Portrait of the Female Character as a Psychoanalytical Case: The Ambiguous Influence of Freud on May Sinclair’s Novels

Abstract

When May Sinclair started to write fiction and read psychoanalytical papers in the 1890s, case histories were emerging as a crucial medium that helped Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, as well as the other founding fathers of psychoanalysis to address the new and singular questions raised by their most puzzling patients. Indeed, the case proved to be a valuable tool in the epistemology of psychoanalytical research: writing case histories enabled pioneer psychoanalysts to challenge existing theories, set up new approaches and develop new discourses. But the case study is also a textual object that relies on dialogue, deixis, narrative and analysis, in ways that are quite similar to fictional writing. Sinclair’s key psychological research papers – “The Way of Sublimation” (1915), “Clinical Lectures” (1916) and “Psychological Types” (1923) – suggest that she favoured a more Jungian-based eclectic approach to psychoanalysis, which she also integrated into her two philosophical books A Defence of Idealism (1917) and The New Idealism (1922), over Freud’s sexual theory. Yet, even if she distanced herself from some (but not all) of Freud’s theses, as we shall see, his influence remained central to her fiction and non-fiction, and more particularly to her textual strategies and character depiction.