Dr Kay Souter

Virginia Woolf was perhaps the first person to give an account of the effect of psychoanalytically ‘healing herself’ in the way that Peter Conrad describes. In her memoir Moments of Being, she famously wrote
Until I was in my forties . . . the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day’s doings. . .  she obsessed me, in spite of the fact that she died when I was thirteen, until I was forty-four. Then one day walking around Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked…when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed with my mother. I no longer heard her voice; I do not see her. I suppose I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest. (Woolf, 1976)
In view of the fact that Woolf was chronically irritated with institutional psychoanalysis for its then belief (she was 44 in 1926) that her previous psychotic episodes meant that psychoanalysis could not help her, this is particularly touching testimony. Her connection with psychoanalysis was long-standing and intimate: her brother and sister-in-law Adrian and Karin Stephen had become members of the British Psychoanalytic Society as early as 1927, James Strachey was the brother of Lytton, briefly her fiancé, and there were many other friendships and connections. It was not long before Woolf first ‘made up’ To the Lighthouse that James Strachey had first discussed the possibility of Hogarth Press, the Woolfs’ publishing company, undertaking a complete translation of the works of Freud. Because Leonard Woolf had a tremor that made it impossible, Virginia Woolf was the compositor, setting much of the type by hand. Her relationship with the early writings and practitioners of psychoanalysis is thus a mixture of the closest physical and intellectual connection and something like emotional neglect: while she had lived closely with both the individuals and the texts, she had never been an analysand. By 1926, as psychoanalysis flooded her world, she must have been sick of it.

She thus, and probably unwittingly, followed Freud’s path: where there was no analyst who could or would help, she performed an heroic self-analysis. In doing this, she didn’t, of course, use Freud’s method, but instead allowed a new novel to ‘bubble’ and ‘blow’ out of her mind. When we read this majestic and elegiac work, it is clear how much it helped her. It remembers, repeats and works through; it celebrates the loved past, grieves for the dead,  and welcomes the future in an extraordinary and perhaps unequalled blend of mourning and celebration. It seems calm and centred even in examining its pain and loss.

Woolf’s novel in some measure healed the writer and although it is a difficult novel, it can do similar things for readers. The image of ideas blowing out of the mind like bubbles out of a pipe and shaping the lips, causing them to ‘syllable’ of their own accord, powerfully suggests something of the pressure, the pleasure, the unconstrained easiness and the performative evanescence of the experience of making up the novel. It also suggests something of the experience of the reader ‘getting it’, as the novel’s scenes, ideas, emotions ‘blow into’ the reader’s mind as they once ‘blew out of’ Woolf’s in Tavistock Square. I would say that the writing cure can be, and perhaps (except at the ecstatic moment of composition that Woolf describes, a moment which does not include hours of tedious rewriting, proof-reading, editing and so on) must be, also a reading cure, and in a sense an interpersonal one, linking writer and reader via a creative work.

This is perhaps part of what Freud meant when, as Maurice Whelan quotes him, he wrote to Arthur Schnitzler
whenever I get deeply interested in your beautiful creations I always seem to find behind their poetic sheen the same pre-suppositions, interests and conclusions as those familiar to me as my own … all that moves me with an uncanny feeling of familiarity.
That experience of meeting ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ in literature may in one sense seem mundane, but in fact, as Freud is suggesting, it can perform the analytic function of opening our own mind to ourselves. That interpersonal ‘bubbling’ of ideas through literary art is a gift to the many who are not creative writers, or not great writers; and it goes some way to answering Maurice Whelan’s final question, what about internal constraint? Internal constraint is one of life‘s givens, but the role of the other can help us with it, in the talking, writing or reading cures. I think it’s in part the way that individuals ‘rewrite’ the texts they read, mobilizing the ‘uncanny feeling of familiarity’, that helps to dislodge constraint and move the reader towards greater insight and freedom. This is of course also true for writers as readers, as Freud, the winner of the Goethe Prize for Literature, makes plain when writing to Schnitzler.



Dr Kay Souter
English, La Trobe University,
Melbourne.