Psychosensory Images from Virginia Woolf's “A Sketch of The Past”

I would like to indicate how one aspect of ego psychology, that having to do with sensory images and their relation to sex and emotion, may be related to Virginia Woolf's literary genius. In order to describe this process I shall use the term “psychosensory” imagery. Hinsie and Campbell (1960) define psychosensory, in part, as “a hallucination which, by an effort, the mind is able to distinguish from an actuality.” Virginia Woolf's imagery, by her own descriptions, had a semi-hallucinatory quality. However, I use the word here to denote not only the extremely vivid quality of Woolf's experience of her sensory images but also the fact of their relation to the totality of her psychic experience. Psychosensory images, as the term is used here, refer to exceedingly vivid sensory images, those approaching a hallucinatory quality, as such images are embedded in the total matrix of emotional and psychic experience. The sense in which I use the words will emerge more fully in what follows.

If there is a specific key to Virginia Woolf's genius, it may well lie in her capacity to retain certain sensory images within her memory for a long period of time and to reproduce them in written language. Her vivid description of sensory impressions from the past conveys the impact of truly eidetic imagery. In the very first paragraph of “A Sketch of the Past” (Woolf, 1976) she alludes to the difficulties in writing such a sketch: “In the first place, the enormous number of things I can remember. …” (p. 64).