'At age ten Harry West, the son of a circus escape artist, read Pilgrim's Progress merely as "A great heroic adventure". Only later did he appreciate it as a religious allegory, and still later - after his exposure to Freud and Jung - he came to "discover it as one of the greatest, most potent works on practical psychology extant".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Harry West Print: Book
'Ethel Mannin was an exceptionally liberated letter-sorter's daughter, an early reader of Freud who made something of a career championing sexual freedom in the popular press. But when she approached the subject as a girl, she was far more fearful than informed: "At the board school all the girls were morbidly interested in parturition, menstruation, and procreation... We raked the Bible for information, and those of us who came from homes in which there were books made endless research, looking up in encyclopaedias and home medical works, such words as 'confinement', 'miscarriage', 'after-birth'... We were both fascinated and horrified. At the age of twelve I ploughed through a long and difficult book on embryology"... She copied passages from The Song of Songs into her commonplance book, but was disgusted when she came across the phrase, "Esau came forth from his mother's belly": "It seemed unspeakably dreadful, conjured up visions of sanguinary major operations. I was very miserable...".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ethel Mannin Print: Book
'Even those who read widely about sex often learned very little. In the 1920s Jennie Lee won a psychology degree from the University of Edinburgh... She went beyond the syllabus to read Ellis and Freud. While her collier father could not bring himself to discuss the subject, he was progressive enough to leave a book by Marie Stopes where she was likely to find it. All the same, Jennie was still capable of chatting with a prostitute on Princes Street without realizing what was going on. Stopes on sex "was all a bit remote and unattractive", she found'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Jennie Lee Print: Book
'An emancipated working woman like Elizabeth Ring was free to read the works of Freud, Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell in the late 1920s, but she was familiar with these books only because her schoolteachers had her exchange them at the Finsbury Public Library'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Ring Print: Book
'Charlie Chaplin was a classic autodidact, always struggling to make up for a dismally inadequate education, groping haphazardly for what he called "intellectual manna"... Chaplin could be found in his dressing room studying a Latin-English dictionary, Robert Ingersoll's secularist propaganda, Emerson's "Self- Reliance" ("I felt I had been handed a golden birthright"), Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman, Twain, Hazlitt, all five volumes of Plutarch's Lives, Plato, Locke, Kant, Freud's "Psychoneurosis", Lafcadio Hearn's "Life and Literature", and Henri Bergson - his essay on laughter, of course... Chaplin also spent forty years reading (if not finishing) the three volumes of "The World as Will and Idea" by Schopenhauer, whose musings on suicide are echoed in Monsieur Verdoux'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Spencer Chaplin Print: Book
H. J. Jackson notes T. H. White's reading and annotating of C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928); Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1923), and Alfred Adler, Practice and Theory of Individual Psychology (1924), conjecturing that White read these before 1932 (when aged 26).
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: T. H. White Print: Book
'[May Sinclair] read [Freud] in German as soon as "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" and the "Three Essays on Sexuality"were available.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: May Sinclair Print: Book
'[May Sinclair] read [Freud] in German as soon as "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" and the "Three Essays on Sexuality" were available.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: May Sinclair Print: Book
'like any bright young intellectual of his day, he was greatly influenced by Freud and writers on sex, such as Havelock Ellis and Norman Haire, who had taken their cue from Freud's liberating initiative'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
'I read Freud's "Introductory Lectures".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
[I am reading] 'An endeavour to see whether or not war can sort of be got under control for the future. (Freud; War & Death)'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'Though I am the least superstitious of mortals and rhough I have read Freud and Dunne and treat dreams with the scientific detachment they advocate, for the life of me I couldn't help but look upon this as a warning and for weeks afterwards I was alarmingly apprehensive of disaster, though nothing did happen to justify this terrifying experience.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: unknown Print: Book
Saturday 2 December 1939: 'Began reading Freud last night; to enlarge the circumference. to give my brain a wider scope: to make it objective, to get outside. Thus defeat the shrinkage of age. Always take on new things.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Friday 8 December 1939: 'Shopping -- tempted to buy jerseys & so on. I dislike this excitement. yet enjoy it. Ambivalence as Freud calls it. (I'm gulping up Freud).'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
Sunday 17 December 1939: 'We ate too much hare pie last night; & I read Freud on Groups [...] I'm reading Ricketts diary -- all about the war the last war; & the Herbert diaries & ... yes, Dadie's Shakespeare, & notes overflow into my 2 books.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
