Dickens, Family, Authorship: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Kinship and Creativity (review)

About halfway into her introduction, Lynn Cain quotes a passage from Julia Kristeva's Black Sun to comment upon Charles Dickens's "using the novel" Dombey and Son (1846–48) "as therapy through the processes of sublimation" and then remarks: "despite the risks of attempting to psychoanalyse Dickens retrospectively, this passage bears close consideration in terms of his creative development" (9). Cain's comment itself warrants a moment of our critical attention. Not only does it tell us what sort of eponymous psychoanalytic perspectives most engages her; it also reveals the shifting focus of her inquiry (now Dickens's fiction, now Dickens himself). It suggests, too, something about her critical persona: that she is fearless—some might say foolhardy—in deliberately plunging into hermeneutical hazard zones (such as "attempting to psychoanalyse Dickens retrospectively") that most other critics in recent decades, even those who are inclined to read psychoanalytically, have sedulously avoided.

Cain is acutely aware that psychoanalysis as a literary methodology has fallen on hard times of late (most of her secondary sources date from the 1970s and 1980s), and one of the items on her critical agenda is to rescue it from disrepute. She asserts its efficacy in uncovering philosophical universals that are inaccessible to strictly historical ways of thinking, and, citing Dickens's avid interest in psychology and his well-known habit of tapping into his own psychic resources, identifies him as the ideal candidate for psychoanalytic literary analysis. Moreover, responding to the call of her series editors at Ashgate, Vincent Newey and Joanne Shattock, to view the nineteenth century "as a locus for our understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity" (vi), Cain argues that Dickens himself "had an appreciable effect on psychoanalytic theory" (xi), anticipating Sigmund Freud in meaning, method, and theory.

To recognize that Dickens is intellectually Freud's contemporary—as well as our own, for that matter—is a project to which I'm sympathetic. And Dickens, although arguably the most fascinating case (as Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and Steven Marcus—for starters—have shown), was certainly not alone among nineteenth-century novelists to have made out those disturbances and motives of the unconscious that Freud later made it his business to taxonomize. But to do justice to Dickens, psychoanalysis, and the aims of the series editors (to the object, method, and purpose of the investigation, as it were) requires, I think, that the method be employed more innovatively than Cain employs it here. Instead of considering Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, and Bleak House (the four novels Cain has chosen to consider closely, written from 1843 to 1853, a "pivotal period" of "unique and vital energy" for Dickens [1]) from a perspective that, while informed by the theoretical work of others, focuses on revealing fresh aspects of those novels, Cain expends much of her effort putting Dickens to work in the service of Kristeva's concepts, particularly "abject creativity" and the "matricidal imperative." Here is one example, in which a comment to his friend John Forster about his restive behavior in 1856 (three years after the close of the "pivotal period")—when Dickens felt as if he "should rust, break, and die" if he were not perpetually "doing"—is presented as proof positive of the power of the method rather than of Dickens's state of mind at the time: "as so often with Dickens, this passage exhibits remarkable psychological self-awareness and prescience in respect of psychoanalytic theory, exhibiting here a consciousness of the 'Thanatic reaction to a threat that is in itself Thanatic' (Kristeva, 1989)" (10). Thus to relegate the object of one's investigation to a virtual footnote designed to support one's methodological choices strikes me as an unhelpful, if not a counterproductive, tactic of persuasion.

Ironically perhaps, Cain arrives at her keenest observations—even those that are psychologically resonant—almost completely independent of psychoanalytic theory: like Freud, she is...