Hazel writes beautifully about literature and music, and I’m always in awe of the way she seems to think, making connections that make perfect sense yet which I would never have contemplated.

A particularly interesting point is the difference between the pre-  and post-Freud worlds and the effect that psychoanalysis had on the concept of the self. Hazel’s correct when she says that there is a profound difference which can be felt in literature (though my natural bent is more towards prose where she’s cited poetry); it would be fascinating to study the literature ten years either side of Freud’s publications and examine the resulting changes.
19th century men did struggle with their demons, but was the sense of self under such siege pre-psychoanalysis as it seems to have become? It can’t be laid solely at Freud’s door, as World War I led to developing theories about mental illness with the increased shellshock and hysteria that had previously largely affected women now affecting men in increasing numbers while women’s mental illness rates were falling. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy takes seriously the question of why this is, and the effect the war had on men and women’s mental states, following the feminist theory that hysteria was a by-product of enforced inactivity, women who were aching to be more active, intellectual and creative than they were permitted to be whose bodies and minds reacted in protest. Barker traces the shift of that to men, in shell shock of varying degrees and types, and the way in which women’s role opened up during the war because they had to – there weren’t enough men to do the job.

He didn’t know what to make of her, but then he was out of touch with women. They seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space” (Barker, Regeneration)

Living through the first twenty years of the century was to be witness to a profound change; the shift from being born into a country which essentially ruled the world to living in a world that had somehow shrunk, and turned against itself, causing an immense disruption to generations. There is a fragmentation of the self afterwards which somehow isn’t as present prior to the beginning of the 20^th century, a sense that it is a struggle with oneself, that you can’t necessarily trust the way you think, react, and feel, because there’s the new subconscious that you can’t control. It’s a base instinct, uncontrollable, primal – and unleashed in the war’s destruction, leading to killing on such a scale that everyone was touched by it. But essentially, it came from men.

That, coupled with the analysis of the subconscious, prompts the powerful shift you can see in literature dealing with self and identity. Prior to this, the contemplations of the self are largely to do with a force acting upon the self, attempting to split it in two – whether that force is Satan, alcohol, despair or poverty, it’s brought about by an external force and the self must hold fast against it. Post war, post analysis, the threat comes from within. We are our worst destroyers, our own greatest threat.