James Strachey was the younger brother of Lytton Strachey and one of the first people in England to train in and practise psychoanalysis. He translated Freud's work, and as a member of the Bloomsbury Group was instrumental in promoting it via publications with the Hogarth Press. These letters were written (almost daily) during the single long separation from his wife Alix who was being psychoanalysed as part of her training by Karl Abraham in Berlin. It's an interesting one-year slice of two lives which encompasses social and cultural life in Germany and the UK in the early 1920s, the foundations of Freudianism in the UK, and a rich tapestry of European modernism from two of its inside practitioners who were very keen to be au fait with the latest cultural and intellectual developments... Read more >>
13 July 2008
Bloomsbury/Freud
23 June 2008
Midsummer Reading Week
Andalusia is offering itself up in solar splendour at the moment - which is a welcome relief after the misery of Manchester in the last few weeks. And Puebla Lucia was at its finest - except that we have unfortunately lost another palm tree to the weevil infection which has blighted the coast recently.
My reading highlight was Katie Roiphe's much publicized Uncommon Arrangements - a study of six 'unusual' partnerships in the literary world of the 1920s. There's not a lot of in-depth analysis, but the gossip-factor rating is commendably high.
I followed this up with the Letters of James and Alix Strachey which made a sound case for their combined importance in establishing Freudianism in the UK, both as a medical practice and an intellectual force, via their translations of his work and publication via Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press
I also slogged my way dutifully through two volumes on study skills for undergraduate and postgraduate students, then tackled a book of literary criticism on one of my old favourite authors, Vladimir Nabokov. Battling through it reminded me why nobody except geeks and academics seeking tenure would have the slightest interest in reading literary criticism in its latest manifestation.
