Joyce and the early Freudians

Outstanding and insightful, this work demonstrates that by 1922, Joyce had engaged with key psychoanalytic texts by Freud, Jung, and others, significantly shaping his artistic vision in Ulysses. It offers a crucial roadmap to Joyce's relationship with psychoanalysis. The book examines Joyce's interaction with psychoanalytic literature prior to Ulysses, not as a psychoanalytic reading but as an exploration of how these writings influenced his work amid the psychoanalytic movement's zeitgeist. Jean Kimball begins with an in-depth discussion of three psychoanalytic texts Joyce acquired in Trieste before moving to Zurich in 1915: Freud's psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci, Jung's essay on paternal significance, and a German translation of Ernest Jones's Hamlet and Oedipus. She then analyzes the extensive psychoanalytic literature available at the Zentralbibliothek during his Zurich residence, including previously untranslated articles relevant to the Blooms' marriage, which hint at a psychoanalytic basis for Bloom's sexual peculiarities. Through close reading, the study identifies textual parallels and verbal echoes from psychoanalytic writings in A Portrait of the Artist and, more prominently, in Ulysses. Kimball highlights Joyce's unique allusions, intertwining psychoanalytic and classical references, thereby reinforcing the connection between Joyce and Freud, two pivotal figures of the 20th century.