12 eBooks available.

Nabokov and the Witch Doctor

No novelist has waged a more relentless campaign against the talking cure than Vladimir Nabokov. In novel after novel he has attacked the “Viennese witch doctor,” as he sardonically calls Freud. Of the many types of people Nabokov satirizes, none evokes the foolishness and evil of the psychoanalyst, who embodies the qualities of sham and shaman, Satan and charlatan, simpleton and stereotyper.(68 pp.)

Phillip Roth’s Psychoanalysts

Of all novelists, Roth is the most familiar with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, and from the beginning of his career he has demonstrated a keen interest in the therapeutic process. His characters are the most thoroughly psychoanalyzed in literature. (72 pp.)

Freud Revisited

The White Hotel opens with an exchange of letters among Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, and Hanns Sachs. Although these letters, along with all case studies in the novel, are fictional, Thomas’ Freud abides by the generally known facts of his historical counterpart’s life. Though the psychoanalyst might be jolted by the uncanny reflection greeting his eyes in “Fräu Anna G.,” a reflection highlighting the human face in all its nobility and sorrow, grateful readers need not look beyond the pleasure principle to appreciate The White Hotel. (69 pp.)

The Unrestful Cure

In writing “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman became a psychiatrist herself in the advice she offered to the nervous women who might be reading her story. She was not only shrinking her former psychiatrist to his proper size but also offering her readers the sympathy and understanding that the medical establishment could not give to women. (65 pp.)

Tender is the Night

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S Tender Is the Night (1934) remains one of the most profoundly moving psychiatric case studies in American literature and was born from the novelist’s anguished experience with mental illness. (66 pp.)

Religious Conversion or Therapy

It is clear from Eliot’s writings that he identified Freud as the embodiment of the pernicious secularism assaulting age-old religious truths. (79 pp.)

If Writing is Not an Outlet, What is?

Despite the extensive research on Plath’s work, little has been written about her fascination with psychiatry and its importance to her life and art. The Bell Jar, published in England one month before her death, describes the events leading up to Plath’s initial collapse. (83 pp.)

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

The best-selling novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a powerful description of a young woman’s battle against schizophrenia. Rose Garden remains one of the most psychologically sophisticated literary representations of mental illness. (58 pp.)

Doris Lessing’s Antipsychiatry

Doris Lessing has established herself as the most eloquent voice in the antipsychiatry movement. Her characters are particularly vulnerable to mental breakdowns, and they embark upon odysseys that lead them to the doorstep of psychiatry and, if they are lucky, beyond. They are endlessly medicated, tranquilized, psychoanalyzed, and institutionalized. The unfortunate characters, dependent upon conventional psychiatrists, lose their minds and become burned out shells, victims of what Lessing calls a Dark Age approach to mental illness. Along with the condemnation of psychiatry is the belief that characters need never have been ill, that their illnesses were in fact caused by psychiatry and modern science.(81 pp.)

The Talking Cure:Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis

“The talking cure” was the expression coined by Bertha Pappenheim–the subject of the first celebrated case history in psychoanalysis–to describe the magical power of language to diminish mental suffering. From its beginnings, psychoanalysis has inspired countless novels dramatizing the psychotherapeutic process and using the patient-analyst relationship to explore psychological, moral and philosophical questions.

The Talking Cure is a well-written and evocative book that analyzes these relationships as portrayed by modern writers, including Philip Roth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath. The first critical analysis of the ways in which psychoanalysts are depicted in literature, it asks a number of crucial questions: How do creative writers portray psychoanalysis? What is the effect of psychotherapy on the creative process? Which prominent artists suffered psychological breakdowns and later wrote, in however disguised form, about their experience in therapy? Why does Freud continue to fascinate–and in some cases, obsess–the artist?

Of the nine writers discussed, seven have had experiences with mental illness serious enough to require hospitalization or prolonged psychoanalytic treatment, including Charlotte Perkins (“The Yellow Wallpaper”), Joanne Greenberg (I Never Promised You A Rose Garden), Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook), Eliot, Fitzgerald, and Plath. In a number of cases Jeffrey Berman has uncovered the actual published psychiatric case study that sheds light on the novelist’s portrayal of mental illness and therapeutic cure.

The first major study of the characterization of the psychoanalyst in literature, The Talking Cure is a fascinating book that provides a critical new approach to the portrayal of the patient-analyst relationship, the effect of psychotherapy on the creative process, and the ways in which a writer transmutes case study material into art. (574 pp.)

Download Author: Berman, Jeffrey, Ph.D.