Modernism, Neurology and the Invention of Psychoanalysis

Modernist literature develops out of the intrinsic tension in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourse between scientific empiricism and hermeneutics, the close analysis of sign, language and meaning. Neurology and psychoanalysis, two major scientific attempts to understand the mind and behaviour, had a profound impact on the work of writers, thinkers, artists, and film-makers in the Modernist period. Developing the idea that Sigmund Freud can productively be read as a Modernist writer and thinker, the chapter examines his Modernist tendencies from the perspective of the tensions that emerge out of the origins of his clinical work in nineteenth-century neurological science, and the hermeneutic method that forms the foundation of psychoanalysis. It proposes that this tension or contradiction is also endemic to literature, and that it appears in a dazzlingly heightened, intensified form in literary Modernism.