Archaeologies of the Mind: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Pre-Freudian Psychology of the Unconscious
Abstract
This essay analyses the representation of mental processes in James Joyce’s Ulysses in light of ‘scientific’ or ‘experimental’ psychology, whose impact on the composition of the novel has been quite underestimated. Since concepts such as ‘unconscious cerebration’ and ‘mental latency’, or the theorisation of a close connection between dreams and repression, regularly appeared in nineteenth-century psychological treatises along with discussions of insanity and deranged states of consciousness, these ideas are likely to have made inroads into the cultural milieu in which Ulysses was composed. By analysing the stratified representation of the characters’ minds, this essay attempts to read the novel through a focus on pre-Freudian conceptions of unconscious mental processes and latent memory, and to show that some of the ideas propounded by early psychologists may have provided the substance for Joyce’s understanding of the functioning of consciousness, the unconscious and memory portrayed in Ulysses.
Downloads
References
Barnes, Djuna, “James Joyce”, Vanity Fair, 18 (1922): 65-104.
Belluc, Sylvain - Valérie, “Introduction”, Cognitive Joyce, Eds. Sylvain Belluc - Valérie Bénéjam, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018: 1-29.
Bourne Taylor, Jenny - Shuttleworth, Sally (eds.), Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830-1890, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998.
Brivic, Sheldon, Joyce Between Freud and Jung, Port Washington, Kennikat, 1980.
Carpenter, William, Principles of Mental Physiology, London, Henry S. King, 1874.
Ellenberger, Henri, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, London, Fontana Press, 1994.
Ellmann, Richard, The Consciousness of Joyce, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977.
Id., James Joyce, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982.
Friedman, Susan Stanford, “The Return of the Repressed in Joyce: (Self)Censorship and the Making of a Modernist”, The Languages of Joyce, Eds. Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli - Carla Marengo Vaglio - Christine Van Boheemen, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 1992: 55-68.
Id., Joyce: The Return of the Repressed, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993.
Gillespie, Michael Patrick, Inverted Volumes Improperly Arranged: James Joyce and His Trieste Library, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1983.
Id., James Joyce’s Trieste Library: A Catalogue of Materials at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 1986.
Groth, Helen, “The Mind as Palimpsest: Art, Dreaming and James Sully’s Aesthetics of Latency”, Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind, Eds. Chris Danta - Helen Groth, London, Bloomsbury, 2014: 107-21.
Hamilton, William, Lectures on Metaphysics, Edinburgh, William Blackwood, 1877.
Harrington, Anne, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1987.
Herr, Cheryl, “Art and Life, Nature and Culture, Ulysses”, Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective, Eds. Robert D. Newman - Weldon Thornton, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1987: 19-38.
Holland, Henry, Chapters on Mental Physiology, London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852.
Jay, Martin, “Modernism and the Specter of Psychologism”, Modernism/Modernity, 3.2 (1996): 93-111.
Johnson, George, Dynamic Psychology in Modernist British Fiction, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Joyce, James, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986.
Kimball, Jean, “Family Romance and Hero Myth: A Psychoanalytic Context for the Paternity Theme in Ulysses”, James Joyce Quarterly, 20.2 (1983): 161-73.
Id., “Jung’s ‘Dual Motherʼ in Joyce’s Ulysses: An Illustrated Psychoanalytic Intertext”, Journal of Modern Literature, 17.4 (1991): 477-90.
Lewes, George Henry, Problems of Life and Mind, London, Trübner & Co., 1874.
Lindberg, Erik. “Returning the Repressed: The Unconscious in Victorian and Modernist Narrative”, Narrative, 8.1 (2000): 66-86.
Lusty, Natalya - Groth, Helen, Dreams and Modernity: A Cultural History, New York, Routledge, 2013.
Maher, Michael, Psychology: Empirical and Rational, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1890.
Matus, Jill, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Micale, Mark, “Introduction: The Modernist Mind: A Map”, The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940, Ed. Mark Micale, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004: 1-19.
Rickard, John, Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses, Durham, Duke University Press, 1999.
Ryan, Judith, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Rylance, Rick, Victorian Psychology and British Culture, 1850-1880, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.
Shechner, Mark, Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Ulysses, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1974.
Smith, Roger, “The Physiology of the Will: Mind, Body, and Psychology in the Periodical Literature, 1855-1875”, Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, Ed. Geoffrey Cantor - Sally Shuttleworth, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2004: 81-110.
Thurston, Luke, James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Van Mierlo, Wim, “The Freudful Couchmare Revisited: Contextualizing Joyce and the New Psychology”, Joyce Studies Annual, 8 (1997): 115-53.
Wigan, Arthur, A New View of Insanity: The Duality of the Mind, London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844.
Winter, Alison, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Copyright Notice
You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to adapt the work. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
