"Working through" and the novel.

Abstract

Prone to jargon, psychoanalytic literary criticism must be circumspect lest it appear narrow, sectarian, judgmental or exploit a particular psychoanalytic theory. Salient imagery, symbolism, metaphor, and psychologically intuitive characterization in the novel may be viewed as evocative of central, conflictual, predominantly unconscious source of experience or fantasy (Arlow, 1979) synchronizing with autobiographical and biographical data in achieving more dynamic, interpretive syntheses. VW's emotional state is an emergent of her total personality interacting with and evolving in her highly complex family milieu. Though she claimed writing the novel modulated the preoccupation with her parents, essentially VW did not resolve her obsession with the cumulative and untimely deaths of her parents and siblings but engaged in her writing in a perpetual mourning of these and other psychological losses for most of her life. Her life and work reflect the processes of "repetition" and "elaboration" also intrinsic to the psychoanalytic process but she did not achieve the memory "reconstructions" and "changes in self-esteem" alluded to by Kris (1956a, 1956b) and Greenson (1965) as intrinsic to the psychoanalytic experience of insight and "working through."