Psychoanalytic approaches

Abstract

The connection between psychoanalysis and Woolf seems overdetermined. Firstly, the development of psychoanalysis and Woolf’s life were contemporaneous and psychoanalysis was profoundly influential on early twentieth-century intellectual life. Woolf’s connection with Freud goes further; she was close to the source of dissemination of his theories via the Hogarth Press and her friends and family circle. Bloomsbury played a major role in bringing Freud’s theories to England with James Strachey, Lytton’s younger brother, and his wife Alix as central figures of this English psychoanalytic movement. Woolf’s younger brother, Adrian Stephen, and his wife Karin also became professional psychoanalysts. In 1924 the Hogarth Press became the official publisher of the entire ‘International Psycho-Analytical Library’, (which means all the writings of Freud and his other followers), and had James Strachey as the official translator as well as the editor of the Standard Edition.¹ While the circumstantial connection between Woolf and psychoanalysis seems so obvious, its actual relationship is far from straightforward and her response seems ambivalent. She maintained a deliberate distance from it until the later years of her life. There is no record until a diary entry late in 1939 that she read Freud, though, according to Leonard Woolf, it seems that she read at least The Psychopathology of Everyday Life before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway.²