‘Freudian Fiction’ or ‘“Wild” Psycho-Analysis’?

By 1920, according to the poet Bryher, ‘all literary London’ had ‘discovered Freud’ – but not all of those discoverers were fans. In a 1920 review of what she called ‘Freudian Fiction’, Virginia Woolf complained that ‘all the characters have become cases’. Writing in 1922, T. S. Eliot complained similarly of the reductive vision of a new ‘psychoanalytic type’ of novel that claimed to lay bare ‘the soul of man under psychoanalysis’. Tracking both the explicit interactions and the submerged engagements between British writers and psychoanalysis between 1900 and 1920, this chapter argues not only that writers and psychoanalysts in this period held a shared interest in representing what Woolf termed the ‘dark region’ of human psychology, but that psychoanalytic thinking about the unconscious is crucial for understanding the formal innovations of modernist writing in Britain in the early decades of the twentieth century. Beginning with a sketch of the interactions between modernism and psychoanalysis in the early years of this period, it goes on to explore the strange affinities between Freud’s theory of the psyche and modernist formal innovations in both prose and poetry.