case of Balzac, lived in a different era, at a different time. If we remove the artistic techniques, an ordinary person will speak with us - an ordinary person in the sense that he, like his readers, had his own history of development. The preoccupation with the ideas of another life keeps Balzac on a short leash, this “jailer” makes him dance to his tune. The dream of a great fraud, the desire to break free, to loose bonds, accompanies Balzac his whole life. And the more he strives for material well-being and freedom, the more he plunges into debt and dependence - from writing, coffee and women. At the same time, all his aspirations are aimed at finding the meaning of what happened to him “not meeting” with his mother. Warning of shagreen skin that “your life will belong to me” suddenly occurs and as soon as at the borders of the “hole” a ray of hope of “meeting” and a normal life begins to flicker. It means that life will belong to that inner Introject of a cold and demanding mother. The fatal message remains in Balzac's unconscious, and requires a return to a state of helplessness. Balzac's reflections in fictional characters can be seen as a desperate attempt to feed on what was irretrievably lost along with mother's milk that did not reach him. In Balzac’s personal story, milk can hardly be considered collected, but in his work, drop by drop, it is collected and becomes a breeding ground for feeding the characters of its heroes. The study provides biographical facts and thoughts about the fate of the heroes of Balzac’s novels “Louis Lambert”, “Shagreen Skin”, “Facino Canet” and “Madame Firmiani”.