Transformation of Dr Freud

Abstract

This chapter sets out to study the appearance of Sigmund Freud in five works of fiction published since 1971. The five narratives make use of the famous psychoanalyst for various purposes according to individual thematic emphases. In quantitative terms they represent a considerable range, from Freud’s complete domination of Irving Stone’s The Passions of the Mind and Carey Harrison’s Freud. A Novel through Anthony Burgess’s The End of the World News and D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel in which we find him playing a less dominant but more intriguing role, to E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, in which he enters the action for a short while only.

‘The biography stands, fat and worthy-burgherish on the shelf, boastful and sedate: a shilling life will give you all the facts, a ten pound one all the hypotheses as well. But think of everything that got away, that fled with the last deathbed exhalation of the biographee.’ (Barnes, 1985, p. 38)