The Woolfs' Response to Freud—Water-Spiders, Singing Canaries, and the Second Apple

Writing to Pfister in 1920, Freud bemoaned 'the way people accept and distort' psychoanalysis. 'It is true', he granted, 'that things are moving everywhere, but you seem to overestimate my pleasure in that. What personal pleasure is to be derived from analysis I obtained during the time I was alone, and since others have joined me, it has given me more pain than pleasure' (Meng and E. Freud, 1963, p. 79).

Freud was not thinking of the Woolfs, but his remark could have been applied to them. For as this paper has described, the 'Freudianism' of Freud's English publishers was far removed from the doctrine contained in the psychoanalytic texts which rolled off the presses at Hogarth. For some thirty years, Virginia Woolf relied upon bed rest and dietary supplements to get through her periods of mental distress. Leonard Woolf seems not only to have acquiesced in but to have guided his wife's medical preferences, with no awareness of any contradiction between this and his avowed Freudian position. Furthermore,