Joyce and the Early Freudians

Book excerpt: "Outstanding, even spectacular. . . . Kimball shows beyond any doubt that Joyce had by 1922 read key texts by Freud, Jung, Rank, and other analysts, and that his immersion in these then comparatively obscure writings informed his artistic vision in Ulysses. She provides an indispensable roadmap to Joyce's encounter with psychoanalysis."--Peter L. Rudnytsky, Institute for Psychological Study of the Arts, University of Florida, and editor, American Imago "Expands our sense of how influence can work, and it is rich with fresh insights into Joyce."--Sheldon Brivic, Temple University Joyce and the Early Freudians explores Joyce's interaction with psychoanalytic literature available to him before the publication of Ulysses in 1922. It is not a psychoanalytic reading of Joyce but rather a book that draws parallels between these works and Joyce's own writing and examines how Joyce was affected by the Zeitgeist of the psychoanalytic movement. Jean Kimball begins with a close but expansive discussion of the three psychoanalytic texts that Joyce purchased in Trieste before he moved to Zurich in 1915: Freud's psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci, Jung's intensely Freudian essay on the father's significance in a person's life, and a German translation of Ernest Jones's original Hamlet and Oedipus essay. She follows with a discussion of the remarkable collection of psychoanalytic literature available at the Zentralbibliothek during Joyce's residence in Zurich, including an analysis of previously untranslated journal articles especially relevant to the Blooms and their marriage--articles that, because they relate to perversions, suggest a psychoanalytic base for Bloom's sexual oddities. Through close reading, the study traces textual parallels and verbal echoes from the psychoanalytic writings in A Portrait of the Artist and, to a much greater extent, in Ulysses. Kimball also gives close attention to the unique way in which Joyce makes use of allusions, often combining psychoanalytic traces with classical ones to add density to his work, thus strengthening her case for a textual connection between Joyce and Freud, two towering figures of the 20th century. Drawing from early psychoanalytic texts in a manner uniquely his own, Joyce has set up echoes in Ulysses that touch all the major characters of the novel. Jean Kimball is an adjunct associate professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa.