This discussion of Irving Stone’s biographical novel, Passions of the Mind: A Novel of Sigmund Freud 1971, is my latest effort at amateur literary sleuthing. It has led me through essays on the changing definition of the biographical novel, the death of the liberal humanist subject, the rise and fall of the postmodernist subject and emerging 21st century movements like ecocriticism and Darwinian literary studies.
Having finished the novel (a slow and thorough telling of a life, quite pleasant, if slightly formal in language) I next read an essay by the same author called The Biographical Novel, from 1957. It is a brilliant document, transparent in meaning and method, a work that captures the ideological presuppositions that have lain at the foundation of western ontological thought from Descartes onwards. His opening sentence captures the ideas and the mood, the self-assuredness and the belief in the existence of self-evident “truths” that informed the scholarship and zeitgeist of Stone’s era.
Stone writes, “The biographical novel is a true and documented story of one human being’s journey across the face of the years, transmuted from the raw material of life into the delight and purity of an authentic art form.” If Stone’s definition is reliable and if he has followed the rules he has enumerated in his essay then “Passions of the Mind” ought to be considered a “true” and “documented” story of Sigmund Freud’s “journey”.1 And if the “raw material” is “transmuted” into an art form that is “authentic”, verifiable and if it is treated by expert hands, this biographical novel should be considered true. We can indeed know Freud: mid 20th century positivists like Stone tell us so and they teach us how to do it.
Enter the postmodern biographer and reader and everything changes. Recent writers like Massih Zekavat2 investigate the history of the construction of identities and remind us of the paradigm shift that ushered in the postmodern moment. After 1970, thinking about identity and its representation moved laterally and the existence of the stable, unified subject disappeared. The quest for the “authentic” self became not only impossible but irrelevant. The postmodern generation might expect a biographical novel based on the life of Freud to ask different questions, to be more speculative and to take more risks. To rewrite Stone’s definition, “the material selected from sources that are sometimes unusual or unauthorized or problematic will give up multiple meanings. The resultant ‘art form’ or text, while it will not produce something ‘pure’ or ‘authentic’, may nevertheless ‘delight’, particularly if it calls attention to its artifice.” Can we know Freud? Which Freud? Deleuze and Guattari’s Freud? Juliet Mitchell’s Freud? There are many to choose from.
Time passes. The postmodern subject grows old. The discursive language around issues grows strident. Contestatory positions appear and new appeals are being made to science to solve the problems brought on by the neglect of facts and figures. The individual is now reoccupying the agent position. Human nature is back and ecocriticism, Darwinian literary critics and other biology based movements applaud its return.
What would Irving Stone make of these monumental shifts in the formulation of ideas about ourselves? Is it nature over nurture or vice versa? Are we whole or fragmented subjects? And who was Freud, in the end?
1Of the 837 pages that comprise the novel, 28 pages detail the scholarship involved in the researching of the book.
2Zekavat, Massih., Evolution of the ‘Subject’: Postmodern and Beyond., 2010
