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Theme Of Dysfunctional Love In Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard

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Dysfunctional Love in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard: A Psychoanalytical Reading
Mahmoud Gaber

Abstract
This paper assumes that the romances in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904) are stories of dysfunctional love, rather than of true love. By a dysfunctional love relationship is meant one that neither emotionally satisfies its participants by bringing them closer to each other, nor is it meant for love as an end in itself. As a result, none of the romances in the play ever ends with the union of its parties or, at least, a promise of it. The reason beyond this dysfunctional sort of love is that the characters suffer from a chronic sense of low self-esteem that results as a psychological core issue from their repressed negative memories. This underrated sense of the self causes the characters to fear intimacy and develop negative concepts of themselves as being guilty, unworthy, and unlovable. Therefore, they get in love relationships for pure psychological reasons: either to act out their past failures in love or to use love as a defence for hiding their low self-esteem. The method of research in this study is the classical psychoanalytical approach to literary criticism with its emphasis on such concepts as repression, core issues, and defences.
Key Words: Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, Dysfunctional Love, Psychoanalytical Criticism, Repression, Low Self-Esteem, Fear of Intimacy

Despite the fact that Anton Chekhov’s last comedy, The Cherry Orchard

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