On Not Being Able To Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World

by Jacqueline Rose

In these powerful essays Jacqueline Rose delves into the questions that keep us awake at night, into issues of privacy and publishing, exposure and shame. Do some women writers - Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath - have a special talent for self-revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography?

Turning to psychoanalysis, Rose explores its affinity with modernism and asks what it can tell us about the limits of knowledge, both about the most intimate and baffling components of experience and about the furthest, hallucinatory, reaches of the mind.

These fine studies move deftly between public, political and private, unconscious worlds. Offering new links between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics, On Not Being Able to Sleep provides a resonant and thought provoking collection for the present day.

Genres: Psychology, Essays, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Theory

Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Jacqueline Rose, FBA (born 1949, London) is a British academic who is currently Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Rose was born into a non-practicing Jewish family. Her elder sister was the philosopher Gillian Rose. Jacqueline Rose is known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. She is a graduate of St Hilda's College, Oxford and gained her higher degree (maîtrise) from the Sorbonne, Paris and her doctorate from the University of London.

Her book Albertine, a novel from 2001, is a feminist variation on Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

She is best known for her critical study on the life and work of American poet Sylvia Plath, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, published in 1991. In the book, Rose offers a postmodernist feminist interpretation of Plath's work, and criticises Plath's husband Ted Hughes and other editors of Plath's writing. Rose describes the hostility she experienced from Hughes and his sister (who acts as literary executor to Plath's estate) including threats received from Hughes about some of Rose's analysis of Plath's poem "The Rabbit Catcher". The Haunting of Sylvia Plath was critically acclaimed, and itself subject to a famous critique by Janet Malcolm in her book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Rose is a regular broadcaster on and contributor to the London Review of Books.

Rose's States of Fantasy was the inspiration for composer Mohammed Fairouz's Double Concerto of the same title.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Anna]

Reading psychoanalytical theory requires a lot of effort and doesn’t always offer proportionate rewards. The essays in this collection were denser than I expected, given that they were supposed to be applied theory rather than pure uncut Lacan-language. Although there were interesting elements to be found within, this was ultimately a book whose meandering, misty style did not provide sufficient comprehensible substance for my taste. I picked it up from the library shelf in the first place because I am a frequent insomniac, however the title should not be taken literally. Perhaps the most interesting chapter re-examines Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, but that’s as close as Rose comes to discussing sleep. Somewhat ironically, I found the first half of the book quite soporific, so it in fact helped me to sleep. The initial six chapters are psychoanalytical literary criticism, which reminded me why I chose not to do English Lit A-level. I struggled through them, especially given the morbid emphasis on female writers who committed suicide.

The latter chapters covered topics of greater appeal, to me at least. There was some interesting stuff about the split between Freud and Jung, focusing on the interpersonal conflict rather than theoretical disagreements. In fact, this book is the first I’ve come across that discusses psychoanalysis as both theory and practise, noting the differences between the two. The former resides largely in academia, whilst the latter is shaped by the disagreements between key (male) figures who have shaped it. Rose asks what qualifies someone to be a psychoanalyst - is it enough to have been psychoanalysed by someone else for a certain period? This implies a particular sort of apprenticeship rather than formal academic training, yet it reminded me of my experience of academic teaching. As a postgraduate, I was considered qualified to supervise undergraduates as I’d been through the supervision system as an undergraduate myself. Actually, the similarities don’t end there, as supervisions involve semi-structured discussion in which the supervisor prompts their students to explore their ideas through careful questioning. I’ve never been psychoanalysed but the format is surely quite like that, albeit with a very different conversation topic to, say, housing policy!

I also appreciated Rose’s discussion of psychoanalysis as an institution, rather than just a body of theory. Although I knew that Lacan set up his own breakaway school, I hadn’t realised that he was experimenting with an alternate governance structure. Rose describes it as monarchical, as Lacan apparently had quite the cult of personality going. It’s striking to consider (what little I understand of) psychoanalytical theory in light of the conduct of those that came up with it. The final two chapters take psychoanalytical angles on public grief after Princess Diana’s death and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, both fascinating subjects for analysis. Yet my main thought when reading each of those chapters was, “But what is your thesis?” In the fashion of her discipline, Rose’s writing raises a question then drifts in another direction, lacking the clarity of structure that I expect from academic work. Nonetheless, there were thought-provoking elements to be found and I don’t regret reading the book. To gauge whether you’d find it worthwhile, here is the most memorably annoying paragraph:

Both novels are grounded, narratively and ideologically, in property, specifically in a house - two in the case of Bowen - which, partly due to the economic conditions or aftermath of the war, is in the process of dramatically and painfully changing hands. And both choose to supplement the violence of the war, whether as memory and anticipation in the case of Butts or concrete, lived, backdrop in the case of Bowen whose novel takes place during the Blitz, with a death, or number of deaths, which remain at least partially and bafflingly contingent to the historic conflict whose emotional and psychic vicissitudes they also trace.

If you can cope with that, I think you'll be fine.

[Moira]

The literary criticism is great, as is most of the essay on Diana's death, but the heavy-duty psychoanalytic theory in the whole second half of the book is unreadable. Definitely a book to get from the library.

[Tucker]

Ideas on self and emotion. Good explanation of Freudian ideas and historical/biographical context of various writers.

[Sita]

Any book that begins with “Shame requires an audience...” works for me.

The essay on Christina Rossetti is wonderful, iconic, an absolute banger. I skipped the second half as most of them were essays about psychiatry and I could not understand them well.

[Frank Hoppe]

Fascinating, but very dense. I had to read it in short chunks, consulting a dictionary regularly throughout. I tried out some writers that I had not previously explored, Anne Sexton was one.

[Mirna S]

I definitely understood some of this. Particularly liked the essays on Plath and Woolf, obviously.

[Tayfun Sen]

Some of the essays are thought provoking, while others are extremely hard to read. Loved the writing on women poets and the quoted words from them and also the essay on South Africa. Worth reading in my opinion.

[Sammy]

For a defense and complication of the 'confessional,' look no further. Not to mention some really interesting essays on Freud et al.