Palatable poison 252

War Wounds 237 were also increasingly diagnosed in the civilian population, in effect rendering the neurotic psyche as the paradigm of national wartime citizenship and as a model of modern, traumatized British subjectivity.18 In conjunction with the war’s influence on notions of the psyche, psychoanalysis infiltrated the British journal-reading public General interest journals, from the Athenaeum to the Spectator, and lay-science magazines such as Psyche and Discovery, all claimed that the mental casualties of war raised popular awareness of psychoanalysis in Britain.19 While “extreme” Freudianism was often dismissed as inappropriately preoccupied with sexuality, the press tended to embrace the more moderate, homegrown, new British depth psychology expounded by shell shock doctors such as Rivers Subsequently, journalists widely employed Freudian language and introduced psychoanalytic concepts to their readers Such terms as war nerves, shell shock, hysterical symptoms, conversion, repression, sublimation, the unconscious, neuroses, flight into illness, wish fulfillment, and traumatic memory became common phrases of the media.20 By the 1920s the press was referring to the “psychoanalysis craze” as the latest bourgeois preoccupation.21 “A characteristic feature of the emancipated conversation of the present day,” claims the Saturday Review in 1920, “is the popularity of the works of Freud as a dinner-table topic One can hardly read a review without finding some allusion to his discoveries, or some reference to the jargon peculiar to his disciples.”22 Similarly, Discovery reports that “the new psychology, or psychoanalysis is made the subject of letters to newspapers, sermons from the pulpit, and discussions at afternoon tea,” while The New Statesman asserts simply, “We are all psychoanalysts now.”23 Shell shock and its impact on discourses of the psyche had introduced Freud into the vernacular of the bourgeois reading public by the 1920s, providing the interwar generation with an appropriately modern language for categorizing and interpreting post–Great War subjectivity The Shell-Shocked Invert It is within this context of the Great War, traumatic neuroses, and popularized concepts of psychoanalysis that I want to situate a reading of The Well of Loneliness In writing the narrative of a 1920s female invert, Hall strategically appropriated the traumatic memory of both the war and shell shock