Radical anthropocentrism

Auden's aversion to Romantic idealism, especially the Shelleyan mingling of spiritual sublimation and political radicalism, is well documented. His nature images also reject Romantic models. For the Romantics, nature provided an imaginary framework enabling the self to overcome alienation. 'Nature' bridged the gap between childhood and adulthood as a quasireligious power enabling the self to enter a higher plane than that of a mundane reality where actual, physical nature was increasingly sacrificed to the Industrial Revolution.

In Auden, images of nature are always man-made constructs. The early poem '1929' is telling. It contains a list of potentially Romantic nature images, frogs in ponds, 'traffic of magnificent cloud' across open sky, only to frame them in the urban context of a public garden and eventually of individual, social and political concerns. Already the term 'traffic' hints at a thoroughly anthropocentric perspective. In an essay on Robert Frost in 1936, Auden stated bluntly: 'Man is naturally anthropocentric and interested in his kind and in things or animals only in so far as they contribute to his life and sustain him; he does not interest himself in things to the exclusion of people till his relations with the latter have become difficult or have broken down.'

Storytelling is the obvious link between psychoanalysis and literature. Sixty years before Jacques Lacan described the unconscious as structured like a language, its method was labelled the ‘talking cure’ by an early patient. Most psychoanalytic methods produce texts, and most use texts such as dreams, narratives, slips of the tongue, jokes, but also bodily symptoms for their investigations. Freud employs Greek myths (most prominently Oedipus and Narcissus) for his crucial concepts. Jung scrutinises fairy tales and folklore, eastern and western religion, even alchemy. Neither differentiates between stories by actual patients and those inherited by literature and culture. This trend continues into the late twentieth century, as is evident in Lacan's analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's story ‘The Purloined Letter’. Eventually, psychoanalytic texts themselves have become objects of analysis, as in the writings of Abraham and Torok, who analyse Freud's analysis of the pathological case study the ‘Wolf-Man’.

Text-based in its methods, psychoanalysis shares with literature the poiesis of images and expressions, the poetics of their arrangement, the grammar of narratives, but also a theory of interpretation. The latter frequently abandons the idea of an origin of symptoms (in empirical fact or transcendent metaphysics) and instead refers to other texts, previous traumas or archetypal images and stories that are closely related to myths. Modern literary theory calls this ‘intertextuality’. Psychoanalytic theories also refer to their material in literary terms: the poetry of dreams, the drama of ur-scenes, and the narratives that emerge from them.