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.)
Download Author: Berman, Jeffrey, Ph.D.
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.)
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.)
Narcissism and the Novel
In this encompassing study, Jeffrey Berman investigates the increasingly significant phenomenon of narcissism and its presence in classic novels. While paying special attention to the theories of Freud and the post-Freudian theorists Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut, Berman provides an insightful exploration of the meaning and history of the narcissistic complex, beginning with Ovid’s myth. Concentrating on an examination of seven classic novels–Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Jude the Obscure, Sons and Lovers, and Mrs. Dalloway–according to these psychoanalytic theories, this book brings an entirely new understanding to these and other works of Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. In this lucid application of psychoanalytic theory to literature, Berman adds clarity to one of the most confusing areas of psychoanalytic study.
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