ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two of the picaresque novels written contemporaneously with Lawrence’s prose critiques of psychoanalysis, Mr Noon and Aaron’s Rod, and it presents not only their content but also their fictional form and narrative voices as revisions of the integrative vision of classical psychoanalysis. It reads Mr Noon as a furious satire on the excessively theoretical nature of German culture, from its frequent parodies of Goethe’s Faust to its attack on Gross’s programme of erotic liberation. This is followed by a survey of the debate between psychoanalysts and psychiatrists about ‘shell-shock’ in Britain in the war years, with particular attention paid to the position of David Eder, to whom Lawrence was again close in autumn 1917 when starting work on Aaron’s Rod. The chapter concludes with a full critical discussion of Aaron’s Rod, the most psychoanalytically engaged of all Lawrence’s texts, whose traumatised victims of hysteria and war-shock are presented within the context of a ‘biological psyche’, whose parameters directly undermine the foundations of Freudian theory and therapy and whose hero Rawdon Lilly appears as a ‘psychic physician’ who may – or, paradoxically, may not – have found a way to escape the general contamination of war-time hysteria.
