Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- 10 Trauma and war memory
- 11 The time–mind of the twenties
- 12 Modern life: fiction and satire
- 13 Modernist poetry and poetics
- 14 Modernity and myth
- 15 Psychoanalysis and literature
- 16 Biography and autobiography
- 17 ‘Speed, violence, women, America’: popular fictions
- 18 Theatre and drama between the wars
- 19 Literature and cinema
- 20 The thirties: politics, authority, perspective
- 21 Literary criticism and cultural politics
- 22 Surrealism in England
- 23 World War II: contested Europe
- 24 World War II: the city in ruins
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
15 - Psychoanalysis and literature
from PART THREE - MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- 10 Trauma and war memory
- 11 The time–mind of the twenties
- 12 Modern life: fiction and satire
- 13 Modernist poetry and poetics
- 14 Modernity and myth
- 15 Psychoanalysis and literature
- 16 Biography and autobiography
- 17 ‘Speed, violence, women, America’: popular fictions
- 18 Theatre and drama between the wars
- 19 Literature and cinema
- 20 The thirties: politics, authority, perspective
- 21 Literary criticism and cultural politics
- 22 Surrealism in England
- 23 World War II: contested Europe
- 24 World War II: the city in ruins
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
In January 1939, Sigmund Freud presented Virginia Woolf with a narcissus. The gift, we can suppose, was a token of appreciation from the analyst to his English publishers. Thanks to the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, Freud’s writings not only received a British audience, but were also introduced into the heart of the Bloomsbury enterprise. Perhaps unconsciously (or perhaps not) Freud’s choice of a narcissus was particularly apposite for a writer who so often put the self at the centre of her work. Narcissus, the self-centred image-lover, speaks eloquently to certain strands of literary Modernism and to the psychoanalytic project. Both put the self at the centre of their enquiries, and both try to find a new language to describe that self or, to be more precise, try to render what is most obscure about that self newly intelligible. Indeed, one way to think about the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature in this period is as a joint venture in forging a new language for the unconscious. From the science of the psyche and the art of the modern writer emerges a distinctly modern materialism for the dreamworld. But, and this is a paradox that lies at the heart of both psychoanalysis and literary Modernism, the self that both return to endlessly in this endeavour is not, as it were, in full possession of itself, but is rather characterised by a recognition of the limits of its own self-knowledge. What the Modernist poet and the free-associating patient both do, the psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips has argued, is inject ‘something irreducibly enigmatic into the culture, something no one quite knows what to do with’.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature , pp. 269 - 285Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005