Psychoanalysis,Psychiatry and Modernist Literature

by Kylie Valentine

Two developments during the modernist period - the consolidation of psychiatry as a medical speciality and the emergence of psychoanalysis - affected the representation of madness in literature. They also influenced the ways psychic distress was experienced, narrated, and understood. Literature and criticism in turn affected the formation of the modern psychological self. Presenting detailed readings of both canonical and non-canonical modernists like Virginia Woolf and Emily Holmes Coleman, this book argues that modernist madness can be understood as experience, clinical discourse and cultural representation.

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 22, 2003

Reviews

[The Awdude · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a decent history of psychiatry and the notion of madness as a cultural construction, and it's also a somewhat decent, and entertaining, account of Virginia Woolf's relationship with Freud and the budding field of psychoanalysis. What it is not, is a coherent argument. Sometimes it's quite difficult to discern what Valentine's argument even is. She takes far too much issue with Foucault, the foundation of which seems to be a fundamental misreading of his work, and thereafter she argues obscurely for nothing in particular. The most frustrating thing about this book, though, is how terrible the writing is. Valentine's word choice and her fumblingly awful command of grammar make for an altogether laborious read. Theory may be inherently abstruse and inaccessible, but novice theorists have a way of making it damn near incomprehensible.

[Burcu]

More the psychoanalysis than the psychiatry, more the doctoral thesis than the monograph.