Gods and Goods: Psychoanalysis, Holism and Modernist Women
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Gods and Goods: Psychoanalysis, Holism and Modernist Women Submitted by Ana Tomcic to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English In August 2019 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. Signature:………………………………………………………………… 1 Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………5 From Destruction to Society: Sabina Spielrein and the Causes of Coming into Being………………………………24 Interlude: The Traumatic History of Thought and Language…………………………81 Bees in the Shell or the Singing Skull: H.D.’s Freudian Defences……………………………………………………………….88 From Epic Childhood to Psychological Realism: Bryher’s Development………………………………………………………………….135 Closing the Circle: Djuna Barnes’s Subversion of Psychoanalytic Progress Narratives……………...187 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………238 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..248 2 Abstract The first half of the twentieth century was a time of seismic shifts in scientific and cultural perceptions of what constitutes individual and social development. The expansion of industry and communication technologies, Darwinian and Lamarckian theories of evolution, changes in the conception of gender, class and sexual identity as well as the devastating effect of the two world wars left the modern citizen in the East and the West with few stable reference points to hold on to. These global trends resulted in two opposing tendencies in the scientific and artistic understanding of the mind. One sought to infuse the brain and body with trans-individual forces and eternal communities which transcend cultural and linguistic differences and resist the passage of time. The other looked to investigate the impact of society on individual psychic life and to employ this knowledge as the basis for psychologically founded social interventions. This thesis will explore the tension between these transcendentalist and materialist narratives in psychoanalysis, film and literature between the 1910s and the 1950s. In particular, I will focus on the work of the psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein and three literary authors: Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Annie Winifred Ellerman (Bryher) and Djuna Barnes. The psychological conceptions of these scientists and artists afford insight into how individual and social development was understood by authors who – as non-Western or homo/bisexual women – were excluded by dominant progress narratives. Their work thus sheds important light on the political implications of different models of the human mind that appeared in the modernist period. Chapter one outlines the political specificities of Spielrein’s understanding of drives and unconscious symbolism as well as her journey towards a materialist approach to psychoanalysis. Chapter two shows how H.D. adapted Freud’s idea of universal symbols to her feminist mythological system and how this narrative became a defence against the traumatic impact of war-time events. Chapter three explores Bryher’s oscillation between the exclusive image of the pre-oedipal poet and the materialist psychology of her post-war fiction and her cinema articles. Chapter four gives voice to Djuna Barnes’s subversion of psychoanalytic stories of progress that opposed pleasure to reality, myth/fiction to science and passion/sexuality to reason and cultural advancement. 3 Abbreviations BPP: Beyond the Pleasure Principle CC: The Child’s Conception of the World CD: Civilisation and its Discontents CU: Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism FR: The Freud Reader JR: Judgement and Reasoning in the Child LT: Language and Thought of the Child N: Nightwood SS: Sabina Spielrein: Sämtliche Schriften TF: Tribute to Freud TL: Thought and Language 4 Introduction In the autumn of 1938, after Sigmund Freud – like a number of Jewish intellectuals before him – had left his home in Vienna to settle in London, his former patient Hilda Doolittle sent him a cluster of gardenias accompanied by a card. In the context of her friendship with Freud, the flowers had a special meaning. Like the book she would compose six years later, in the autumn of 1944, they were “an offering”, belated words that “she could not speak” (TF 63) at the time of her analysis in 1933/1934. H.D.’s belated words point to an important aspect of her World-War-II writing, to its function as a sequel to her conversation with Freud, a case of auto- analysis after the Professor (as she called him) had joined the ranks of the “Gods” he kept on his writing table (TF 64). For it was these “Gods” to which the 1938 note referred. Freud’s famous collection of antique figurines had just arrived from Vienna. Knowing this, H.D. sent her gift of flowers “to greet the return of the Gods” (TF 63). Freud soon replied, saying that he wasn’t sure if the card read “Gods” or “goods”, but correctly guessing H.D. meant the former. This small anecdote is not only symbolic of a series of misunderstandings that occurred in H.D.’s relationship with her analyst, but also of a deeper tension between materialist and transcendental trends that permeated psychoanalysis, literature, film and politics in this period. For H.D., the figurines on Freud’s table were incarnations of eternal ideas. For Freud, they were representations of universal psychological conflicts, different from, though not unrelated to, the transcultural symbols H.D. discovered in the Freudian unconscious. Occasionally, or so H.D. believed, Freud’s materialist side would come to the fore. It was in these moments – when Freud decided to read “goods” – that problems in their communication arose and that H.D. disparagingly characterised Freud’s approach as “Jewish materialism” (cf. TF 70). H.D. was well aware that “a great many people read goods” in those days and “continued to do so” (TF 64). This did not merely imply discounting the transcendental side of Freud’s teaching. It also referred to the integration of psychoanalysis into the capitalist system, where “doctors charged exorbitant fees for prolonged and expensive treatments” (TF 84).1 Both of these questions – the social role of psychoanalysis and the changing 1 In line with contemporary ethnic prejudice, for H.D. the latter trend was associated with the “Jewish” side of Freudian analysis (see chapter two). 5 negotiation between its transcendental and materialist aspects – are crucial to the (hi)stories presented here. The following chapters will examine this negotiation in the work of one psychoanalyst – Sabina Spielrein – and three modernist women writers: H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman) and Djuna Barnes, along with the immediate circle of artists and scientists with whom they collaborated. The relationship of the four women with psychoanalysis varied in kind and intensity. In 1904-1905, Spielrein was a patient at the Burghölzli asylum in Switzerland (treated by Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler). She was later to become a psychoanalyst herself. H.D. and Bryher were literary authors and film critics who were both at one point treated psychoanalytically: H.D. by Freud in the 1930s and Bryher by Hanns Sachs (one of Freud’s closest associates) in the late 1920s. Bryher began her psychoanalytic training at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, but never became a certified analyst. Djuna Barnes was a literary author who was neither a psychoanalyst nor a psychoanalytic patient, but was clearly familiar with Freud’s and Jung’s theories. As the last chapter will show, her literary work presents one of the most original challenges to the philosophical tenets of Freudian and Jungian analysis in the modernist period. In order to comprehend the significance of these authors’ interventions into the transcendentalist and materialist narratives in psychoanalysis, it is first necessary to say something about their pre-history. In the 1840s and the 1850s, but also for decades afterwards, the medical sciences were dominated by mechanistic theories, which maintained that the human organism works like a complex machine or motor, where each part performs a discrete and specific function (cf. Rabinbach). On both sides of the political spectrum, mechanist sciences were closely intertwined with utilitarian ventures that sought to increase productivity and establish social control. In 1900s and the 1910s, US engineers began to implement Frederick Taylor’s suggestion that the study of human motion and time management could significantly increase production rates in factories. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the same methods were advocated by Aleksei Gastev and his movement for the scientific organization of labour (cf. Olenina). The study of labour efficiency greatly relied on the scientific investigation of reflexes, championed by Ivan Pavlov (who coined the term conditioned reflex) and the neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev. By examining the mechanisms through which 6 ideas or actions became hardwired into the nervous system, Soviet scientists hoped to better both the physical and psychological disposition of their fellow citizens. Already in the 1890s, however, mechanist attempts to study human psychology were being disrupted by scientists who preferred a historical and holistic approach to the mind. In various ways, these scientists argued that processes in the human body could not be studied in isolation. One needed to take into account both the relation of the parts to the whole and the way in which the parts themselves were modified in the course of time. Yet, as Anne Harrington observes in her analysis of German holism, the opposition to mechanism was a politically and culturally varied phenomenon. Even in the 1920s and the 1930s, the oppositional movement still “knew itself best by emphasising what it was not” (xx). In this thesis, I will focus specifically on two types of holism that emerged in psychoanalysis, film, literature and politics in the first half of the twentieth century.