Freud, women authors, and continuing research for the White Whale
It says something about the loss of esteem psychoanalysis as a discipline has suffered that the YA biography of Sigmund Freud I just read is subtitled "Famous Neurologist." I did learn from it, however, that the Chinese have taken to the talking cure in a big way, and that psychoanalysis via Skype from US therapists is currently popular in China. Who knew?
I am almost finished with Regeneration by Pat Barker. It's a classic, but from my point of view, it's worth reading because it deals with (a) real people (Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, as well as the main psychiatrist character William Rivers); (b) psychoanalysis; and (c) World War I (albeit the middle of it versus the run-up to it, which is the time frame for my project). I couldn't really not read it, could I? Also, I have in my own way been taking up the Tempest Challenge, and Barker is a woman.
(Concentrating on authors who aren't white and male while researching pre-1914 Austria-Hungary isn't easy, but it's doable! Memoirs by Alma Mahler and Lou Andreas-Salome count, and there was a terrific book by Lavender Cassels called Clash of Generations about Archduke Rudolf's travails as Crown Prince, struggling against the hidebound thinking of his father and the rest of the Habsburg court, among other things. I have read other challenge-appropriate stuff in between these works, including Blair Tindall's notorious classical-music memoir Mozart in the Jungle - haven't seen the TV series yet, but it sounds very loosely based on the book - and a couple of books by Laurie Colwin, who I have mixed feelings about. Perhaps I'll elaborate in another post.)
Regeneration is very good, by the way, and it's given me a lot to think about on how to depict therapy sessions on the page. I've been in therapy, but my thinking was that it was handled very differently a century ago. Maybe Barker is putting a late-20th-century gloss on early-20th-century therapy technique, but it rings true to me. Which means I have a lot more flexibility in how to show Freud doing his work. This is only fair - it's well known that Freud often didn't practice what he preached with respect to clinical distance from patients. With Rudolf, the question of that distance is complicated by several factors - the ruler-subject relationship and how strictly Rudolf may have viewed it (his father Franz Joseph took it very seriously indeed), the relative closeness in age of Freud and Rudolf (Rudolf was two years younger than Freud, far closer in age to him than almost any of his patients), the openness with which the therapy takes place (in my thinking, not very at all given the delicacy of the situation in Europe at the time), etc. So much world-building to think about! I almost wish I didn't have to translate at the same time, but of course, I didn't have to - that was entirely my choice, too.
I am almost finished with Regeneration by Pat Barker. It's a classic, but from my point of view, it's worth reading because it deals with (a) real people (Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen, as well as the main psychiatrist character William Rivers); (b) psychoanalysis; and (c) World War I (albeit the middle of it versus the run-up to it, which is the time frame for my project). I couldn't really not read it, could I? Also, I have in my own way been taking up the Tempest Challenge, and Barker is a woman.
(Concentrating on authors who aren't white and male while researching pre-1914 Austria-Hungary isn't easy, but it's doable! Memoirs by Alma Mahler and Lou Andreas-Salome count, and there was a terrific book by Lavender Cassels called Clash of Generations about Archduke Rudolf's travails as Crown Prince, struggling against the hidebound thinking of his father and the rest of the Habsburg court, among other things. I have read other challenge-appropriate stuff in between these works, including Blair Tindall's notorious classical-music memoir Mozart in the Jungle - haven't seen the TV series yet, but it sounds very loosely based on the book - and a couple of books by Laurie Colwin, who I have mixed feelings about. Perhaps I'll elaborate in another post.)
Regeneration is very good, by the way, and it's given me a lot to think about on how to depict therapy sessions on the page. I've been in therapy, but my thinking was that it was handled very differently a century ago. Maybe Barker is putting a late-20th-century gloss on early-20th-century therapy technique, but it rings true to me. Which means I have a lot more flexibility in how to show Freud doing his work. This is only fair - it's well known that Freud often didn't practice what he preached with respect to clinical distance from patients. With Rudolf, the question of that distance is complicated by several factors - the ruler-subject relationship and how strictly Rudolf may have viewed it (his father Franz Joseph took it very seriously indeed), the relative closeness in age of Freud and Rudolf (Rudolf was two years younger than Freud, far closer in age to him than almost any of his patients), the openness with which the therapy takes place (in my thinking, not very at all given the delicacy of the situation in Europe at the time), etc. So much world-building to think about! I almost wish I didn't have to translate at the same time, but of course, I didn't have to - that was entirely my choice, too.