The making of modern madness : British modernism, psychoanalysis and psychiatry between the wars

Abstract

The thesis offers a contribution to the history of psychoanalysis. It examines the institutional history of psychoanalysis, and is attentive also to textual approaches. It brings together diverse critical approaches, fiom the history and philosophy of science, literary criticism and philosophy. This institutional history is complemented by a critical textual approach. Drawing on existing literature that undertakes intertextual analysis between psychoanalytic and modernist texts, the relationship between modernism and psychoanalysis is presented as crucial to the formation of both these fields. The thesis also offers a history of modernism that focuses on both institutions and the complexity of individual texts. The institutional history of modernism draws on feminist and Marxist mapping of the modernist field and investigations into the complex and contradictory politics of modernism. Imperialism in particular is foregrounded as a vital force acting on the field of British modernism, as are the twin imperialist disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Finally, the thesis provides a new conceptual model for the understanding of . madness, an important but increasingly neglected area of feminist investigation. This model provides a means of analysing in novel ways a number of texts that have long been understood as paradigmatic of both madness and modernism: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and selections from her Diary, Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass and Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow. In addition, the diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman and her correspondence with Djuna Barnes are analysed. This correspondence and ‘private’ writing offers a new possibility for understanding feminist interventions into the experience of mental distress, the experience of psychiatric incarceration, and the cultural meanings invested in madness.