Literary and Psychoanalytical Windows on Interpretations of Literary Work

In a letter to Martha Bernays in 1882, a couple of months after their engagement, Sigmund Freud wrote:

I am taking up again the history of the island, the works of the men who were my real teachers — all of them English or Scotch; and I am recalling what for me is the most interesting historical period, the reign of the Puritans and Oliver Cromwell with its lofty monument of that time — Paradise Lost, where only recently when I did not feel sure of your love, I found consolation and comfort.

(The translation from the German is found in Ernest Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.)

The seventeenth century captured Freud's intellect and imagination; returning the interdisciplinary favor, I am an academic associate (research candidate) at the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis and a Ph.D. candidate in seventeenth-century British literature at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Academic associates participate in all the academic work involved in psychoanalytic training, including continuing case conferences, but do not see patients. A personal analysis is optional for academic associates in the Baltimore program.

Freud was drawn to the seventeenth century in part by its politics; he even named a son after the Puritan political and military leader, Oliver Cromwell. He wrote to Martha of England's “generous devotion to the public weal, the stubbornness and sensitive feeling for justice of its inhabitants.” Today's scholars tend to hold more complex views on empire and class conflict.

Culture, Politics, and the Individual

I've long had an intellectual interest in how elements of the individual psyche react to historical crisis and produce literature. In the middle of the seventeenth century in England, for example, a king was beheaded and the monarchy abolished; civil wars took place; a bourgeois revolution was consolidated; a scientific revolution accelerated; and Ranters, Diggers, and Levelers — ever-shifting middle- and lower-class religious and political groupings — fomented radical insurgencies. This same period of turmoil saw the creation of the profound religious lyrics of John Donne and George Herbert, the politically and historically attuned epics of John Milton, and the psychologically acute tragedies of John Webster and Thomas Middleton.

Applying psychoanalytic theory to the intersection of history and literature can enrich the critic's work. In Rebecca West's great narrative of travel in Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, I've found her idealization of a people, nation, and history has its origin in her effort to master a traumatic relationship with her father, a raconteur and philanderer, for West both highly desired and often absent. An analysis of Frances Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden suggests considerations of empire and the auxiliary superego. The failure of utopian visions, based alternatively on libidinal freedom and Puritan guilt, appears in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance.

When I came to teach freshman composition at George Washington I chose as my rubric “Childhood: Memory and Identity.” I ask the students to reflect upon early childhood memories, to choose one that influences their lives as young adults, and to write about it. A later assignment is to write about a cultural form from childhood that shapes their lives. Students' choices have included race, region, and religion.

My students read and apply psychoanalytic thought. We read Sophocles' Oedipus the King and the corresponding pages on the Oedipus complex in The Interpretation of Dreams. Next comes Henrik Ibsen's Rosmersholm — whose main character is Rebecca West — and we consider Freud's oedipal interpretation of the play in his essay “Those Wrecked by Success.” We read Kenneth A. Grigg's difficult JAPA article on oedipal involvement in Freud's dreams about travel, “‘All Roads Lead to Rome’: The Role of the Nursemaid in Freud's Dreams.” I have been impressed by my students' willingness to engage with oedipal interpretations, sometimes with eagerness and receptivity, sometimes despite feelings of ambivalence, doubt, and hostility.

My professional life integrates two worlds: that of the English teacher and scholar and that of the academic associate at the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis.