We Perished, Each Alone. A Psychoanalytic Commentary on Virginia Woolf's to the Lighthouse

Literary materials often evoke in the psychoanalytically trained reader introspective perceptions which resemble those introspections which are evoked in the analyst during his clinical work. Psychoanalytic theory serves to order these perceptions into meaning which can be communicated in the form of interpretations. Immersion into the opus of Virginia Woolf, particularly into her quasi-biographical novel To The Lighthouse, is evocative of perceptions that are similar to those experienced by analysts during the treatment of narcissistic personality disorders. Kohut's concepts of a psychology of the self seem most comprehensively productive in making sense of the literary imagery and themes of this novel. The character of Mrs Ramsay in this view emerges as a narcissistically injured person who needs hyper-actively to keep the people of her environment enmeshed with her own personality in order to protect her defective self from disintegrating. The vicissitudes of human incompleteness pervade the novel and lend it its main theme.

Speculative comments are made about Virginia Woolf's illness and its roots in her relationship to a mother who was the model for Mrs Ramsay. The theme which is condensed into the line 'We Perished, Each Alone' also links the novel to the literary traditions represented by Sir Leslie Stephen, Mrs Woolf's father, and through him to William Cowper, an eighteenth-century poet who suffered illness and fate which were in certain respects similar to those suffered by Virginia Woolf.