At the end of the nineteenth century, enquiries into the nature of the self and the human psyche led to the development of two extensive and enduring psychological theories: those of William James and Sigmund Freud. James's theory has, at its base, the notion of a stream of consciousness, a phrase which would become almost an aphorism for modernism. His seminal work, The Principles of Psychology (1890), is said to have ‘practically founded the modern science of psychology in America’. Freud's topographical theory divides the human psyche into consciousness and the unconscious (later the Ego and the Id); he is considered the originator of psychoanalysis and the reach of his work into other disciplines is, of course, extensive. Whilst there is little evidence that Katherine Mansfield read either James or Freud, her notebooks, letters and stories signify more than a passing interest into notions of the self. However, Mansfield was not a philosopher or scholar and, unlike Freud and James, her approach was intuitive rather than academic. The theories espoused by James and Freud are necessarily complex and seem at times at variance with one another; this speaks to the difficulties inherent in attempting to understand and express what makes up the concept of the human self. Mansfield's own thoughts and ideas about the self are equally complex and at times contradictory. In this essay, I want to show how she attempts to work through her personal deliberations about the self by drawing attention to some of her notebook entries and two very early short stories, ‘Vignette: Summer in Winter’ and ‘The Education of Audrey’. I do not propose that Mansfield absorbed the theories of James and Freud, or indeed offered any kind of theory herself. I wish only to show that the complexity of psychological theory is mirrored in Mansfield's conjecture about the self and to highlight affinities between the discourse of those theories and Mansfield's writing.

James begins with the statement that ‘no psychology […] can question the existence of personal selves’ because we are aware of our own existence, and aware of the thought process that tells us that we exist separately from the rest of the world. It is not the thought but my thought.