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From the start of her literary career, Virginia Woolf exhibited a psychological bent, and though most critics assume a Freudian influence, a host of other “second wave” figures from the early era of psychoanalysis color her work (“second wave” is distinguished from “first wave” in its shift from the mind as a mechanistic, passive entity to psychic energy in flux). As George M. Johnson argues, Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was particularly influenced by the Society for Psychical Research, founded in Britain in 1893, passing on the ideas of Frederic Myers (the subliminal self), James Sully (author of Sensation and Intuition), as well as others, such as Henri Bergson, more philosophically than clinically inclined. Sully in fact admired Woolf's writing, and Woolf for her part mentions him in letters as late as 1912.
Johnson goes on to provide an apt if occasionally vague tracery of second-wave influence in Woolf's first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919). Protagonist Rachel's primary conflict in The Voyage Out, for example, is based on a repression of feelings that not only separates her from others but also divides her into two selves: her rational being versus her uncontrolled instinctual desires. Her latent sexuality therefore emerges most vividly in dreams, but also in prelinguistic states of consciousness. Rachel's schism most resembles Henri Bergson's model of two-layered consciousness, one layer clear and fixed, the other mutable and inexpressible.