Abstract
Sigmund Freud’s early psychoanalytical theories were based upon his studies of hysteria and obsessional neurosis, and for all their subsequent expansion and mutation they continue to be marked, for both good and ill, by their origin in the analysis of the neuroses. This is no less true of Freud’s ventures into aesthetics or literary criticism than it is of his more strictly professional work. His clinical experience of the psychoses was minimal and even his major paper on the paranoiac Schreber is based only on the Senatspräsident’s autobiography.1 He could accordingly never produce an adequate theory to explain the differential bases of the neuroses and the psychoses. The most significant developments in psychoanalysis outside the Freudian camp, however, have been grounded precisely in the study of psychosis, often carried out in mental asylums. For these more radical disturbances of the psyche, including schizophrenia, manic depression and paranoia, are characterised by a failure in reality-testing. Unlike the neurotic, the psychotic patient cannot know that he or she is ill; phantasy omnipotently invests the outside world and thereby becomes ‘insanity’. Carl Gustav Jung investigated schizophrenia during his nine years as an assistant in a Zurich mental hospital (1900–9), and whatever personal factors were operative in his break with Freud in 1913, the antagonism is principally that between a theorist of the neuroses and a student of psychosis.
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Notes
Sigmund Freud, ‘Psychoanalytical Notes on an Autobiographical Account of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)’, in Case Histories II, trs. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards, vol. IX of the Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) pp. 129–223.
For a brief account of Jung that makes some useful contrasts with Klein see Anthony Storr, Jung (London: Fontana, 1973); and for a fuller critique
Edward Glover, Freud or Jung? (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950).
Cited in Hanna Segal, Klein, Fontana Modern Masters (London: Fontana, 1979).
Cited in Peter Fuller, Art and Psychoanalysis (London: Writers and Readers, 1980) p. 112.
See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trs. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1974) pp. 30–3, 44–50.
Melanie Klein, ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, in Envy and Gratitude and Other Works1946–1963 (London: Hogarth, 1975) pp. 1–24.
Cited in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trs. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth, 1973) p. 210.
Melanie Klein, The Psychoanalysis of Children (London: Hogarth, 1975).
Cited in Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981) p. 143. See the use of Hegel in
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness and Self and Others (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965 and 1969).
Melanie Klein, ‘Symbol Formation and its Importance in the Development of the Ego’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921;#x2013;45 (London: Hogarth, 1975) pp. 220–1.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva;’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trs. James Strachey, vol. IX (London: Hogarth, 1966) pp. 3–95.
New Directions in Psycho-analysis, ed. Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann and R. E. Money-Kyrle (London: Tavistock, 1955).
Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, in Case Histories I, trs. James Strachey, vol. VIII of the Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) pp. 163–305.
D. W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth, 1977) p. xxxvii.
For Lacan the ‘mirror phase’ is a preliminary fixing or ‘roughcast’ of the ego, which is the very reverse of what Winnicott intends. See Lacan’s ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Écrits: A Selection, trs. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977) pp. 1–7.
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© 1984 Tony Pinkney
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Pinkney, T. (1984). Theoretical Preliminaries: Klein, Winnicott and Psychoanalytic Aesthetics. In: Women in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. Macmillan Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06666-7_1
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