Epic without Organs

The psychic malady governing the last century’s greatest literature was neurosis: a nervous, depressive, or aggressive inability to conform to the regular demands of bourgeois life. Its sufferers—largely the daughters of middle-class families afflicted with a bewildering range of somatic symptoms and inner turmoil—sought a cure in the nascent science of psychoanalysis. The cure devised by Sigmund Freud and his collaborators in fin-de-siècle Vienna required analyst and analysand to collaborate on a narrative tracing each symptom to its root in the patient’s early trauma, generally an early experience of proscribed sexual desire felt within domestic life’s supposedly prim precincts. In psychoanalysis’s inaugural case study, written by Freud’s collaborator Josef Breuer, the patient Anna O. herself names this therapy “the talking cure,” because telling the physician stories about her own life alleviated her symptoms. Given psychoanalysis’s emphasis on narrative, language, and the psychic investigation of bourgeois repression, we might consider it a novel science in more ways than one. The narrative fiction contemporaneous with Freud’s new science—James, Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner—shared his interest in plumbing the modern individual’s consciousness to its forbidden depth in the mysteries of sexuality and desire.