NICOLI-1 WARD _]()UVl-l

Virginia Woolf and psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis
is the science and clinical pr-actice that was born from
Freuds discoverylof the unconscious and that began to spread with the
publication of his Inter/iretzztion of Dreams in I900. Freuds invention of
the talking cure placed language rmly at the centre of its theory and
practice. Throughout the twentieth century, in the West, psychoanalysis has
had a huge impact on how human beings think of their own mental and
psychic life. It has led to new ways of looking at art, new ways of reading
texts, literature
in particular.
Woolfs relation to psychoanalysis was manifold. Critics have interpreted
it essentially in three ways: in terms of her own mental illness; of her
involvement
in, knowledge of and attitude to Freud and his followers; of
the impact of psychoanalytic concepts upon her own writing and of the
occurrence,
in her writing and relation to language, of concepts and
practices similar or alternative to psychoanalytic
ones. In addition, psycho~
analytic interpretations of her life and work have been offered. This triple
or quadruple relation is fraught with paradoxes and questions which this
essay will attempt to place before the reader.
Woolfs life is contemporary with the birth and development of psycho-
analysis
as a therapeutic science and practice. In the |92.os Freuds Works
and ideas spread to F.ngland largely through the so~called Bloomsbury
circles in which Woolf moved. Indeed, 40 per cent of the worlds psycho-
analysts were then in England. Woolf herself suffered from bouts of
insanity. Yet psychoanalysis does not seem to have been considered as a
possible cure, least of all by herself: might it have helped? Also, moving as
she did in a milieu steeped in Freuds ideas, Woolfs recorded reactions
suggest strong hostility to those ideas, and her own writing seems to luau
no trace of what might be called an influence. Searching the ltllc|'s .|||<l
journals for signs of admiration or informed knowledge, one t-m"oun|t-|-.
instead ironic or dismissive asides. Yet manifold recent readings oi Wm-ll
novels show her to be consciously re-writing and counit-riup_ liu-ml|.ni
Virginia \X/oolf and p_~.yt'l\oaii.ilys|s
-.ueh parallels with any of \X/oolfs contemporaries. But it is relevant lo how
I reuds initiation of psychoanalysis and Woolfs own madness liave been
pi-rceived and interpreted by recent Western feminisms'. They have repeal
ully stressed that psychoanalysis was born from work on hysteria ~ that the
hysterics symptoms spoke of repressed trauma. The hysterics that Freud
-..iw being treated by (Iharcot were all female. Dora, the young woman
whom he attempted to treat by means of the talking cure in 1900, had been
lraumatised by a complex family situation sexually pursued by a family
lriend of her fathers age whilst her father was having an affair with the
lriends wife. Alice Miller, in Thou Shalt Not Be Au/are, points out that in
I896 Freud had posited that at the bottom of all cases of hysteria he had
studied there \A/SP6 occurrences of premature sexual experiences, generally
incest, often seduction by the father? Later on, however, being unwilling to
believe so many perverted acts had been committed by respectable family
inen, Freud abandoned the seduction theory and replaced it with the drive
theory, the idea that it was the childs own unconscious desire for the
parent that led to the delusion of seduction. In Woolfs time the latter view
had been accepted; her own sister-in-law Karin Stephen held it."
Throughout the 1980s in the west awareness has grown of the extent to
which children were sexually abused, often by a close member of the
family, in incestuous situations. What Florence Rush had called the hest-
kept secret ceased to be a secret, and one scandal after another erupted,
especially in the USA, and in Great Britain as the scale of the problem
became clear. Some forms of psychotherapy even came to rest on the idea
that sexual ahuse was at the core of any psychic disturbance evinced by
young women, and that recalling the ahuse could constitute the cure. Freud
was seen as the man who had rst of all come to perceive this (the seduction
theory) but who, with the drive theory, had betrayed the truth and his
female patients with it.5 In this perspective, l~reudianbased psychoanalysis
came to be seen as a new form of repression, resisted by former analysts
like Alice Miller, who denounced a parental conspiracy to prevent children
from being aware.
There are diverging versions of the severity, frequency and nature ol
\X/oolfs mental illness, and even of what the diagnosis should be: manic
depression? (Iyclothymia (i.e., periodic breakdowns interspersed by long
periods of sanity)? Hysteria? Schizophrenia? Should words like inadm-as
or insanity be used or are they crude and inappropriate? In her vip,o|'oi|s
biography, in what is clearly a rebuff to hard terminology or the si".||< ll
for single causes, Hermione Lee states: Virginia \X/oolf was a sane won|.|n
who had an illness . . . Her illness is attributable to genetic, l'l\VllH|lllI<'I|l.ll
and biological factors. It was periodic, and recurrent. The l'\\l oi l\4|
Nl(Z()l.li \V/\RU ]()[IVl-I
nolious about the unconscious, the Oedipus Complex, feinalr -1'-llillll
Hid \Xoolfgathe|" enough about psychoanalytic concepts througli .| ||||u IS;
ol second-hand immersion and osmosis to be able to re-handle Ml
II lllle
them? ()r is it the case that such understandings were in the an am Hill
that a novelist like Woolf and a scientist like Freud were at the saint Hlllr
and with different means exploring the same psychic realities? \lu-nlil =1
fluid notion of intertextuality
replace that of influence?
lt is worth noting at the outset that interest in Woolfs in-depth n-l.n|-|||
to psychoanalysis has come almost exclusively from feminist critics. I Inn hi
not to invalidate or relativise their work: l would he loath to do that
counting myself among them. But I do feel the need to stress that ll in mu
that such interest bears the mark of its epoch. Woolf criticism as it n-l.|n s
to psychoanalytic
issues is gender-marked. And periodmarked,
as lllll
herself inevitably and fruitfully was. Whatever the degree of her ignoiant 1-
of or hostility to Freud himself, her own writing about female desire and
the relation to the Mother was part and parcel of the question of feilmlr
sexuality that was being debated in the 1920s through overt or cow-1|
dialogue with Freud. It is certainly relevant that from the 1970s onwanl-i,
many women writers should have felt that for female identity to In
adequately explored, Freudian or Freudian-orientated
concepts needed In
be eschewed or redened. This led to new perceptions of Woolfs own
redefinitions
of such concepts as well as to a desire to make Woolf into .1
champion: the great woman writer was seen as one who stood for .u|
affirmation of sexual cliffcrence and for anti~patriarchal
versions of wbal ll
is to he a woman. That she did these things deliberately, masterfully as ll
were, was somehow of the essence of what was being asked of her. This has
made Woolfs relation to psychoanalysis
as we at present describe ll
inseparable from the question ofgender.
Psychoanalysis
and W00lfs madness
Sigmund Freud was almost twenty~six and about to become engaged when
Virginia Woolf was born, in 1881. She was two when he went to Paris to
study hysteria under (lharcot, thirteen when her mother died and Freud co
published the Studies in Hysteria (1895). She was close to Doras age when
Ill moo a young hysterical woman called Dora was taken to Freud by her
lailicr to be analysed, and when The Interpretation of Dreams came out.
l>\ l\)l._, when she married Leonard Woolf, Freud had published much,
lIvl||HllLl
the Psychoanalytic
Society, and his ideas were becoming interna-
i|on.|llv l<nown.
llnr. may be no more than a coincidence of dates: one could establish
Vtrginia Wooll and ps.yel1<>.\i|.\lysis
prompted to do so by her initial encounter with psychoanalytic notions. ln
November I920 she read a paper to the Freudian-inspired Memoir (jlnhz
she called it zz Hyde Park Gate, which was the address at which the
Stephen family had been living when she was a child and evoked (ieurge
l)uckworths malefactions, his visits to her hed which lasted through the
many years of her adolescence and young womanhood, which she felt had
spoilt her life for her before it had fairly hegnn." But in i939, when Woolf
began to write her autobiography, A Sketch of the Past, she Went deeper
and further hack. She embarked upon what she called her autoanalysis""
a kind of catharsis through writing and attempted to recall her feelings as
well as tell what had happened. In A Sketch of the Past she came to
connect her appalling moments of depression, the sense which she had
earlier de/scribed as being exposed on a high ledge in full light"' with a
childhood experience: she was six or seven and recovering from a bad bout
of flu when her step-brother Gerald Duckworth lifted her up on a ledge
usually used for stacking dishes and explored her body, down to her
private parts. '1 Louise DeSalvo connects Woolfs writing of A Sketch of
the Past which induced, or was unable to lighten, a growingly unbearable
hurden of feelings, with her recent encounter with Freud. She reads Woolfs
diary remark that Freud reduced her to a Wl'1lllp()t)ll'l as the feeling that
she was being yet further repressed: since Freud had ended up denying the
seduction theory, he would have heen invalidating the memories she was
recapturing. This denial, combined with terror of a (hodily) invasion of
England by the Nazis, contributed to her suicide. Whilst] would agree with
DeSalvo that Woolfs treatment at the hands of her step-brothers and the
feelings of rage and outrage that must as a result have been simmering deep
inside may well have heen one of the determining factors in her psychic
illness, I feel one must refrain from laying Woolfs suicide at Freuds door,
as DeSalvo almost does. It was Moses and Monothcism that Woolf is
known to have been reading around 1939, not the Dom Case or the Studies
in I-I)/steria.
DeSa1vos case may he excessive, and has been questioned, especially in
the USA, in a variety of ways hut especially on the grounds of simplistic
psychoanalytic interpretations. '4 Her readings are one-sided, unsympa-
thetic to the various men in Woolfs life (for what damage had the
l)uckworth brothers themselves suffered as children, what models of adult
behaviour had they been given for them to be so abusive of their half-
siblings? (loultl one not lay Leslie Stephens neurotic and selsh behaviour
at the door of his own mad father?). Damage in families travels in many
t
directions. 'l he French child analyst Francoise Dolto claims that it takes
three generations of neurotics to produce one psychotic child: it would he
ll \\l\RI) |Ull\| NILU .~. "
Madness chapter is devoted to a rich description of the intricacies of thi-
case. That it was a major element of Woolf"s life, and a component
of her
talent is difficult to dispute. Virginia Woolf had her first bout of insanity
after her mothers death when she was thirteen in 1895. She broke down
again after her fathers death in 1904, then in 1910 after years lled with
family trouble (including her hrother Thobys death), after she had been
working on her rst novel, The Voyage Out. And then again after a year of
marriage to Leonard Woolf. Further breakdowns followed, which have
often been linked with the strain of working on, or completing,
a work of
ction, but not always and not only. In almost all of these attacks, she tried
to kill herself. They are dramatically signalled by periodic interruptions in
the Diaries. There is no clear evidence to connect them with any one cause.
Hermione Lee states that the illness; was precipitated,
but not indubitably
caused, by the things which happened to her.7 This statement (which is not
open to more subtle psychoanalytic
interpretations)
together with the
accounts of history of mental disturbance in the Stephen family and the
manifold pressures and miseries the Stephen children had to survive, are
offered by Hermione Lee as correctives
to a psyehoanalysis-inspired
version
of Woolf that has been influential:
Louise DeSalvos.
Louise DeSalvo made a powerful effort to trace the attacks back to abuse
which Virginia would have been subjected to as early as when she was six.
The whole context of post-i98os discovery of the societal extent of
childhood sexual abuse, and its damaging consequences,
as well as new
feminist research initiated in the United States under _]ane Marcuss impact
are relevant to her thesis. Hers is the major study, using psychoanalytic
concepts and resisting them at the same time, to place Woolfs madness
centre-stage
and to interpret it in terms of the incestuous
advances she
suffered at the hands of her two step-brothers,
Gerald and George Duck-
worth. DeSalvo very much counters earlier rosy accounts of the Stephen
family, stressing instead the patterns of repression, neglect and even cruelty
that made it up. Witness, she argues, the familys pitilessness to Leslie
Stephens daughter from his rst marriage, Laura, punished for her
perverse behaviour, locked away in the home and eventually sent to an
asylum. Or Leslies exploitation
of Stella Duckworth,
julia Stephens
daughter by her rst marriage: he used her as a replacement mother to his
children after his wife ]ulias death. She died early, and then Vanessa,
Virginias other sister, was exploited in her turn. DeSalvo also adduces the
violent intrusive visits of 2| mad cousin, j. K. Stephen, in pursuit of Stella
and allowed to roam the house, and the general neediness and predatori-
Hess of the men in the Stephen circle. She points out that Woolf herself had
-.|r<-ssetl the importance
of the abuse she had suffered, and had been
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