Modernism, Psychoanalysis and Other Psychologies
Laura Salisbury
‘[C]himney-sweeping’. This was Fräulein Anna O’s joking description of the new treatment for hysterical symptoms she was undergoing in the 1880s with Dr Josef Breuer. In more serious moments and perhaps more memorably, she referred to the nascent practice of psychoanalysis as the ‘talking cure’ (Breuer, 1893, 29), thus underscoring psychoanalysis’ insistent link to linguistic modes and representations. But as Breuer’s collaborator, Sigmund Freud, was later to suggest, perhaps the joke reveals as much as the more sober account, given the comic’s capacity to carve routes into material the mind cannot and will not face straight on. Though chimney-sweeping implies a rather routine operation – something like spring cleaning – condensed within the image is a much less homely, more unheimlich, or uncanny idea. If the house can be taken as an image of the self, the chimney is a hidden space that cuts through the core of the building. Though central to the functioning of the home, inside the house the chimney is only visible via contours and bulges. The chimney is necessary for the hearth’s cosy warmth, but it is also clogged with the soot and smut that are the precipitates of a fire that might stand for civilization itself. Darker still, the chimney in the nineteenth century could have held for Anna O the ghost of a deathly space – a site of child labour and abuse. But there is a glimmer of the folk erotics and romance of the ‘lucky’ sweep, too, which perhaps prefigures Anna O’s developing desires for her doctor. The unreasonable strength of these feelings would frighten Breuer away from psychoanalysis and into a second honeymoon with his wife, but for Freud they became the bedrock of psychoanalytic technique through the attempt to understand the patient’s transference of earlier modes of relating on to their doctor.1 As Stephen Frosh has it, psychoanalysis admits that ‘[s]omething lives at the heart of the human subject, outside the realms of normal egoic control, something not-I’; but what distinguishes the Freudian unconscious is its dynamic character – it is something ‘present, active, pushing for expression, motivating, causal’ (2003, 118). A blockage in a chimney can burn down the whole edifice.
Of course, it would be impossible to unpick the metaphor of ‘chimney-sweeping’ in this way without the psychoanalytic processes of interpretation Anna O was beginning to name. And one of the reasons why psychoanalysis became the dominant accent in cultural accounts of the mind by the middle of the twentieth century, and why it has been the most significant way of using psychology to read literary modernism, is precisely Freud’s emphasis on representation and interpretation. Freud’s focus on representation has its root in the idea, expressed in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900; published in English in 1913) and brought back to the centre of psychoanalysis in Jacques Lacan’s work in the 1950s, that the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan, 2007). For Freud, the human organism desires the production of its own pleasure, and our instinctual drives are encoded into us in such a way that expressions of sexuality and extreme self-preservation, often figured as aggression, become the impulses from which we gain most pleasure. For society to function, however, we must order and control our instinctual drives, and so they are repressed, pushed down into the unconscious to which the conscious mind can have no direct access. But these repressed desires will always seek to express themselves, to irrupt into the consciousness. This may happen in jokes or in the famous Freudian slips of the tongue, but most significantly for the early Freud it happens in dreams, where the repressive function of the conscious mind is temporarily lifted. Still, the essential, or ‘latent’, content of the dream can only emerge by slipping past the repressive function of consciousness in disguised form. Repressed ideas thus undergo a form of condensation and displacement through modes akin to the production of metaphors and metonyms in literary creation, re-emerging as potently significant symbols that can be decoded. As Freud puts it, ‘dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation’ (1900, 278). Psychoanalysis, which emerges coterminously with the major strands of literary modernism, seems, then, to offer a fundamentally literary heuristic through which to understand the mind and through which the mind is structured, and a new conduit into portions of experience related to irrationality and desire that exist beneath the embattled structures of social repression (see Marcus, Rabaté, Stonebridge).
Freud was not the first to posit the existence of unconscious aspects of mental life, however, nor to suggest that established ways of viewing the world and ourselves imposed a false coherence on to experience. As modernist scholarship from the 1990s onwards has shown, although psychoanalysis became dominant in cultural representations of the mind by the middle of the twentieth century, its theory and practice emerged from a network of other psychologies, neurological discourses and philosophical accounts of mental life in the late nineteenth century that were just as significant for literary modernism. This wider field includes those working in experimental and positivist modes, such as Wilhelm Wundt, who founded the first psychological laboratory in 1879, and who broke down the workings of the mind into their structural elements via experiments on reaction times, sensory perception and attention. Others like Franz Brentano opposed experimental methods, advocating introspection instead, to argue, in an empiricist mode, that there was no reality beyond that perceived by the senses. William James taught his first course in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1875–76, using methods learned from Herman von Helmholtz, who in 1867 famously ‘clocked’ the nervous impulse at between 35 and 45 metres per second (McKendrick, 1874, 7); but James’s work also aimed to establish the philosophical underpinnings of psychology. As Judith Ryan has shown in The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism, these diverse modes of anatomizing consciousness and sensory perception were deeply influential on early modernism. Although psychoanalysis’s concentration on the question of representation, alongside desire and narrativization in the form of memory’s after-shocks, resonates with literary modernism’s central concerns, the extraordinary shape of the perceiving, sensing consciousness emerging from the broader field of psychology cuts as deeply to the core of the modernist project.
‘Subject and Object and the Nature of Reality’
It has been a commonplace to speak of the modernist moment as defined by a ‘turn inwards’ to questions of mind and subjective experience. At one level, this hardly seems like a break from the past, for it is difficult to think of a more profound exploration of psychology of character, nor a more potent sense of layered inner life, than that which emerges from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1874). Still, where the modernist ‘turn inwards’ might be different is in its swerving away from the idea of a rich core of subjectivity existing in a finely detailed but essentially stable external world of objects. For throughout the nineteenth century, there was a developing sense that aesthetic modes that emphasized the wholeness and continuity of a perceiving self were no longer able to withstand the dismantling of the scaffolding on which such unified perceptions were based. Alongside the scientific challenges to narratives that framed the world according to religious modes, this period saw a persistent unpicking of the stability, in both philosophical and aesthetic terms, that had been drawn from Kant’s transcendental idealism. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argues for synthetic a priori categories that consolidate disparate empirical sense experiences under a transcendental, cognitive unity. By this account, experience depends on ‘necessary conditions’ – a priori forms that structure, hold true for and transcend that world of experience. In Kant’s terms, ‘[u]nity of synthesis according to empirical concepts would be altogether accidental, if the latter were not based on the transcendental ground of unity. Otherwise it would be possible for appearances to crowd in upon the soul’ (1965, 14). But throughout the nineteenth century, the perceived wholeness of this world began to sheer away, as synthesis and the maintenance of the coherence of reality was divested of its transcendental elements and relocated within the self and its psychological capacities. As a consequence, as Jonathan Crary has shown, ‘[i]t became imperative for thinkers of all kinds to discover what faculties, operations, or organs produced or allowed the complex coherence of conscious thought’ (1999, 15).
Crary suggests that, in philosophical terms, it was Schopenhauer’s unifying principle of the subjective ‘will’ that offered to restabilize the system (1999, 15). But by anchoring unity to a faculty so susceptible to flickering in and out and to distraction from external elements, Schopenhauer was also implying a more subjective, contingent, intermittent possibility of coherence. The philosopher Henri Bergson used memory and projection into the future to synthesize immediate sensory perceptions, but one did not need a Freud to show that memory and desire were hard to hold to stable, objective formations. In 1890, William James offered ideas that emerged from both philosophical introspection and new experimental psychological methods to describe how a baby born into a world perceived as ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’ (1983, 462) comes to experience a continuous sense of itself. For James, consciousness is not adequately described as a string of associations; rather, sensations and perceptions are compounds:
Consciousness […] does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (James, 1983, 233)
Consciousness, as a flow, is determined neither by its constituent parts nor by its relation to transcendental categories; instead, it tracks the shapes of our subjective, intermittent attention and interest in the world.
For James, writing in both philosophical and scientific psychological mode, our psychic life necessarily has a subjective rhythm – of drifts and resting places, of ‘flights and perchings’ (1983, 236) – that is temporally extended. This account of psychological functioning remains physiological and material, but it is James’s philosophical reflection on the human capacity to attend to the world, to form it into a pragmatically unified shape through a subjective capacity for interest, which has a traceable influence on literary modernism. Indeed, May Sinclair invokes James’ ‘stream of consciousness’ in 1918 to describe Dorothy Richardson’s extraordinarily extended account of Miriam Henderson’s mind. Sinclair speaks of the need to ‘throw off the philosophic cant of the nineteenth century’ – ‘the distinction between idealism and realism, between subjective and objective’ (1918, 58) – as Richardson’s work, by her account, connects the reader to ‘[a]ll that we know of reality at first hand’ (57). For Sinclair, Richardson’s radical narrative technique demonstrates that ‘[r]eality is thick and deep, too thick and deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving knife’ (57) into the subjective and the objective.
In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), although ‘[s]ubject and object and the nature of reality’ (1964, 28) are Mr Ramsay’s areas of professional, philosophical expertise, his idea of ‘angular essences’ is refused in favour of a multiplicity of perspective that flows in and out of the purview of the narration. When trying to finish her painting of Mrs Ramsay, Lily Briscoe indeed comes to know that ‘[f]ifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with’ (1964, 224). The Ramsays’ son James also finally realizes that the angular shape of the lighthouse and its tenebrous impression are both expressions of a truth: ‘So that was the Lighthouse was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing’ (211). What Woolf gives, and what Richardson gives, are the fragmentary glimpses and subjective conditions that, in fact, by Sinclair’s account, ‘life imposes on us all’: ‘It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on’ (Sinclair, 1918, 59). And if our understanding of the world no longer matches the shapes of aesthetic realism, if the idea of a stable subject, fully present to and cognizant of itself and its experience, no longer seems tenable, then the structures of literary representation will also have to alter. Moving away from the idea that reality might be graspable through the atemporal unity of apperception, literary modernism’s capturing of the flickering intermittence of perception and sensation that extends across time and a narration that no longer needs to offer ‘any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end’ (Sinclair, 1918, 59) becomes a potent way of miming a self understood as always in the process of becoming, rather than present as a unified being.
In his account of the modern artist in 1863, Charles Baudelaire similarly made clear that the notion of a stable, even stolid self had come unstuck in the transactions of Parisian modernity:
[T]he lover of life, may also be described as a mirror, to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, with which every one of its movements represents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity […] It is an ego athirst for a non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting. (Baudelaire, 1992, 400)
Here is a consciousness as shifting and crystalline as the reflections of a Paris of light and glass – a consciousness that takes on the qualities of objects glittering on the surface of the retina. And by the time Ford Madox Ford was writing The Good Soldier (1915), the subjective impressions of its narrator, Dowell, dominate its content, form and frame of understanding. There is no getting behind Dowell’s impressions to the reality of a stable world. He admits how he likes
being drawn through the green country [on a train] and looking at it through the clear glass of the great windows. Though, of course, the country isn’t really green. The sun shines, the earth is blood red and purple and red and green and red. (Ford, 1972, 44)
Throughout the novel, the fictional environment’s shape and mood track both the possibilities and limitations of a consciousness that comes to seem positively psychopathological in its inability to see beyond its projections and investments.
Writing of literary impressionism in 1913, Ford spoke of the need to render ‘those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass’:
through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere else. (Ford, 1964, 40–1)
Although Ford ends with an idea of a mind separable from an object world in which bodies take their place, he nevertheless implies that ‘the whole of life’ might admit a more complicated, more implicated structure of subject and object. For the metaphor of the pane of glass makes clear that one does not simply see through one’s impressions to a stable scene beyond; one sees with one’s impressions. Mental impressions become a material medium that enables a seeing through to what is beyond, but not without reflecting and refracting the object world according to its own material properties. Ford is not claiming that there is no world beyond subjective impressions; as Michael Levenson notes, ‘Ford never denied that we ascend from perception to knowledge and from sensation to understanding’ (1984, 380). But it is only through the impression – an impression understood as a medium – that we might access the world. Ford’s aim was thus to find an aesthetic capable of registering ‘the odd vibration that scenes in real life have’ (1964, 42) – a ‘vibration’ found precisely by centring on the flickering, temporally extended processes of perception through which subject-world and object-world meet to form a representation of reality.
The idea that the ‘real world’ might be constructed in the transactions between the inner and outer will, of course, be particularly suggestive to writers, who necessarily use mediation – words and literary form – to structure their representations. Just as Ford focuses attention on the reflective, refractive materiality of glass to foreground its status as a medium, rather than a clear window on the real, many modernist writers worked to score and scuff up the transparency of their language. In a mode of both admiration and alarm, Woolf speaks in ‘Character in Fiction’ of Joyce’s ‘indecency’, of his status as a ‘desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows’ (1988, 434). But she goes on later to imagine in A Room of One’s Own (1929) a new kind of writer who might have ‘broke[n] the sentence’ and ‘broken the sequence’, but ‘has every right to do both these things if she does them not for the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating’ (2015, 61). The aim is no longer to allow the medium to recede in the impression of external reality, but to represent the mediation that takes place within consciousness and perception through new, extruding forms.
In another oft-quoted modernist articulation of how an ‘ordinary mind on an ordinary day’ might be rendered, there is a similar emphasis upon making clear the transactions between objects and subjects in any perception of reality. In Woolf’s essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), impressions of the fleeting object world press and score on subjective perception:
The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms […] Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display […]? (Woolf, 1994, 161)
If, as Crary has noted in Techniques of the Observer, eighteenth-century philosophical accounts of mental activity were figured as working like a stamp to fix the constancy and consistency of objects, for Woolf, at least at this moment in 1925, a more fundamental permeability of subject and object world is admitted.
Woolf was to claim in 1924, rather knowingly, that ‘[o]n or about 1910, human character changed’ (1988, 421). Her Essay ‘Character in Fiction’ implies a change in both literary and more general psychological terms, but Laura Marcus has suggested that Woolf uses the formulation of ‘human character’ rather than ‘human nature’ because ‘character’ is specifically connected to writing via the Greek kharattein, to engrave (2014, 11). From Aristotle onwards, ‘character’ has been distinguished from ‘nature’ by being formed rather than found, and by emphasizing the materiality of impressions on consciousness that are ‘engraved with the sharpness of steel’ Woolf figures character and consciousness as things that are worked on and moulded by the world, as much as they shape it through acts of perception and representation. ‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall’, Woolf thus writes in ‘Modern Fiction’: ‘let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’ (Woolf, 1994, 161; my emphasis). These same terms repeat in To the Lighthouse, as we hear of Lily’s ‘accumulated impressions’, ‘the intensity of her sensation’ and her ‘I respect you (she addressed him silently), in every atom’ (Woolf, 1964, 29) on a single page. Within essay and novel, Woolf’s work impresses on its reader how both the subject and object worlds are constituted of the same ‘atoms’; and as perspective shifts from subject to object, oscillating from seemingly stable and unyielding definition to shifting plasticity, the novel seems formally to mime Woolf’s understanding of reality itself. ‘[L]ife’ is found neither inside nor outside, but in the ‘semi-transparent envelope’ in and through which our transactions with the world take place.
Pathologies of Perception
In the late nineteenth century, the production of unity in perception and consciousness was fundamentally relocated within the psyche’s capacity to represent and synthesize disparate portions of experience; consequently, psychological dysfunction in the period was frequently framed as a disordering of this synthetic capacity. A host of newly described and culturally visible psycho-neurological disorders emerged, with hysteria, neurasthenia, aboulia and agnosia tracking the disintegration of the supposedly smooth relationship between consciousness and automatic behaviours, alongside the coherence of the subject’s capacity to synthesize and represent their experiences to themselves. These new psychopathologies stretched the limits of how the human was imagined to function, putting the putatively rational self into often alarming contact with the automatic and the compulsive in ways that made clear that much of mental life occurred beyond the limits of conscious awareness.
As Henri Ellenberger has noted in his influential history of dynamic psychiatry, it was Pierre Janet, rather than Sigmund Freud, who was most influential in tracing the psychological elements within the epidemic of hysteria seizing patients in the late nineteenth century. He was appointed to the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in 1890, but soon began to pull away from his neurophysiological colleagues in insisting that he considered hysteria’s ‘physiological conditions as mere translations of the psychological ideas’ (Janet, 1907, 322–3). Janet was interested in phenomena such as somnambulism, automatic writing, expressions of multiple personality and hallucinations, which had previously been left to the expertise of physiologists because they seemed to emerge automatically and were thus outside of the purview of the psyche. But Janet’s early work brings such experiences back into the frame of psychology by attending to dissociation, and the ‘désagrégation’ of perceptual and cognitive modes that takes place in patients unable smoothly to synthesize their experience. Janet tracks in numerous patients the splitting of perception and cognition, which, through dissociation, become oddly autonomous in the psyche and are experienced in strangely intensified ways. In L’Automatisme psychologique (1889), Janet offers a comprehensive account of automatisms as forms of psychopathology that appear when the mind is able only to synthesize a limited number of phenomena. Because of ‘the lack of power on the part of the feeble subject to gather, to condense, his psychological phenomena, and to assimilate them to his personality’ (Janet, 1907, 501), there is a ‘shrinking of the field of consciousness’ and the production of activity in the ‘subconscious’ mind. In 1901, Janet frames a psychological theory that allows him to group such illnesses together into a single clinical category – psychasthenia (lack of mental strength). Janet concludes that the shrinking of the field of consciousness encountered in hysterical patients is frequently the result of traumatic experience that weakens the subject, causes dissociation, and then the formation of an idée fixe that has its own particular symbolic logic and chains of association. This idée fixe will then become a centre around which other psychological phenomena arrange themselves to become something akin to a distinct personality that sits below normal conscious awareness.
This emphasis on the weakening of the mind’s ability to synthesize disparate elements into the contours of a seemingly smooth and coherent personality is nevertheless aligned with the notion that the dissociated portions of the psyche still work according to a logic. And this logic is symbolic – often oddly and rigidly so. In 1928, the Surrealist poets Louis Aragon and André Breton, both of whom had some medical training, trumpeted hysteria as ‘the greatest poetic discovery of the nineteenth century’ (1948, 9). Why? Because the work of Janet (and others) demonstrates that the sliding of the relationship between two things that takes place in symbolic formations is not simply the product of language or artistic representation; instead, the relationship between mind and body itself is the product of the human’s functioning as a symbolic, representational animal. For Janet, hysterical symptoms are vivid physical manifestations of ideas and associations that express the wild, excessive logic of the idée fixe. By Janet’s account, hysteria is an ‘ensemble of maladies through representation’ (Janet, 1901, 488) caused by a lack of psychological synthesis, in which shards of dissociated elements play themselves out across the body. Surrealism takes this new sense of the fragments, distortions of focus and excessive symbolic linkings that form the logic of what normative society deems to be madness, as a potent artistic possibility. It uses a logic that psychopathology has shown to be within the capacity of the human, while taking minds and bodies beyond social limits of propriety.
Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood (1936) also uses psychopathology and drives to structure the narrative, but there is little characterization that produces recognizable selves; indeed, the text works precisely to undercut the notions of origin and continuity usually used to stabilize subjects. Felix Volkbein is obsessed with heredity and the culture of European aristocracy, but is cut through with a disowned Jewish heritage that cannot be papered over with Old Masters, aristocratic manners and the Catholic Church. Dr Matthew O’Connor remains uncategorizable in his sexual and gender identity, while his professional title turns out to be inauthentic – just another surface curlicue on a baroque text that thematically and formally proliferates surface while refusing depth.
The protagonist of Nightwood, Robin Vote, is first encountered in a hotel room, lying on a bed, and compared to a painting by ‘the douanier Rousseau’: ‘she seemed to lie in a jungle trapped in drawing room […] thrown in among the carnivorous flowers’ (Barnes, 1950, 56). For reasons that are not given, she is a wanderer and an alcoholic, and yet the chapter that describes her is not ‘L’Alcoholique’; it is called ‘La Somnambule’ (sleepwalker). Like Rousseau’s fin de siècle primitivism, the anachronistic feathers she wears (‘of the kind [Felix’s] mother had worn’ (66)) and her clothes of heavy brocade fabrics and ‘phosphorous glowing’ (56) that recall a decadent aesthetic, the reference to ‘La Somnambule’, also takes us back to the 1890s. For, lying in her bed, legs ‘spread as in a dance’, ‘hands, long and beautiful, lay on either side of her face, the thick lacquered pumps looking too lively for the arrested step’ (55), Robin resembles one of those theatricalized set-piece photographs of ‘hysterics’ in the paradoxically hyperkinetic paralysis of a grand mal seizure taken in Charcot’s Salpêtrière of the 1890s.2 She is, after all, described as lying in a ‘set’, though one more like a circus than a clinic (the Salpêtrière might sometimes have seemed more like that too, of course). Here described as someone who has ‘the structure of the somnambule, who lives in two worlds’ (56), there as displaying a ‘stubborn cataleptic calm […] strangely aware of some lost land in herself’ (70), the novel reaches for images and vocabulary that evoke Janet’s clinical environment to convey Robin’s lack of ability to synthesize her personality – her life that ‘held no volition for refusal’ (67). And yet, it is certainly not the case that Robin’s dissociations and désagrégations are meant to suggest a diagnosis, an aetiology of symptoms or indeed any answers. Instead, the image and vocabulary of something like the clinic, though not the Salpêtrière itself, perhaps suggest that the novel is interested in the chain of wild substitutions – those endless metaphorical slidings of hysteria – that evoke the refusal of the syncretic processes of coherent personality in favour of ‘a woman who is beast turning human’ (59) and back again. As Daniela Caselli has shown, Nightwood mostly refuses modernist free indirect discourse and the depths of consciousness it invokes (2009, 157–8); instead, words, images and people are constantly on the slide. Disaggregation and then the reformation of other meanings around a heightened idée fixe that has its own symbolic logic and chains of association but that, unlike in Janet’s world, are always subject to the possibility of collapse mirror Nightwood’s mode and mood, but do not offer a key to its meaning. Instead, modernism and psychology reflect on each other to intimate how in Nightwood ‘all needs to be made sense of, nothing simply is’ (Caselli, 2009, 163). All syntheses seem too weak to hold, and the fixities present in the text come to feel more like fixations – fixations without any subject to anchor them.
Returning once again to Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’, there is another word that might capture our attention in the famous phrase: ‘Let us record the atoms as they fall’ – and that is ‘record’. Much modernist literary criticism over the past two decades has been concerned with mapping the relationship between modernist literature and the new writing and recording technologies that emerged coextensively with it (see Armstrong, Trotter). As Friedrich Kittler’s work has emphasized, one of the distinctive differences between the modes of representation that had been used for millennia and the new representational technologies that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century was the removal of human translation from the scene. Photosensitized paper or celluloid and wax cylinders were all able to record the data of the world directly, without a mediating consciousness. Without having to submit information through judgement, the new ‘indexical’ media of phonograph and film camera (invented in 1877 and 1888, respectively) registered the imprint of the real rather than representation. They recorded atoms literally as they fell, without distinction between random data and meaningful configurations, while meaning-making was reconceptualized as a process of filtering signal (intended information) from noise. Kittler forges a link between these writing and recording technologies, and a new account of mind in the work of scientists such as Gustav Fechner. Rejecting the Kantian philosophical orthodoxy that the mind could not be subjected to experiment or be quantified mathematically, in 1860 Fechner set up empirically reproducible experiments on sensation to which he gave the name psychophysics. He bridged the gap between the study of the mind and the methodologies of the physical sciences and physiology, testing the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they affect through phenomena such as reaction times that precede conscious mentation. For Kittler, the mind subjected to these experiments is refigured accordingly as a recording machine that, as with a phonogram, is inscribed with both significant sound and noise without qualitative distinction (1990, 206–64). Kittler suggests that because psychophysics reads the mind as a tabula rasa onto which data is imprinted and then replayed, structures of meaning in the mind are once again figured as emergent and contingent rather than immanent.
The aspect of literary modernism that most interests Kittler is the transcription of nonsense and noise in Dada and Surrealism that mirrors the storage capacities of the new media and, he argues, reproduces the words and sounds that emerge from new psychological experimentation and come to visibility in the disorders of the aphasic, the psychotic, the hysteric. André Breton, who had worked with war-shattered soldiers on a neurological ward in Nantes, indeed recommends in 1924, via his reading of Janet and James, an artistic method that returns to the automatic writing experiments of William James’ psychological laboratory of the 1880s:3
Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember that you are writing and be tempted to reread what you have written […] Put your trust in the inexhaustible murmur. (Breton, 1972, 29–30)
Futurism mimics the mechanical sounds of the world of noise – zong-toomb-toomb – while Joyce’s ‘Ulysses–gramophone’ is interested in both sound and linguistic sense, recording the noise of the train in Molly’s bedroom (‘frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong’) (Joyce, 1992, 904) as well as the noise of her free associations from which background sounds can only imperfectly be differentiated.
In a famous description of psychoanalytic technique, Freud makes a link between new media and the unconscious mind by comparing the analyst to a telephone receiver. ‘The doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation and of recognizing the concealed unconscious material without substituting a censorship of his own’, he writes: ‘To put it in a formula: he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone’ (1912, 114–15). Here, we find Freud turning to portions of the psyche and communications that lie both below and before the structuring, interpretative, selective aspects of the rational, conscious mind. All must be admitted – sense and nonsense, significant sound and noise – for new structures of meaning to reveal themselves to interpretation. But this overdetermined metaphor is also a useful figure for thinking through how literary modernism and psychology might relate to one another. For we see a technology of modernity – a seemingly objective mechanical ear – invoked in a process that cannot easily be submitted to empirical scientific method: the meeting of two unconscious minds. Freud’s example indeed focuses attention precisely on the impossibility of separating modern objects and methods from sites of subjectivity and desire. David Trotter has recently brought literature and the cultural history of telephony into productive exchange by showing how each reveals in the other a complex negotiation of the ‘transgressive erotics of connection’ (2013, 57). What Freud’s image of the telephone receiver might similarly offer is an intimation of just how entangled technological and scientific modernity is with elements that pull against its putative objectivity.
As Mark Micale notes, the late nineteenth-century understanding of the functioning of the mind and its relationship to a body is not easily matched with contemporary disciplinary formations. ‘Distinct intellectual and disciplinary counterparts to early twenty-first-century psychiatry, neurology, psychology, and philosophy of mind did not exist’, he writes. To complicate things further, late nineteenth-century psychological medicine also clearly emerged from contact with fields of enquiry now figured as determinedly unscientific: ‘hypnosis, somnambulism, psychical research, magnetotherapy, metallotherapy, dream interpretation, mediumistic psychology, automatic writing, faith healing, and spiritualism’ (Micale, 2004, 10). Janet spent considerable time tracking spiritualist modes of automatic writing alongside manifestations of hysteria in asylums. James investigated one Mrs Piper – a medium from Boston who had seemingly developed psychic abilities after a road accident damaged her neurological functioning – without, as Roger Luckhurst notes, ever being able really ‘to decide whether her spirit guides and trance selves were psychological or supernatural phenomena’ (2008, 41). To go back to the period between 1860 and 1940 is to find oneself in a field of rich and complex interactions where disciplinary borders had not yet hardened, and the borders between scientific and cultural spheres were particularly porous. Although one story the history of science and medicine likes to tell is an essentially Whiggish account of inevitable progression and improvement, with scientific psychology emancipating itself from past mistakes by purifying itself of its non-scientific elements, such a narrative is a particular distortion of the messy, noisy networks of association, influence and mutual constitution in this period of modernity. In fact, the psychology of the period precisely mirrors literary modernism’s own paradoxical relationship with the complexity of the modern moment – its concern with both positivism and atavism, new technologies and the body’s primal drives, scientized rationality and ‘primitive’ irrationality.
Psychoanalysis and the Night-Mind
On 17 June 1936, an elderly man who would soon have to flee the country of his birth received the gift of a letter published in The New Republic:
Sir: The eightieth birthday of Sigmund Freud gives us the welcome opportunity of offering our congratulations and homage to the Master whose discoveries have opened up the way to a new and profounder understanding of mankind. He has made eminent contributions to medicine, psychology, philosophy and art […] The ideas he formulated and the terms he coined have become part of our daily life, and in every field of knowledge, in literature, art, research, history of religion, prehistory, mythology, folklore, pedagogy and, last but not least, in poetry, we can trace his influence. The most memorable achievement of our generation will be, beyond doubt, the psychological achievement of Sigmund Freud. […] Thomas Mann, Romain Rolland, Jules Romains, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig. (Mann et al., 1936)
Given that Woolf claimed she did not read Freud until 1939, though paradoxically suggested that she scanned his words while typesetting the International Psychoanalytic Library for the Hogarth Press in 1924, this underwriting of Freud’s cultural authority seems positively ripe for a psychoanalytic reading in its lack of straightforwardness. When Woolf did admit to reading the work, three years later and only after his death, she owned in her diary of 8 December 1939 to ‘gulping up Freud’, seeming finally to allow herself to gorge on an influence that had been so defensively disowned in the 1920s.
Even though Woolf appeared keen to avoid reading Freud in the 1920s, Elizabeth Abel has described how she was embedded in a world profoundly conscious of psychoanalytic ideas. James and Alix Strachey, part of the Bloomsbury Group, were both analysed by Freud in 1920 and dominated the translation and dissemination of his ideas through the Hogarth Press. Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen and his wife Karin were enthusiastically converted to psychoanalysis and undertook trainings. Melanie Klein, who was to have such a profound influence on the development of theories of ‘object relations’ that are still the main accent of British psychoanalysis, came to 50 Gordon Square (the Stephens’ home) in 1925 to deliver lectures to Ernest Jones’ newly formed British Psycho-analytic Society. As Frosh points out, Klein’s emphasis on understanding destructive impulses and moving towards the possibility of reparation may have seemed particularly compelling following the perceived irrationality of the slaughter of the Great War (2003, 116–7), and the hope in some modernist quarters that art might, in T. S. Eliot’s terms, be a way of ‘controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (1923, 483). Nevertheless, Woolf was explicitly hostile to psychoanalysis in the 1910s and 1920s (Jouve, 2000, 254–6), referring to the Freud she ‘read’ while typesetting as an expression of ‘gull-eyed imbecility’ (Woolf, 1977, 135). And yet, in ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939), she speaks of a cathartic process that resembles Freud’s idea of ‘remembering, repeating and working through’ the traumatic loss of her parents. She indeed admits that after writing To the Lighthouse, she ‘ceased to be obsessed by [her] mother, I no longer hear her voice. I do not see her. I suppose I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients […] And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest’ (1982, 94).
Woolf’s hostility to undertaking a personal analysis may have been linked to a worry about undoing the knots from which her creative process was untangled; still, as can be seen in ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf felt that ‘[f]or the Moderns, “that”, the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology’ (1994, 161). As Michael Rustin has noted, one of the aims some literary modernisms and psychoanalysis shared was to ‘extend the domain of reason to the sphere of the emotions, and of the residues of irrationality that were not readily comprehensible within rationalistic categories’ (1999, 106). Of course, Surrealism and Dada were not interested in the extension of reason, but in hearing and recording the noise that emanated from the unconscious, and many literary modernists, like Freud himself, remained ambivalent about the wedge of unfathomable, motivating darkness at the core of subjectivity. At moments Freud aimed psychoanalysis at reclamation:
The intention of psychoanalysis, is to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. […] Where id was there ego shall be. It is the work of culture – not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee. (1933, 79)
Yet persistently, Freud suggested that the work of culture might have a more troubling place in the battle for expression between conscious and unconscious elements. Against the reclamation work of what came to be known as ‘ego psychology’, it was Jacques Lacan’s ‘return to Freud’, and to the former’s emphasis on the question of language, that reconfigured psychoanalysis not as a search for stable ground but as a place where more radically disruptive structures of self based on the slidings of signification could find their voice.
One of the earliest literary enthusiasts for Freud was D. H. Lawrence. In Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), he praises Freud’s vitalism, stating:
We must discover, if we can, the true unconscious, where our life bubbles up in us, prior to any mentality. The first bubbling life in us, which is innocent of any mental alteration, this is the unconscious. […] It is the spontaneous origin from which it behooves us to live. (Lawrence, 1962, 13)
Lawrence, though, had less time for Freud’s systematizing, and for a large strand of what might be called Romantic Modernism, it was Carl Jung’s analytical psychology, rather than Freud’s psychoanalysis that was always searching out scientific respectability, that offered greater creative possibilities. As is well known, Jung and Freud acrimoniously split in 1913, seemingly (though not completely) due to Jung’s insistence that libido need not necessarily be sexual. Jung had worked as a psychiatrist with Bleuler at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich, and there began to outline a theory of complexes related to the psychogenesis of dementia praecox (later, schizophrenia), to show how delusional formations had their own difficult but explicable logic. Influenced by Freud, but unlike him in that he did not primarily see neurotic patients, Jung drew from the study of psychosis the idea that the psyche includes repressed personal material, as Freud insists, but that there is also unrepressed material in the unconscious – material that had never been known to consciousness. Jung’s interest in this ‘collective unconscious’ meant that, like many modernists, he was drawn to Romantic accounts of creativity and to valorizing what was considered to be pre-modern or ‘primitive’ to trace the patterns of significance behind and beneath the crust of social modernity.
In the late 1920s and into the 1930s, it was through the writer and publisher Eugene Jolas that the most sustained relationship between modernism and Jung’s work took place. Jolas was a multilingual American working in Paris, whose magazine transition aimed to explore how literary innovation – a ‘Revolution of the Word’ – might reshape the human subject, connecting people back to a primal, pre-modern unity. In transition 15, Jolas proclaims the need for a new language: ‘We need the twentieth century word. We need the word of movement, the word expressive of the great new forces around us […] The new vocabulary and the new syntax must help destroy the ideology of a rotting civilization’ (Jolas, 1929, 13). In James Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (later to become Finnegans Wake) published in transition, Jolas thought he had found a mode of writing able to tap into a universal linguistic unconscious. And in The Language of the Night (1932), Jolas goes on to affirm that it is only the poet, as spiritual medium, who can bore down vertically into the primal elements of language: ‘the poet in giving back to language its pre-logical function makes a spiritual revolution – the only revolution worth making today’ (Jolas, 1932a, 60).
In ‘Literature and the New Man’ (1930), Jolas turns his aesthetic and spiritual project from the Freudian notion of the personal unconscious, which was too scientized, too in tune with what rationality wants, towards Jung:
In the essay which transition is publishing in this issue [‘Psychology and Poetry’], an epochal step forward has been made. Not only does the unconscious express the repressed elements of the personal life of the creator, says Dr Jung, but it is also the vessel containing elements that relate him to the collective life of humanity […] [T]he poet gathers these forces in him and presents them through his conscious act as a revivified condition of the personal-collective unconscious. […] The creative imagination is not a priori a rational one. It proceeds from the primal, almost somnambulistic phase to that of intuition. Then the intelligence sets in. (Jolas, 1930, 17)
Jolas’s Romantic Modernist manifesto ‘Poetry Is Vertical’ that appears in transition 21 (1930) follows this idea of the purpose of poetry:
The transcendental ‘I’ with its multiple stratifications reaching back millions of years […] is brought to the surface with the hallucinatory irruption of images in the dream, the daydream, the mystic-gnostic trance, and even the psychiatric condition.
The final disintegration of the ‘I’ in the creative act is made possible by the use of language which is a mantic instrument. (Jolas et al., 1932, 148)
In ‘Night-Mind and Day-Mind’ (1932), Jolas affirms his commitment to language as a form of psychological, mystical connection: ‘We have today means for investigating the night-mind and day-mind […] Psychology has opened the gates of the chthonian world. It is a world within our reach’ (Jolas, 1932b, 223). As will be clear, Jung and Jolas are representatives of a modernism that was never simply modern.
Joyce never consented to having an analysis with Jung,4 though some artists took the opportunity of undergoing a practice felt by some to be ‘the most memorable achievement of our generation’ (Mann et al., 1936). Bryher, for example, arranged for her partner H.D. to have a three-month analysis with Freud in 1933, from which the compelling book Tribute to Freud (1956) emerged. But for most writers, psychoanalysis, like other psychologies, was encountered through a complex network of experiences of reading, conversing, living that can be hard to reduce to singular sources or lines of influence. Even when one has the notes Samuel Beckett typed up on psychoanalysis and psychology while having therapy with Wilfred Bion in the 1930s (see Feldman), such sources offer only a compelling start, rather than an end, to any analysis of the importance these accounts of the mind had for a modernist writer. The Beckett and Bion encounter is indeed instructively unproductive of any simple account of influence. For Beckett was struggling to get his writing going and published at that fraught moment, while Bion, who was later to become one of the most significant figures in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis in the British context, had not undergone a psychoanalytic training at the time he was working with Beckett. Beckett terminated the therapy early, though later averred that it had helped him; Bion never suggested that his experience with Beckett had been particularly significant for his theory and practice. Technical terms from psychoanalysis and other psychologies resonate throughout Beckett’s work, but always in ambivalent, parodic ways, with the discourses looking askance at one another. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis does give literary critics some tools for thinking through the anxieties of influence, the unstable lines of power in the citation of authority, the inconsistencies of memory and the defences of both conformity and rebellion that saturate evocations of the modernist mind. Perhaps to understand the ‘turn inwards’, then, it is most important to have one’s ear turned receptively outwards, to the complex lines of connection in the discursive networks where radical literary forms and new notions of mind come into charged contact.
Notes
1 Freud introduced the concept of transference to explain how patients frequently unconsciously remember and then repeat difficult past experiences with significant people (such as parents) with their analyst. By analysing this mode of relating rather than rejecting, judging or colluding with it, Freud suggests that psychoanalysis can unravel or ‘work through’ in the present the problems of the past.
2 See Didi-Huberman (2003) for these images and an analysis of their construction as theatrical ‘set-pieces’.
3 See Armstrong (1998, 187–219).
4 For an illuminating account of the contact between Joyce and Jung, including the latter’s rather bad-tempered essay on Ulysses and Jung’s treatment of Joyce’s daughter Lucia, see Rabaté (2014, 150–5).
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