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Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the Freudest of them all? Literary critics from Lionel Trilling to Michael Zimmerman have often asked this question of modernist fiction writers, and have answered it with surprising unanimity. While Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka all depict mental life in a Freudian way, it's usually James Joyce who wins the prize for “most Freudian of all the great twentieth-century writers” (Zimmerman, p. 185). Joyce would have sent the prize back. Though he read some of Freud's work and discussed psychoanalysis with knowledgeable friends in Trieste, like Italo Svevo—and though his work emphasized many of the same aspects of the psyche that psychoanalysis does—he denied being influenced by Freud, or for that matter, by any other living writer besides perhaps Henrik Ibsen. So what makes Joyce the most Freudian of modern writers?
At the outset of his original and illuminating study of maternal imagery in the work of James Joyce, Michael Zimmerman provides a clue in the form of a quote from Finnegans Wake: “I can psoakoonaloose myself any time I want,” Joyce wrote. The statement perhaps reflects Joyce's refusal to share any glory with Freud, but also points to the central role of self-analysis in his work. To be sure, Joyce's free-associative and fearlessly self-observing art grants readers special access to the writer's unconscious and instinctual mental life. And it yields a map of the transferential connections between past and present in the minds of Joyce's characters—a map of what Mark Shechner (1974) has called “the devious byways of a lifelong family romance” (p. 5).
In Joyce's art, Zimmerman says, things “simultaneously keep their identities and all but lose them in their resemblances to other things”