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if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person but a whole climate of opinion […] under whom we conduct our different lives:
The above quotation stems from W. H. Auden's poem ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, written at the time of Freud's death, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War (Auden, 1945, p. 163). It introduces the third chapter in Jennifer Spitzer's book, The Secret Sharers: The Intimate Rivalries of Modernism and Psychoanalysis, in which the author outlines the complex relationships of rivalry, mutual admiration, covert and overt borrowing and the struggle for independence between literature and psychoanalysis in the modernist period. As the quotation suggests, in the cultural realm Spitzer analyses (her focus is primarily on the Anglo-American region), psychoanalysis appeared to be everywhere. In the USA, psychoanalytic ideas were employed by progressive thinkers ‘as a liberatory discourse that challenged American sexual puritanism’ (p. 12). In the UK, especially following the publication of Freud's translated works in Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, writers and artists in literary London did not always agree with Freud, ‘but he was always taken with the utmost seriousness’ (p. 12). It is this intricate engagement with psychoanalysis as something that - no matter what they thought of it - writers had no way of avoiding that Spitzer successfully illustrates by concentrating on four literary figures: D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov.
Modernist authors were famously vexed by the problem of the writer's relationship to the literary market and to the masses. Related to this was literature's relationship with the natural sciences - medicine and psychology, in particular - which writers like D.H. Lawrence, Hilda Doolittle, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield feared would rob the literary work of its ‘soul’, reducing its mystery to the schematic explanation of the case study. Indeed, the fac