LIT 3101 Make It New May Sinclair (2) Overview May

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.

(ll. 111-114)<br>

Psychoanalysis Freud’s works appear in English from the early 1900s
Ideas permeate English avant-garde culture: Leonard Woolf reviews Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1914
May Sinclair’s interest developed in work at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in Brunswick Sq.<br>

Psychoanalysis Clinic devoted to ‘study of human character, social and individual’
Sinclair’s educational mission at the clinic reflected in the novels, especially Mary Olivier and Harriett Frean.
These novels show the impact of psychoanalysis on literary modernism<br>

Aspects of psychoanalysis in Harriett Frean Subjugation of female passion - “behaving beautifully”
Guilt and inhibition the result of maternal embrace
No possibility of sublimation - compare Mary Olivier.
“Harriett exists in a morbid familial rapture, a sort of living death with no prospect of an escape into the life of the mind…”
(Stonebridge, L. ‘Pychoanalysis and Literature’ in Marcus, L. and Nicholls, P. (eds.) The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)<br>

Sublimation Freudian view:
1. In classical psychoanalysis, the process whereby primitive libidinous impulses are redirected into new, learned, 'noninstinctive' behaviours. Typically, the term is used with the understanding that the learned behaviours are socially acceptable whereas the instinctive impulses would not be. Classical theory regarded creative and artistic tendencies as manifestations of sublimation.
2. Generally, and more loosely, any redirection of energy from the socially unacceptable to the acceptable.
Reber, A. et al, The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology. (London: Penguin, 2002) p.721<br>

But… Harriett’s repression prevents sublimation into culture etc - she struggles with new ideas and retreats to childhood comforts.
“She couldn’t understand a single word of Herbert Spencer” (p.43)
“lifted off her feet and… away from her safe, happy life” (p.47)
“A novel about waste” (Stonebridge)<br>

Sinclair’s view of sublimation All religion, all art, all literature, all science are sublimations in various stages of perfection. Civilization is one vast system of sublimation [...] Sublimation itself is the striving of the Libido towards manifestation in higher and higher forms.
Sinclair, M. (1916) Clinical lectures on symbolism and sublimation. I, Medical Press and Circular 153 (9 Aug. 1916) p.119<br>

T.S. Eliot’s review “…because the material is so clearly defined (the soul of man under psychoanalysis) there is no possibility of tapping the atmosphere of unknown terror and mystery in which our life has passed and which psychoanalysis has not analysed.”
“London Letter, August 1922” Dial 73 (September 1922) p.330<br>

Symbols and Images Visual nature of psychic experience - e.g. the blue egg, the campions
Contrast imagism - instead of concentration on the image itself (direct treatment of the thing) psychoanalysis assumes that all images have symbolic connotations
What are the connotations of these images?<br>

Dreams and Symbols Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (1900) argues that dreams speak of unconscious desires of the dreamer
Jungian symbol forms the basis of Sinclair’s theory of psychic symbols, explored in ‘Clinical Lectures on Symbolism and Sublimation’<br>

Psychoanalysis and feminism Recent critics argue that Freudian approach is incompatible with feminism constructed as politicised discourse
Question - can we reconcile Sinclair’s portrait of a wasted life with a feminist interpretation of the text?<br>