In Katherine Mansfield's short story ‘Psychology’ (1920), the protagonists reflect ruefully on the fact that psychology is invading the territory of literature and speculate that ‘the young writers of today – are trying simply to jump the psycho-analyst's claim.’ For the (unnamed) female speaker this is a dismal prospect, as it was for Mansfield, who complained to John Middleton Murry that ‘cheap psycho analysis’ was no substitute for the artist's vision, although she went on to observe in the next breath that ‘with an artist – one has to allow – oh tremendously for the subconscious element in his work.’ These contradictory comments reflect the ambivalence of Mansfield's engagement with psychology. While deploring fiction that turns ‘Life into a case’, she uses the language of psychology to explain her self-understanding as an artist, and there is no doubt that the central concerns of her fiction resonate powerfully with the landscape opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis. In consequence, an extensive body of criticism has grown up which draws on insights from these disciplines to discuss Mansfield's fiction. Psychoanalytic theory predominates, as we would expect, given the pervasiveness of Freudian theory in modernist culture, and with the exception of Meghan Hammond's illuminating discussion of Mansfield and empathy, there has been relatively little examination of the connections between her writing and other branches of twentieth-century psychology. This article aims to redress the balance by assessing the relationship between Mansfield and vitalist psychology as represented by William James and Henri Bergson. It suggests that this is a connection which is ripe for reconsideration in light of the resurgence of interest in vitalism: for example, in Elizabeth Grosz's recent re-evaluation of Bergson's work.

James and Bergson were the most significant vitalist thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their ideas were widely disseminated in intellectual culture. James's Principles of Psychology was an unexpected bestseller and the famous phrase, ‘the stream of consciousness’, had entered literary criticism by 1918. Mansfield's knowledge of his work is evidenced by the fact that she quotes from his The Will to Believe(1897) in a 1920 review of Hugh Walpole's The Captives and her familiarity with Bergson's work is also a matter of record.