Ulysses and Freud

One of the cool things about Episode 15, now that I have had a chance to digest it a bit, is the way in which it serves as a psychological study of the two main characters, Bloom and Dedalus. The “bubbling up” of the subconscious in these two characters throughout the episode really highlights, in the most significant way so far, the influence Freud and his theories of psychoanalysis had on this book. All the crazy dream sequences and drunken hallucinations, the repressed memories and feelings of the characters, laid bare by the literary process. It’s one big fictional account of the whole Freudian thing, Freud as applied to literature. Modernism.