Ms,ReMa
07-31-2008, 07:21 PM
At the beginning of the 20th century, writers such as Virginia Woolf and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, William James and Henri Bergson were trying to give a novel account of our inner and psychological life. The aim of this article is to compare Woolf's metaphorical recreation of the workings of the human mind by means of a rhetorical pattern articulated around the notions of container and content, surface and depth, fluidity and unboundedness with Freud's dynamic and topographical representation of psychological life, where streams of thought flow across the superficial and the deep layers with James's definition of consciousness as a 'stream of thought' and with Bergson's conception of psychological time as 'durée', an endlessly flowing process, apprehended by 'l'intuition'