| In the forties and fifties, psychoanalytic thought moved from the highest intellectual circles to movies and pop-psychology. From its more complicated nuanced forms to what Lionel Trilling called its "absurd simplifications," psychoanalysis permeated American culture so thoroughly that it was hard to define just where Freudian influence on literature began and ended. This dissertation explores what it meant to be a poet or writer in an intellectual climate so saturated with Freudian thought. To approach the problem of Freudian influence, the discussion focuses on a circle of writers, Mary McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, tracing each writer's individual relation to psychoanalysis as it manifests itself in their work.;Aside from his strong cultural presence, Freud poses a natural threat to the position of the writer as a rival inventor of human character. One of the stories this dissertation tells is a story of competition. Mary McCarthy writes about a character who thinks of herself as a "Freudian classic," and Vladimir Nabokov's Humbert Humbert invents dreams for his psychiatrist that are "pure classics in style." The pressing literary question of the period, then, becomes how not to write a Freudian classic.;As the conflict between psychoanalysis and art plays itself out in literature, the larger question that emerges is how individual writers strain against dominant ways of thinking in order to clear space for their own invention.;Many of the writers of the period reacted against the Freud they found everywhere, facile, obvious, the ubiquitous oedipal complex to explain everything. John Berryman has a poem which begins "Freud was some wrong about dreams" and Vladimir Nabokov writes, "I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud." But even for the writers most hostile to psychoanalysis, Freud was still a force to be reckoned with. Writing for an audience so attuned to psychoanalytic resonances, so used to thinking in terms of conscious and subconscious, repression and symbols, a cigar could no longer be just a cigar. |
