Autobiography as Psychotherapy: May Sinclair’s Revisionary Dialogue with early Psychoanalytical Interpretations of Femininity

In “Understanding the Language of Medicine,” Dr. Rita Charon explains how the science is troubled by the gaps in communication between doctors and patients-“two different conversations going on at the same time, one about the patient’s world and one about the world of medicine” (857). In her program of Narrative Medicine at Columbia she approaches this problem by emphasizing the importance of narrative practices not only to bridge the gap between physician and patient, but also to teach about illness and to enter into a public discourse about how medicine should be practiced in our culture. The success of the conversation between doctor and patient becomes then crucial to the sharing of information and for the progress of the field. Her innovative approach involves the recognition that memories, sadness, and feelings influence the care given by doctors; her method aims at raising the level of empathy and compassion in medical practice by encouraging the medical staff to write about their patients and their experiences.

Whether a bridge can be constructed between the arts and the sciences of healing, or between the world of the patient and that of the physician is at the center of our debate today. Psychoanalysis, the embodiment of narrative medicine, has already provided an ideal opportunity to constructing a bridge between the reality of suffering and the doctor’s narrative perception of it; “the talking cure” in fact functions on an alliance of trust between patient and psychoanalyst. From its beginning, this science has operated in close relation to the literary world with which it established a vibrant and reciprocal rapport of exchange of narrative strategies and cultural perceptions. Freud himself felt this connection with the literary world, and believed that his case histories resembled works of art. In this paper, I intend to present the case of May Sinclair, a writer who at the turn of the century was deeply affected by early psychoanalytical theories, and who reflected upon their misleading influence on the medical perception of the female patient; a perception that both resulted from and reinforced the cultural acceptance of woman as inferior social being. Throughout her life, Sinclair carried out a veiled revision of this perception in order to help the reader heal herself from a lifetime of psychological subjugation. By constructing a narrative discourse that advocated woman’s agency and health, she proposed a more positive narrative connection between the world of the patient and that of the doctor. With her theory of autobiography as psychotherapy, Sinclair encouraged an alliance between the artist as healer and the reader as patient that was based upon a rapport of reciprocal knowledge and empathy.

A popular writer and an important liaison between generations in the artistic world, Sinclair published widely and contributed to the establishment of a dialogue on literary conventions and experimentalism by coining the famous “stream-of-consciousness” metaphor that later critics identified with the modernist stance. In her career she wrote twenty-five novels, five collections of short stories, two philosophical volumes, two translations of books, and a number of articles and pamphlets of philosophical, feminist, and medical character. Because of her eclectic production, early critics objected to the “intrusion” of philosophy in her novels, her “lack of reticence” in her social and psychological exploration of sexuality, and her blending of psychoanalysis and fiction in her narrative technique. Later critics were also reluctant to consider her simultaneous discussion of philosophical, feminist and psychoanalytical issues as part of a unified project, and attributed her eclecticism to her “dual personality.” Her commitment to the woman question and participation in the suffrage campaign especially made her appear radical to the average reader. Sinclair used philosophical idealism, feminism, and psychoanalysis to revise her position and role of woman artist in society. In this paper I will focus on her psychoanalytical narratives as she constructed them through feminist and idealist lenses.

Veiled Rebellion: May Sinclair’s Struggle with Freudian Psychoanalysis

The speaker was five feet tall, and within six months of her sixtieth birthday. Her features were smooth and plump. . . Her audience had only contacted view of her high, rounded forehead, her Buddha-like immobile face, and her very beautiful nose, and they never met her intensely black eyes during the reading of the paper, because she looked unwaveringly at the typescript, shutting out with her strong will all notice of the organs of primary consciousness that were intent upon her . . . When she finished her paper she abruptly retired, trotting and shuffling on the balls of her feet to her chair . . . After she had taken her seat, Professor Whitehead commented on her paper, and than recalled her to the platform to reply to questions and comments from Professor Hoernle, Wolf, and Herbert Wildon Carr, and Mr. Joad and Lord Haldane. A young student who attended the meeting as a guest recalled the shades of unhappiness that flickered over the face of the gentle little woman during the discussion period, her state of total disarmament of any proud poise of confidence or of feminine defiance. At every question that was put to her, she turned to Professor Whitehead in a gesture of apparent rout, to ask him most appealingly, ‘Oh, dear! What ought I to say to that ?’

With this account, Theophilus Boll, one of Sinclair’s biographers, described Sinclair’s reading of her paper “Primary and Secondary Consciousness” to the fellow members of the Aristotelian Society for the Systematic Study of Philosophy in London on February 5, 1923. It is difficult to say whether he reported faithfully the event narrated by eye witnesses as the precision with which Sinclair’s facial expressions are described makes the account very improbable considering the time lapse between the date of the event and the time of the recollecting, and suggests a certain degree of dramatic interpretation from the narrator (Theophilus Boll or his eye witness). Moreover, Boll could not explain Sinclair’s attitude, “her distress was a surprising climax to her coadunate career in philosophy” (20), because he did not consider the sociological and psychological conditions affecting the event. Sinclair certainly felt the tremendous imbalance of power between herself, an intellectual woman, and the skeptical audience, made up predominantly of lords and professors, who shared an unconscious tendency to discount women’s opinions as fantasies. Powerless before such hostility, she must have adopted a strategy that was common to women in similar situations and that allowed her to entrench herself behind the image of womanliness-in her case, the old and frail mother figure. This “disguise” afforded her the most effective way to make her controversial role and act acceptable to men. Her strategy of “defensive masquerade” aimed at limiting the power conflict between herself and her audience and averting their revenge. This anecdote is important as it portrays the caution with which she behaved within the early psychoanalytical community.

Sinclair looked at Freudian psychoanalysis with a certain degree of skepticism deriving from her experience with the political manipulation of the medical discourse during the suffrage movement. Freud had “the greatness and the one-sidedness of the pioneer,” she stated in “Symbolism and Sublimation” II, one of her medical lectures (145), alluding to what she saw as limitations in his theories and method. Published in The Medical Press and Circular, these lectures consisted of selections from a bigger book on psychoanalysis she never published, The Way of Sublimation. A close comparison between the articles and the original text reveals that Sinclair selected for publication those excerpts that in her eyes might have been less controversial to the public, and omitted those excerpts that clearly expressed her frustration with the founding father of psychoanalysis. In her unpublished material Sinclair provided a critique Freud’s theories of neurosis and repression and proposed a revision that portrayed the female patient in a more positive light.

Masculine Constructs of Femininity and Woman as Powerless Patient

In the unpublished text, Sinclair disagreed with Freud’s focus on neurosis (and in her reading, Freud explained neurosis narrowly as the consequence of sexual repression (22)). For Sinclair, the Freudian discourse of neurosis and hysteria struck a painful cord: it inherently supported the cultural tendency to isolate and ostracize the mental patient and identified him/her with the rebel or the criminal. English society, and Sinclair’s own family, provided a rich history of mad-women locked up in the attics or in the back rooms of Victorian houses, far away from the eyes of society. In her report to the Medico-Psychological Clinic, she wrote about the code of silence imposed on mental illness in England:

many persons whose lives are burdened by such symptoms suffer in silence rather than reveal them to their most intimate friends, or even to their physicians; either because they are afraid of being laughed at, or because they do not realise that there exists a department of medical science which has devoted years of research to the investigation and treatment of these distressing complaints. (“Proceedings” 319)

Madness was perceived as a shameful and menacing disease from which society had to be protected, and the mental patient was considered less human than a criminal (Chesler 34). Freud’s interpretation of neurosis as inability to cope with harsh reality confirmed the cultural belief in woman’s defenselessness and vulnerability (“in every neurosis the patient turns away from reality, and, moreover, does so because he finds it or some part of it, unbearable” (“Formulation of the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”)). With his theories of neurosis, Freud further confirmed the traditional medical identification of neurosis with femininity-a perception that had characterized much of the anti-suffrage political discourse on which Sinclair had written during the enfranchisement campaign.

Sinclair approached Freud through the popular understanding of his theories and in particular through the reading of Sir Almroth Wright, an anti-suffragist doctor who applied Freud’s theories of female pathology to the political case of the suffragettes. In Feminism, published in 1911, the writer refuted the arguments of Sir Almroth Wright who declared that neurosis, “the scourge of the century,” had been “quite visible in the suffragette ranks” (14). Much like Freud’s interpretation of women’s hysterical symptoms as the consequence of their inability to accept their lot, Sir Almroth Wright believed that the suffragettes’ rebellion against the government was a symptom of hysteria, caused by their inability to accept their inferior political status: “At the bottom of the Feminist movement he finds this element of mental disorder” (Feminism 8). In the pamphlet Sinclair exposed Sir Wright’s unsound “logic and physiology” to make the reader aware that his usage of the medical language aimed at devaluing the suffragettes’ political protest. By refuting the accusation of hysteria on the political level (she argued that “there is very little” in doctors’ theory of women’s psychological ailments), Sinclair made clear that doctors had allied themselves with the politicians in their attempt to control the feminist insurrection and destroy women’s newly-acquired sense of solidarity. Sinclair therefore came to look at Wright’s manipulation of Freud’s theories with the skepticism gained through her painful political experience: she viewed Wright’s discourse of neurosis and hysteria (and Freud’s) in a political context in which medical language was being used as a political tool against women.

In the medical articles “Symbolism and Sublimation” I and II and the unpublished book The Way of Sublimation, Sinclair preferred not to discuss the concept of neurosis in detail, probably because it had been so much used in past political discourses against women; instead, she decided to focus on the concept of “normality.” In doing so, she transferred the discussion from a negative concept associated with femininity to a positive one. She questioned the definitions of “normality” and “abnormality” by sustaining that “there is no great gulf fixed between the normal and the abnormal person” as “the abnormal person is the person unadapted or badly adapted; that is all” (The Way of Sublimation 42-3).

The normal healthy person has the same driving force of the Libido behind him, he suffers the same outward restraints as the neurotic, (since, we may assume the same moralities and decencies of childhood to have been binding upon both) but his Libido is not turned inwards and backwards, it finds its outlet and expression in a hundred ways which are closed to the gravely afflicted or confirmed neurotic; it is gradually sublimated all the time.
(The Way of Sublimation 44)

By narrowing the gap between the neurotic and the normal, Sinclair made it clear that the two concepts were so rigidly defined because of cultural sexist perspectives ingrained in the medical and political mentality of the time. Every person was susceptible to psychological dysfunctions as the libido affected him or her the same way it affected the neurotic. The difference stood not in the person herself, but in the opportunity for the individual to find an outlet for the libido. By transferring the discourse from neurosis to normality, Sinclair refuted the sensationalistic focus on the extreme cases of the disease, but presented and stressed its presence in all different forms in society among both men and women. In doing so, she de-emphasized the discussion of the sickness as a problem of feminine perversion, which expressed the Victorian fascination with sexuality and sin, and demystified the stigma associated with women and the feminist movement. Her questioning of Wright’s interpretation of neurosis, therefore, established a discourse of resistance to the contemporary psychoanalytical and political interpretation of woman. To her eyes, women who showed signs of discomfort, unhappiness, or dissatisfaction with their lives were not to be understood as neurotic. The rebellion against the system did not reveal the presence of sickness or abnormality the same way the suffragettes’ rebellion did not express a hysterical epidemic.

In Feminism Sinclair also criticized the power relation between the doctor-psychoanalyst and female patient and defied doctors’ views of woman as “a bundle of psychological emergencies” (Feminism 28)).

I think of no more fruitful cause of hysteria, neurosis and the rest that the peculiarly ‘epicene’ practice of certain molly-coddling doctors of holding her “physical disabilities” everlastingly before her, until she, poor wretch, herself comes to look upon herself as a bundle of ‘emergencies.’ (Feminism 29)

Nineteenth century doctors felt the need to take control over the cultural fantasy that portrayed woman as suffering from “surgical martyrdom.” By insisting on woman’s mental disability, rather than investigating its social causes, doctors and psychoanalysts distorted woman’s own sense of self-understanding. Through the voice of Dr. Agnes Savill, Sinclair condemned this attitude by stating that doctors themselves were subjected to “moods” and “failures.” By the 1910s Sinclair had already voiced her opinion against the cultural belief in the sexual and therefore inherent inferiority of women that had been embraced by Freud (Gay 507). In her unpublished feminist essay she responded to the argument proposed by Miss Jane Harrison, one of Freud’s supporters, who believed in the sexual difference between men and women:

I do not believe that the difference between Man and Woman is wholly a difference of sex. Or rather, I do not believe that sex is wholly physical. At the same time I do not believe that these psychic sexual qualities are invariably bound up with the physical sex that corresponds with them. (Unpublished 10)

Sinclair did not believe that this difference could legitimize woman’s inferior cultural role and therefore, did not want to address women as a biological and sexual beings, but as a social and political individual whose femininity was culturally constructed. Woman’s femininity was not determined by her sexual difference from man, but rather by the economic and spiritual deprivation inflicted upon her by her cultural milieu. She had been deprived of something that men enjoyed: namely autonomy, freedom, and power of control over her destiny. Sinclair therefore considered Freud and his popularity in the British medical community by keeping in mind the negative political effects that his theories could have on women’s social and political status. She perceived that Freudian psychoanalysis did not cure women of their ailments, but more effectively chained them to an unhealthy and passive position in society that reinforced their lack of power and autonomy.

In the novel The Creators (1909) Sinclair portrayed the oppressive medical and psychoanalytical world of the early twentieth century. Through the life stories of the characters Jane Holland and Laura Gunning, she highlighted the conditions of powerlessness of women in relation to the authority of medical sciences. Both intellectual women struggle against restrictive social and medical conventions to assert themselves. In particular Jane, a brilliant writer, is forced to renounce her career once she becomes a mother because it is considered detrimental to her health and to the health of her children. Through the showing of the negative influence of Doctor Henry Brodrick, Sinclair questioned the validity of the traditional cultural interpretation of sex roles and of neurosis, the disease contracted by “rebellious” women.

Doctor Brodrick presents Jenny as an “interesting case” of neurosis and hysteria; her lapses into exhaustion and depression are caused by her rebellion against her “feminine Nature.” He attributes her dislike for the soothing passivity and quiet of her house to her “nerves,” interprets her “violent fit of hysterics” as the cause for the premature birth of her first child, and in her “insane” obsession with writing he also finds the cause for her second child’s fragility. Jenny represents the neurotic wife and mother who is unable to accept the responsibilities of her new role in society, and as a consequence she develops hysterical symptoms. But Sinclair made clear in her novel that the medical discourse of neurosis proposed by Doctor Brodrick hid a misogynistic agenda, one that was similar to Freud’s and that aimed at disarming woman of her potential. Jenny is “messed over, not messed up”; she is told of her sickness and offered a cure by Doctor Brodrick, who cannot accept her genius, because it threatens his sense of social balance. His insistence on woman’s obligations of wife and mother is an attempt at reinscribing her in the non-threatening passive position. As further evidence of the medical manipulation of the female patient, Sinclair introduces Prothero’s sound medical opinion: he defends Jenny from Brodrick’s reiterated charges of neurosis. Trained in Africa and in Asia, far away from the Western misconceptions of femininity, he reveals the true causes of her son’s sickness (he inherited his fragility from his father’s side) and uncovers the web of lies that had been constructed by Jenny’s doctor and husband to force her to give up her profession. In short, he reassures Jenny of her mental stability and exposes the selfishness of the men around her.
In the novel, Sinclair further denounces the correlation between rebellion and neurosis as a power discourse used in the struggle between the woman patient and her physician through the figure of Laura. After Prothero’s death from consumption, Doctor Brodrick reproaches her for not having followed his orders: the patient needed absolute rest and no writing. Deeply offended, Laura responds by accusing the doctor of insensitivity; what killed Prothero was not his last poem (she granted him his last wish), but the unjustified attacks on his literary reputation perpetrated by his critics, one of whom was the doctor himself. Feeling that his name had lost credibility, Prothero had worked feverishly for months in order to prove himself to the critics, causing great damage to his already precarious health:

That was so like them [doctors]. They were sane when they got hold of one stupid fact and flung it at your head. But you were overstrained when you retaliated. When you had made a sober selection from the facts, such a selection as constituted a truth, and presented it to them, you were more overstrained than ever. They couldn't stand the truth. (513)

Doctor Brodrick does not accept Laura’s rebuttal. He prescribes her “some bromide, for her nerves” (513), a placebo meant to silence her. Feeling as the only one entitled to the truth, he does not believe in her remonstrations; doctor and psychoanalyst, Brodrick plays the role of director of woman’s life and interpreter of her desires and needs with the purpose to “domesticate” her. All knowingly, he determines the normality or abnormality of her behavior and diagnoses her sickness in virtue of his authority over her.

Repression: The Logic of Dominance

If in Feminism and The Way of Sublimation Sinclair reflected upon doctors and psychoanalysts’ chauvinistic theories and attitude, in her published medical papers she concentrated on a constructive critique of psychoanalytical theories by proposing a revision of the concept of “repression”-a concept that to her eyes both Freud and Jung “underrate or seem[ed] to underrate” (“Symbolism and Sublimation” I and II 142). Sinclair considered the concept of repression in relation to that of “libido,” a term that carried different meanings for Freud and Jung: Freud viewed libido as sexual instinct, whereas Jung de-sexualized the concept and defined it as vital energy. Although Sinclair recognized the importance of sexual instinct, “one of the most absolutely determined things we know” (The Way of Sublimation 8), she believed that Jung’s interpretation of man’s life force better suited her view of subjectivity. It indicated an energy that needed to be nurtured in healthy conditions:

for everyone of us the unconscious libido is the Serpent in the wilderness, the dragon in the den . . . and our spiritual regeneration lies in the courage and honesty with which we hunt him out and face him. (The Way of Sublimation 42-3)

Like a dragon, the libido could be either embraced or feared depending upon the conditions determining its development and upon the individual’s understanding of it.

As a consequence of her interpretation of the libido, Sinclair differed from Freud’s belief that repression affected only the sexual impulses, as all other effects were secondary. She instead believed that repression could manifest itself in two opposite forms that could differently affect the individual’s will-power and capacity for self-realization. In its negative form it annihilated natural instincts and thwarted one’s capacity of agency; in its positive form it sublimated vital energy into creativity and encouraged agency.

For Sinclair the first case of repression was closely related to the concept of neurosis. The constant denial of one’s desires, aspirations, and actions, with no form of compensation, was destructive and the individual was

arrested and turned back into those ancestral paths from which with such infinite pain and difficulty and conflict the individual has emerged. The adult becomes an infant . . . the neurotic, without knowing it, is bound hand and foot in the prison of the past, his own ancestors,’ and there is no future for him until he is delivered.
(“Symbolism and Sublimation” I 120)

This form of repression was exerted upon the individual by outside forces, without the individual’s consent, and undermined his or her capacity to act. The neurotic lost a sense of independence and decision making and turned inwards in a childhood world of infantile instincts. With this interpretation of repression, Sinclair explored the dynamics involved in the dialogue between the individual and his/her environment and emphasized the incredible influence that the environment exerted on the individual’s power of agency. In opposition to Freud, she believed that the blame of the neurotic’s sickness lay not on the person but on the conditions of life that determined a healthy or unhealthy development of the libido. With this shift in focus, Sinclair opened up a new set of considerations that valued the adverse circumstances in which women operated; she contextualized woman within her social roles and did not amputate her from their consequences:

what of the innumerable women who are martyrized every day . . by the ‘psychological emergencies’ of men? What of the hysteria and neurosis that spring directly and indirectly from that martyrdom? What of . . . the innumerable disastruous marriages of the unfit? (Feminism 13)

For Sinclair the accusation of women’s lack of stability and incapacity to make their misery a form of bearable suffering (which Freud prescribed as a cure) was flawed as everyone “can do his best work only in surroundings where he is perfectly free from suggestion and restraint” (Feminism 9). Negative repression for Sinclair derived from all those societal and traditional impositions and limitations that prevented women from realizing themselves as healthy and productive individuals.
Sinclair explored the concept of negative repression in many of her novels, but in Mary Olivier: A Life she depicted it with a clinical eye so much so that one contemporary reader stated the following:

I think of the book as a symptom and not a case, and it is the case that interests me. . . . the line-up of her characters in Mary Olivier reads like the list for a clinic. (Jh 30)

The critic understood Sinclair‘s novel as a degenerative form of literature, an expression of sickness rather than a reflection of strength and stability. But what he viewed as a weakness, Sinclair proposed as the stronghold of her analytical method: she wanted the reader to see not just the typical effects of long-enforced repression, but also its origins. The narration develops on two levels: the child, Mary, curious about the mystery surrounding her mad Aunt Charlotte unveils the conditions and circumstances culminating in her madness, while the author reveals the source of the disease through the depiction of the conditions and circumstances surrounding Mary’s childhood. The first level of investigation presents Mary’s focus of interest, the second, much more subtle, conveys the author’s narrative purpose: the critique of the unhealthy and perverted enforcement of passivity and renunciation in female child rearing in Victorian society. Through the list of clinical symptoms and the analysis of social conditions, Sinclair constructed a discourse of resistance to the dominant chauvinistic ideology of neurosis that blame woman for it and told the story of woman’s madness from its origins according to a patient’s perspective.

We first meet Charlotte while Mary is looking through a photo album with her mother:

The other people in the Album were sulky, and wouldn’t look at you. The gentlemen made cross faces at somebody who wasn’t there; the ladies hung their heads and looked down at their crinolines. Aunt Charlotte hung her head too, but her eyes, tilted up straight under her forehead, pointed at you. And between her stiff black curls she was smiling-smiling. When Mamma came to Aunt Charlotte’s picture she tried to turn over the page of the Album quick. (10)

Her mother’s gesture immediately arouses Mary’s curiosity and soon she is able to compose Charlotte’s character: she is “different” because she is the cause of embarrassment and dishonor to her family. But Mary analyzes the picture carefully and concludes that “Aunt Charlotte is the only one to look straight at you; she knew what she wanted.” We understand then that Charlotte was a very sane and healthy person with goals and desires in life. She was not born sick; she became sick when she defiantly refused to accept celibacy as her way of life, as her mother and brothers required. Through Mary’s discoveries, Sinclair depicts the web of deceptions and manipulations surrounding Charlotte. Because of their being first cousins, Charlotte’s parents demanded that their children not get married for fear they might pass on mental instability or retardation to their own children. Although Mary’s father ignored his parents’ will, he still imposed it on his sisters. Lavvy found an outlet in religion, but Charlotte’s psyche remained “blocked” in a “welder of ancestral instinct and memories.” In “Symbolism and Sublimation,” Sinclair explains that the insane person’s life is a continual dream; “instead of logical conceptions he has seemingly incoherent fantasies” (“Symbolism and Sublimation” I 120). Aunt Charlotte lives in a fantasy world in which she is constantly about to get married, and when she thinks it is happening she gives away naked dolls, the symbols of her repressed sexual desire.

Considered through Freudian lenses, Charlotte’s sickness is of her own doing and she is to be blamed for it, as she does not accept her own condition but instead causes a tremendous amount of shame to her family with her “immoral” conduct. But Sinclair provides another reading of Charlotte’s case. Through Mary’s eyes, she focuses on seemingly unimportant details to provide an accurate picture of Charlotte’s repressive environment. We see her imprisoned on the top floor of the house, in a room equipped with a bell on the door and bars on the window. She speaks nervously with broken phrases, like a thief afraid of being caught. Her movements are under constant surveillance:

Aunt Charlotte’s face at the dining-room window looking out . . . she had her hat on, as if she had expected to be taken too. Her eyes were sharp and angry, and Uncle Victor behind her with his hand on her shoulder. (53)

Mary’s economic language conveys Charlotte’s powerless position, a mad woman in the hands of her caretaker. Almost unaware of the symbolical meaning of her description, Mary focuses on Charlotte’s wild eyes, her shouting in the night, and the sound of her feet “staggering and shuffling” when she is brutally restrained. Unaware of the gravity of the event, as a child she witnesses the moment in which her aunt is taken to an insane asylum. In the middle of the night,

the front door opened. Britton came out first. Then Aunt Charlotte, between Uncle Victor and Dr. Draper. They were holding her up by her arm-pits, half leading, half pushing her before them. Her feet made a brushing noise on the flagstones. (153)

This dream-like event haunts Mary when, in her twenties, she realizes that a horrible crime had been committed that night (from that moment on, Mary had neither seen nor heard her aunt again). She alone realizes and feels the shameful responsibility of the act when news of her aunt’s death reaches the family years later.

If Charlotte represents the consequences of a long-term repression, Mary reveals the psychological manipulations and repressions that played an important role in her aunt’s development of madness. Mary’s mother is the primary agent of repression: she uses Charlotte’s disease as a weapon to subdue Mary by insinuating that she is “going like Aunt Charlotte.” Charlotte’s madness serves as warning for “being caught in the net,” and brings Mary to doubt herself and desperately read on hereditary insanity (Ribot’s Heredity and Maufley’s Physiology and Pathology of Mind (292)). The constant accusations and the certainty coming from the many cases of the disease in the family maim her spirit.

Sinclair focuses on Mary’s thwarted potential and stifling environment as possible causes of madness. Mary’s whole upbringing is based on the repression of her desires:

But we were brought up all wrong. Taught that our selves were beastly, that our wills were beastly and that everything we liked was bad. Taught to sit on our wills, to be afraid of ourselves and not trust them for a single minute. (251)

The web of deceptions and emotional and psychological manipulation is supported by the authority figures surrounding her (mother, Uncle Victor and Aunt Bella) and who decide the fate of the young Oliviers and determine that Mary would become her mother’s caretaker. Mary is a prisoner in her house, a caged bird or a woman lying in her coffin (metaphors used in the text) and her surviving brother, Dan, is worried about leaving her in such an unhealthy environment. Her youth is wasted in the hopelessness and boredom of a life spent at the service and mercy of a tyrannical mother; she feels the terrible weight of the passing of years, her physical decline, and the fear of failure in life. Sinclair speaks of Mary’s losses (the death of her father and two brothers) and responsibilities (the care of her brother and mother), and of no positive compensation. Her heart palpitations and her decline in her piano performance of the Apassionata are symptoms of the evident deterioration of Mary’s self-confidence and power of autonomy. A repressed childhood and enforced passivity in adulthood have brought her to the point of suffocation and the verge of madness.

Mary Olivier: A Life took part in an on-going feminist conversation on women’s health. Aunt Charlotte is the emblem of all mad women, and her name reminds us of Charlotte Brontë, the writer who invented the striking figure of Bertha, Rochester’s mad wife (like Bertha, Aunt Charlotte becomes violent towards her male relatives when they try to subdue her; she bites her nephew’s hand). The text therefore established an intertextual connection with a case of madness illustrated in literature with which the public was familiar (in her introduction to Jane Eyre Sinclair emphasizes the novel’s great success). With this literary reference, Sinclair wanted to valorize her own discussion on repression by indicating the gravity of a problem that affected generations of women and that was been perpetuated by similar unhealthy cultural conditions at work in Victorian female child-rearing and education.

The Creators and Mary Olivier: A Life became the place in which Sinclair symbolically denounced the traditional medical vision of woman and illustrated the damaging effects of repressive upbringing of women. I disagree with Zegger, one of her major critics and biographers, therefore, when he stated that Sinclair

did not set any value on feminine intuition or feminine sensibility. . . she missed what Richardson and Woolf provided so richly-that is, the nuances of human feelings as it is caught on the wing and the diverse elements that make up a human response to any given person or situation. (117)

Sinclair did explore the “nuances of human feelings” to the point of obsession and “the elements that make up a human response” were the source of her study of the intricate power struggle between individuals. Her feminine sensibility made her value her own experience of survival in an oppressive environment, an experience that she recognized in the lives of hundreds of women. She identified repression as a result of oppressive living conditions, relationships, and social systems that offered no possibility for healthy development. She depicted women’s mental problems in their various degrees and forms and verbalized the suffering and pain that women experienced so broadly and so silently.

Sublimation: Sinclair’s Feminist Strategy of Empowerment

Having analyzed Sinclair’s view of negative repression, I will now discuss the second form of “repression,” the positive and constructive force of sublimation, that constituted the foundation for her theory of art as psychotherapy. Sinclair’s theory was characterized by a strong political and sociological message that, in response to the medical and political discourses of passivity and repression, encouraged one of empowerment and agency in women. Sinclair forged her theory of art by adhering to Doctor Murray’s method of artistic psychotherapy, for which the Medico-Psychological Clinic of London became famous. It involved the patient’s engagement in plastic arts and crafts as a way to release the negative effects of his/her traumas and shocks, and thus facilitate the healing process.

Dr. Jessie Murray and her work at the Medico-Psychological Clinic had a great impact on Sinclair’s development of psychoanalytical studies: Dr. Murray’s “‘unusual’ practical methods of therapy inspired her,” as Boll stated (224). Certainly Sinclair was committed to Dr. Murray’s cause enough to provide the funds necessary to the opening of the clinic in 1913 (five hundred pounds). Boll then did interpret Sinclair’s dedication correctly, by stating that she found in the clinic the proper site to express her enthusiasm for reforms:

It’s no wonder that a novelist with a dynamic outlook should become enthusiastic over a medical organization that was conceived to help people without financial means whose energies had become stagnated and whose will had become paralyzed, to recover their control over their potential for social usefulness and personal completion. (“Proceedings” 311)

During the brief life of the clinic, Sinclair was deeply involved in its management: she was on the board of trustees and she helped with the writing of advertising pamphlets. One of these pamphlets, “Special Appeal in Time of War,” described the clinic’s goals and methods: the focus was on mental illness and the goal was psychotherapy in the form of “the application of methods known to have great therapeutic value.” Sinclair herself wrote the second brochure of the clinic, the 1918-19 “Report,” in which she announced the success of the combination of diverse therapeutic techniques. The “Report” described the “occupation in handicrafts, plastic arts, music, recitation, dancing, games, gardening, etc.”-the technique promised to be, in the hands of the psychological experts, an instrument of healing in the treatment of many functional nervous disabilities (“Proceedings” 312). As therapeutic method, the clinic would also use hypnosis, which was looked upon with derision by Freudian followers.

The Medico-Psychological Clinic was the very first and the only public clinic in Great Britain to make use of psychoanalytical therapy as a psychological treatment. As for Doctor Murray, so for Sinclair the importance of psychoanalysis stood in the psychotherapeutic method, in its usefulness to cure people, in its practicality, and in its effective results. It is possible that during her involvement with the clinic, Sinclair herself underwent psychotherapeutic sessions with Doctor Murray, as all other students did. She might have also used self-hypnosis or self-suggestion as a method to retrieve her memories (which would explain the originality of her episodic technique In Mary Olivier).

Considering Sinclair’s involvement with the life and goals of Doctor Murray’s clinic, we can easily understand how she came to explain the function of art and the role of the artist in relation to the psychotherapeutic value of sublimation, the positive repression of the libido, the constructive re-channeling of vital energy. She presented sublimation through art as the essential step for the therapeutic process, because “Art is behaving precisely as the psychoanalyst who is also the soul-healer and the soul-builder” (63). Functioning as a healthy and constructive force, art had the very important task of channeling the individual’s libido towards “the ways of progress, the passion for beauty or for truth or goodness.” By submerging into an artistic occupation, such as writing or sculpting for instance, the individual would be able to provide a healthy outlet for his libido, and his artistic occupation would in turn inspire and lead him to produce more artistic products and thus pursue higher moral purposes: “the striving of the libido towards manifestations in higher and higher forms’ (“Symbolism and Sublimation” I, 119). In Sinclair’s theory of sublimation, therefore, art functioned both as inspiration for and result of sublimation: the two important stages of the therapeutic process.

If art were therapy by definition, then the artist would be the person most closely engaged in the therapeutic process in the sense that his work would express the most refined level of sublimation: in the work of the artist, “we find artistic genius overcharged with Libido” (The Way of Sublimation 44). Because of the artist’s close relation with the purpose of sublimation, he could pursue a therapeutic effect through his art not just for his own well-being but also for the well-being of the audience, the reader of his novels or the viewer of his sculptures. In the common individual, Sinclair stated, the libido “may struggle to get out and sublimate itself” because “the angel of repression,” “the psychic Censor stands and stops the way.” In this condition, the artist would become “the psychoanalyst, the healer, [who is able] to expose the censor, and remove him” (“Symbolism and Sublimation” I 121). Sinclair believed that by being trained and submerged in the moral and spiritual development of the self, the artist functioned as the analyst who, equipped with the tools of psychotherapy, helped the patient to see through his psychological blocks and overcome them.

In The Way of Sublimation Sinclair strengthened the artistic need for discovery and healing by questioning the validity of the personal search for the past:

Why stir up old emotions and old memories? . . . Depends upon if they are deleted by a Censor who knows what he is about. If they’ve passed into the unconscious doesn’t that prove that forgetfulness is salutary and necessary? ‘Why not let sleeping dogs lie?’ This not only sounds like the voice of sanity; it is the voice of sanity. And you can only say to it that in normal healthy people forgetfulness is salutary and necessary, and for them it is much better to let sleeping dogs lie. The unhappy case of the neurotic is precisely this that his forgetting, his deletion, acts like a corrosive ink. (42)

Forgetfulness could be acceptable for a healthy person, but for a neurotic, a person who had been psychically wounded by environmental oppressive forces, forgetfulness would seal the effects of the traumatic events in his consciousness, without ever allowing a form of recovery. Regeneration and reconstruction therefore could not occur without a careful study of one’s soul or psyche, and the artist, trained in analyzing his own consciousness, was the right person to promote the healing process for himself and for the reader. The case was particularly true for the modernist woman writer who, like Sinclair herself, made the search for the feminine self the focus of her technical strategies. In her self-assumed role of healer-artist, Sinclair had a double burden to sustain: she had to sublimate her own libido and heal her personal traumas, and at the same time she had to encourage the same process of sublimation and healing in the reader. The questions, therefore, about the validity of stirring up “old emotions and memories” addressed her personal condition and her concern for the reader. Sinclair was interested in both the private and public aspects of art as healing process, and her theory of artistic psychotherapy must be viewed in relation to her private and public agendas. I will analyze Sinclair’s theory of art first as a private and then as a public autobiographical endeavor as results of her literary search for a narrative that could express and convey psychotherapy.

Autobiography as Private Healing: The Personal Value of Sublimation

From what we know, Sinclair did not undergo anything dramatic and physically intrusive as a surgery, but there are reasons to believe that the effects of an undefined sickness might have prompted her self-analysis. Zegger mentioned that, in 1909 she was found “alone in a high fever stretched on a divan, absolutely helpless, and having tasted nothing for several days.” As a consequence, she spent three weeks in a nursing home. We also know that she was a patient of Dr. Hector Munro, at the time working in the Medico-Psychological Clinic, although we do not know for what she was treated. Boll suggested that Sinclair was the embodiment of the dedicated writer in the sense that she routinely overworked herself and fell into a dangerous state of exhaustion and severe fatigue. Boll also stated that in the early 1920s, she had developed a slight limp in her walk, the first sign of the neuromuscular deterioration, Parkinson disease, that was to incapacitate her gradually in both mind and body and cause her death.

It is possible then that Sinclair used writing as a way to keep a tight grip on her reality and mental and physical health. In Anne Severn and The Fieldings, work in the farm becomes the only concrete form of stability: “There the earth waited for her . . . the life of struggling with the earth” (280). In Mary Olivier, writing offers the only form of compensation for Mary’s unhappiness: she is able to make sense of reality and the painful events in her life through the study of literature and her poetry writing. In The Creators, intense writing, to the point of exhaustion, is used by Nina, Jenny, and Prothero as an antidote against artificial social rules and as a form of self-preservation. Sinclair also used her novels as mirrors for her life, as vehicles to express the losses and traumas she experienced from childhood to maturity. Her most autobiographical novel, Mary Olivier: A Life realistically depicts aspects of her own life that are portrayed indirectly in other novels: madness (her aunt), alcoholism (her father), and suicide (one uncle). Mary’s fear of hereditary madness seems to find a reliable correspondence in Sinclair’s. Mary’s struggle with the repressive force of her mother corresponds with Sinclair’s own experience of servitude and renunciation with her own mother. The Creators exposes Sinclair’s dilemmas about her role of woman writer and her rejection of marriage. Nina’s decision to give up the emotional well-being deriving from marriage and having children leaves an empty space that Sinclair expressed in Mary Olivier. Mary’s dreams of dead children manifested the author’s deeply felt anxiety about the cost of her choices and her mourning for lost opportunities. The difficulty with which Mary justifies her life and waste of her youth must correspond to Sinclair’s own questioning of her own life choices.

When Sinclair discussed the reasons for unraveling almost forgotten painful memories, she was probably thinking about her own past and attempting a healing process. “Psycho-analysis is nothing more nor less than the process of unmasking” and revealing “the particular malady, the particular obsession” that afflicts the patient, she wrote in The Way of Sublimation (42-3). By historicizing the experience, by describing it as a medical case history and a chronological ordering of symptoms and signs, she presented herself as a patient that took control over the medical narrative and truthfully wanted to communicate her experience of pain. Sinclair, the patient, related her symptoms to the page in a therapeutic and cathartic act. The function of constructing a history, in this sense, was to provide a cure through verbalization; Sinclair put the talking cure on paper and related her medical and psychical history to her readership.

In the psychoanalytic dialogue the physician’s questions prompt a continuous retelling, “a retelling as performance, by regulating for patients the narrative possibility of their symptoms” (Epstein 152). Sinclair’s obsessive repetition of literary subjects constitutes an attempt to clarify her case and at the same time is an encouragement for the reader to accept her authorial voice of patient in charge of her own narration. She focused on the same type of life story after 1913 as if motivated by the desire to demystify its destructive power through repetition. Sinclair gained a sense of distance from her historical self to become the fictional self that tells her story over and over. If Mary Olivier is closely based on her life, Arnold Waterlow: A Life preserves its major psychological characteristics, while beginning the series of variations on Sinclair’s life that can be found in Life and Death of Harriett Frean or in The History of Anthony Waring, and to a certain extent in The Three Sisters. The reopening and closing, or the masking and unmasking of the painful experiences acted to fictionalize the experience in form of “logotherapy,” linguistic healing. The telling and retelling of her story served two purposes: it rediscovered “the mark” of her “trouble,” the symptoms that revealed her insanity and reactivated the pain of remembering; it also exteriorized the self-story and forced her “to acknowledge that the mark is not the real trouble, that neither the malady nor the obsession nor the impulse is what it seems” (The Way of Sublimation 43). The retelling of her story made it possible for her to expose the repressive discourses that read her as insane, and the painful process of recollecting was necessary for her to gain a better understanding of her malaise first and to assert her control over the narration of the experience.

Autobiography as Public Healing: Sinclair’s Interpretation of Artistic Sublimation

Convinced of the healing power of the applied arts, as she witnessed in Doctor Murray’s clinic, Sinclair reflected on the usefulness of the autobiographical medium as a form of psychotherapy for a broader audience--an approachable confessional narrative that provided a positive discourse of health and agency to the masses. In the unpublished book The Way of Sublimation she proposed the concept of the artist as healer. Because of his prestigious and charismatic position in society the artist has the moral duty to educate and heal the public for the common good of society. As she identified sublimation of the artist’s libido with the strongest form of freedom of the self (46), then his artistic product is bound to have a great impact on the viewer, much greater than that of religion and science. For this reason, “the ethical conclusion is that only the creative, the enlightened and progressive will is holy. . . The creative will, if directed out of the path of social well-being and of progress, is . . . unholy” (39). For Sinclair then, the artist had “to obey a higher law” of conduct; he had to become conscious of his own spoken and unspoken confessions, he had to go through a “period of torment; of self-searching, of shame and of despair” as it is with psychoanalysis, and in the moment of “conversion” he had to sublimate his energy, his self into artistic expression. But even if the artist is not capable of rescuing his self and sublimating his passions, he has the moral obligation to consider the impact of his work on the public: the “great artist even when he cannot save himself saves others” (60).

As in the Greek theater, in which the artist felt the moral obligation to provoke a catharsis in the reader/viewer in order to encourage the sublimation of instincts and moral re-generation, so in writing and reading a novel, Sinclair believed that the writer could provoke a similar cathartic experience in the reader. She valued the Oedipus trilogy for its “redemptive” function, “the purging of passion through pity and terror” (The Way of Sublimation 60). Just like a religion, art is endowed with the power to arouse “pity and terror” (the transformations of the libido) in the reader: pity for the hero’s victimization and terror for the perversity of his crime. If considered in light of her criticism of the medico-political discourse of neurosis and repression, it is clear that Sinclair was thinking of woman’s situation in terms of pity for her victimization from distorted notions of normality and health, and terror for her imprisonment within oppressive political and economic structures. Through the act of reading, she aimed at empowering the reader in a psychotherapeutic experience that could help woman gain the desire and strength necessary to change the negative aspects of her situation. By presenting characters that contested traditional female roles and were denied positive self-perception, Sinclair encouraged the female reader to overcome her own subconscious acceptance of such roles and seek healthier alternatives.

Woman’s health and power of agency are the concerns driving Sinclair’s narrative strategy; autobiography, the search for the self or the process of redemption of the self, becomes the optimal medium with which to establish a connection with the reader. Woman needed to gain awareness of herself and independence in order to become a citizen able to contribute constructively to the well-being of her society, according to the values of responsibility, integrity and dedication promoted by philosophical idealism (in “Women’s Sacrifices for War,” Sinclair speaks of equal pay and treatment on the work place and the opportunity for women to serve in the army). By using autobiography as praxis, she would act on the world by acting on the reader with the purpose to change the reader and consequently to change the world. Realizing that her success centered on the figure of the reader, she wanted to play a convincing role in the reader’s mind because only by convincing the reader was she in the position of pursuing her feminist reformist agenda: change the reader from passive receiver to active critic of negative cultural and medical narratives. Her writing method was based on the psychoanalytical “game” of associations.

The patient makes her mind as far as possible blank; the psychoanalyst then reels off a list of words which the patient is bound by the rules of the game . . . to respond with the first word that comes to his head. (The Way of Sublimation 19-20)
The writer evoked the symbol, the reader responded by remembering her own experiences. As in a Greek theater, Sinclair ritualized the dialogue with the reader; she produced an “incantation” that while soothing the reader’s soul helped her recognize and overcome her own problems. She derived this rhetorical power of language from a combination of a skilled manipulation of the Freudian psychoanalytical model and deeply felt personal experiences. Her feminist awareness of female psychology and sociology was designed to resonate in the reader’s life experience.

With her therapeutic method, Sinclair responded to the inability of the Freudian model to consider femininity within the social sphere, by giving women attention and empathy with a thorough portrayal of their conditions. In her novels, she takes her characters seriously; she explores their fears and problems with a deep sense of respect, because they represented multiple versions of her self and with the full realization that they expressed multiple versions of the reader as well. By showing empathy for her character, she expressed empathy for her reader; she focused on the problems in her life that she saw repeated in other women’s lives; and she portrayed situations and conditions that the average low or middle-class single woman, the New Woman, could easily recognize as her own.

May Sinclair’s unique autobiographical model proposed a vibrant dialogue between writer and reader that proved beneficial to both of them. She was motivated by a political agenda of social reform of woman conditions-by establishing an alliance with the reader she hoped to convey the self-awareness and freedom of thinking that she considered vital to any private healthy choice in life and any public social change. Although limited by the ability of the reader to perceive and share this reformist message, her method still provided a human and intelligent attempt at filling the gap between patient and physician, and vouched for a more truthful psychoanalytical vision of the female patient.