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There is now a fair consensus that James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the most important literary work of the twentieth century. It has spawned a vast critical literature, dedicated, among other things, to clarifying some of its presumed obscurities, elucidating its parallels with its Homeric model and mapping the geography and the populace of the novel against the actualities of Dublin on ‘Bloomsday’—16 June, 1904.
Schwaber, a professor of English literature and a practising psychoanalyst, has chosen to address the novel through a study of the principal players in its unfolding drama—its ‘cast of characters’. Through a meticulous textual study, he focuses a psychoanalytic eye on these figures—primarily Leopold Bloom, the protagonist; Stephen Dedalus, its Telemachus; Molly Bloom, the Penelope; and some of the lesser personalities, such as Gerty McDowell, the Nausicaa, and The Citizen, its Cyclops.
Joyce's connections with Freud and psychoanalysis have been topics of considerable controversy. Although his ‘stream of consciousness’ technique appears to be related to Freudian free association, Joyce vehemently denied this; he insisted that he derived it from Edmond Dujardin's novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés (Ellmann, 1982, p. 126; Svevo, 1927). He expressed considerable disdain for Freud and his concern about ‘the unconscious’ (Ellmann, 1982, p. 436, p. 546), and Italo Svevo1 maintains that when Joyce left Trieste in 1915 ‘he knew nothing about psychoanalysis’ (1927, n. p.). But Ellmann notes that Joyce
had in his possession in Trieste three small pamphlets in German, Freud's Leonardo essay, Ernest Jones's The Problem of Hamlet and the Oedipus Complex and Jung's The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual. They were all published in German between 1909 and 1911, and it seems likely that Joyce purchased them during that period. He probably heard about psychoanalysis from Ettore Schmitz’ [i.e. Italo Svevo!] (p. 340 n.)
In any event, it is hard to imagine anyo