Inner Voices: Literary Realism and Psychoanalysis

The synergy of Freudian psychoanalytic thinking and modernist experimentation is well-documented as is the relation of the formation of psychology as a discipline to the orientation of certain nineteenth literary modes (dramatic monologue, Victorian Gothic). However, the realist novel and the development of psychoanalysis are usually regarded as two historically distinct and consecutive responses to the loss of religious explanations for mental suffering (Lucaks, ), rather than intrinsically connected. I argue that the realist novel and psychoanalytic theory and practice might be regarded as analogous projects, connected particularly via the realist novel’s virtuoso employment of free indirect mode. As a means to capture and give back to the subject, thoughts or emotions which the subject hardly dares or bears to own, especially what Wilfred Bion calls 0, the moment of reality, or the powerful ‘no thing’ of experience and thought, FID probes the hidden and inner as psychoanalysis seeks to do, ‘piercing the obscurity of those minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish or unhappy consciousness’ (George Eliot).