The Modernist Road to the Unconscious

Abstract

This article examines the relation between psychoanalysis and modernism. It highlights the shift in the understanding of the encounters between modernism and psychoanalysis, which was based on the views of Sigmund Freud. The article discusses the focus of recent work on psychoanalysis and modernism in the works of Melanie Klein, who published throughout the 1920s and who, by the early to mid-1930s, had begun to develop a conceptual focus on mourning and anxiety in the earliest years of infancy. It suggests that while the psychoanalytic criticism of modernist literary texts in classical Freudian terms has long seemed to be in eclipse, new psychoanalytic readings of modernism and archaeologies of modernist contact with psychoanalysis are still in the process of unfolding.