Freud in the Soup: Implications of Hysteria in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Bliss’

01 June 2021

Sasha Clarke, Birkbeck College, University of London

When considering the development of the modernist form, Freudianism represents perhaps the most significant trajectory toward modernity. While Freud’s work is predominantly characterised by scientific rationality, similar sentiments were embraced by the great modern poets, most notably, T. S. Eliot, whose reference to the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ characterised the potential to separate thought from feeling.^[1] As Freud found prominence in the late nineteenth century, largely as a result of his Studies on Hysteria published in 1895, it was the subject of these psychoanalyses, Bertha Pappenheim, who inspired the tropes most widely recognised as authentically modernist: self-fragmentation, irrationality, subjectivity, and the formative role of sexuality in developing one’s persona.