Joyce and the Early Freudians: A Synchronic Dialogue of Texts

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.