Romantic Consciousness and Psychoanalysis

Published in 1970, Harold Bloom's Romanticism and Consciousness signals the apotheosis of a surge in Romantic studies that reflected the previous decade's mood swings between optimism and disillusionment. In the struggle between revolution and reaction, if not reform, the volume found its not so uncanny double in the Romantics. The tutelary spirit of this version of Jerome McGann's Romantic ideology, as noted in this volume's Introduction, and despite the diverse critical backgrounds of Bloom's contributors, was psychoanalysis. This orientation made sense, given Bloom's debt to Freud. But it also made sense, given that, especially post-World War Two, American psychoanalysis was dominated by ego psychology, which sought to make the darkness of the unconscious visible and thus champion the subject's ability to conquer inner demons. Yet, at the same time, the Romanticism of Bloom's volume reflects a world at once very and yet never quite sure of itself. This ambivalence heralds a version of psychoanalysis focused more on indeterminacy than resolve, one that took its cue from Continental theory and philosophy, particularly through Jacques Lacan's return to Freud, in which the cogito and its consciousness do not add up to the same subject. Lacan was, of course, a key influence on a deconstructive and poststructuralist thought whose impact can already be felt in Bloom's volume in essays by Geoffrey Hartman and especially Paul de Man. So, while Romanticism and Consciousness reflects a desire to bring the unconscious to consciousness, particularly by healing the Romantic subject's alienation from the world, it also heralds another psychoanalysis in which this desire for a cure is only one of the plague of fantasies by which we live.

Reassessing Freud's legacy closer to our own time, Adam Phillips argues that ‘Freud … charts the development of the unknowing and largely unknowable modern individual in a culture obsessed by knowl-edge; of the distracted and disrupted individual whose continuities and traditions are breaking down around him’ (10–11). This assessment speaks directly to Romanticism as a process of ‘restless self-examination’ (Rajan 25) and entails one of the period's central preoccupations with what Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, calls a ‘willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith’ (2:6). Phillips adds that ‘Freud moves from wondering who to believe in, to wondering about the origins and the function of the individual's predisposition to believe’ (Phillips 111).