THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT : ENGLISH PSYCHOANALYSIS, LITERATURE AND CRITICISM FROM THE 1920S TO WORLD WAR TWO.
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Whereas recent studies of psychoanalysis and
modernism have tended to 'translate' literature
through contemporary French psychoanalytic thought,
this dissertation opens up a historical dialogue
between English psychoanalysis, modernist writing,
art criticism and literary criticism. I argue that a
shared anxiety about the redemptive role of art in a
period which both writers and analysts characterise
as marked by 'unsublimated' drives towards
destruction, is coupled with an increasing concern
with the precariousness of the frontier between self
and culture, and between art and the social and
political ideologies upon which culture rests. This
double movement is reflected in the structure of the
dissertation which begins with a comparison of
attempts to make a moral and~aesthetic out of 'the
destructive element' by I.A. Richards and Melanie
Klein, and ends with Marion Milner's and Stevie
Smith's speculations on the complicity between the
violence of the self and the violence of the outside
world in the thirties. Other writers discussed
include W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Roger Fry and
Virginia Woolf, as well as Ella Freeman Sharpe, Paula
Heimann, Hanna Segal and Adrian Stokes.
Authors
Stonebridge, LyndseyCollections
- Theses [4223]