In my article, I analyse selected British novels about the First World War published at the turn of the 20th century, from the theoretical perspectives proposed by Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis. Pat Barker in Toby’s Room (2012) and Sue Gee in Earth and Heaven (2000) imagine their protagonists’ difficult evolution from melancholia to mourning after the loss of brothers and/or lovers, at the front. The concepts of incorporation and illness of (...) mourning are used to explore the complicated process of bereavement in Barker’s novel, where hauntology becomes a form of honte-ology, from the French honte, shame. In Gee’s beautifully melancholic novel, the haunting trauma of loss is subtly evoked by images of empty fields, neglected farms, urban vistas filled with spectral figures of unemployed veterans. Moreover, Earth and Heaven affects the reader so deeply because the understated pain of loss becomes movingly tangible after the accidental death of the central protagonist’s six-year-old son, which seems to “condense” the pain of war bereavements a decade after the conflict. My intention is also to demonstrate that Sebastian Faulks in Birdsong (1993), Esther Freud in Summer at Gaglow (1997) and Pat Barker in Another World (1998) approach the Great War as a phantom haunting their contemporary protagonists. The persistence of the unknown past has a profound impact on these characters and only by trying to relate to the Great War do they find answers to their existential dilemmas. This directs our attention to the incomplete processes of First World War mourning, the persistence of endless grief and the potential continuity of unresolved trauma(s) in transgenerational memory. The five novels under consideration also problematise the issue of silence—the unsayable family secret and/or the collective disregard for the national past. The psychoanalytic concept of crypt illuminates the relation between present and past in these fictions and makes it possible to draw a connection with the sociological concept of cultural trauma, referring to certain foundational events constructed as traumatic from the point of view of the British collectivity. (shrink)

This thesis explores how we might think the relation between psychoanalysis and the cultural field through Donald Winnicott’s concept of the environment, seeking to bring the concept into dialogue with more “classical” strands of psychoanalytic theorizing. A substantial introduction sets out the rationale behind the thesis by reading Freud and Winnicott in relation to the “classic” and the “romantic”, or the “negative” and “positive”, in psychoanalytic thought. It goes on to outline the value of bringing these tendencies together in order (...) to think the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and change. The chapters which follow move from psychoanalysis as a “cultural cure” – a method and discourse drawing on and feeding into a broad conception of cultural life – towards a notion of “culture as cure” informed by Winnicott’s theory of the environment. Chapter one examines Freud’s refusal of the “culture”/ “civilization” distinction and considers what it means for the idea of a cultural cure. Chapter two considers whether Winnicott’s thinking about “culture” ultimately prioritises the aesthetic over the political. Chapter three uses Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to explore an analogy between totalitarianism, technology and maternal care. Chapter four turns to the series In Treatment to think about the intersections of therapy and technology in terms of reflection and recognition. Chapter five employs Ian McEwan’s Saturday as a means to reflect on the capacity of culture to cure. Ultimately, I suggest that social “cure” may require more than “good-enough” cultural forms and objects, but Winnicott’s “romantic” theorization of the aesthetic, coupled with a “classic” attention to structures of power and oppression may offer a means of thinking the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture in potentially transformative ways. (shrink)