The Curious Scholarly Silence: Freud's Absence from Melville Studies
Scholarly commentary on Sigmund Freud's omission of Herman Melville from his literary writings is surprisingly sparse, representing an underexplored gap in both Freud studies and psychoanalytic literary criticism. While Melville's works, particularly Moby Dick, contain precisely the psychological depth and symbolic richness that attracted Freud to other authors, the absence of any Freudian engagement with American literature has received minimal direct scholarly attention.
This research reveals that the omission stems primarily from temporal and cultural factors, and that the lack of commentary on this gap may itself be significant.
The most substantial evidence suggests this absence resulted from a crucial temporal misalignment: Melville's literary recognition came decades after Freud had established his theoretical framework, combined with broader European cultural biases that shaped early psychoanalytic literary criticism.
The rare scholarly acknowledgment of Freud's American literary blind spot.
The most direct scholarly engagement with this topic appears in Sarah Ackerman's 2017 article "Exploring Freud's Resistance to The Oceanic Feeling" published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Ackerman explicitly addresses Freud's avoidance of concepts central to Melville's work, arguing that "Herman Melville elaborates and expands the concept of the oceanic in the text of Moby Dick while exploring "the many reasons Freud might have wished to avoid it."
This represents exactly the type of scholarship that directly confronts Freud's omission of psychologically rich American literature.
Beyond Ackerman's work, scholarly recognition of this absence appears largely indirect. American literature scholars have noted that early psychoanalytic attention to Melville came from American critics like Harvard psychologist Henry Murray rather than from Freud himself.
The temporal explanation for Freud's European Literary focus
The most compelling explanation for Freud's omission of Melville centers on temporal misalignment between Melville's recognition and Freud's active period of literary criticism.
This historical gap, rather than any theoretical incompatibility, appears to be the primary factor in causing that gap. Moby Dick was published in 1851 but "critics and readers on both sides of the Atlantic took little notice of the work," according to the show American Experience by PBS. Melville "died almost forgotten although he had once been a popular author" in 1891, and "was rediscovered in the 1920s." The crucial period of Melville's 'literary rehabilitation' occurred from 1919-1945, well after Freud had established his basic theoretical framework and completed most of his major literary analyses.
Freud's period of active literary engagement spanned roughly the 1890s through 1910s, when he was developing psychoanalytic theory and seeking literary exemplars.
His foundational The Interpretation of Dreams, (1900) established his approach to literary analysis, drawing on recognized European classics like Sophocles, especially Oedipus Rex, and Shakespeare, especially Hamlet.
By the time Melville gained international recognition in the 1920s, Freud's literary theoretical framework was already established, and his focus had shifted toward broader cultural and anthropological works.
This temporal gap meant that when Freud was actively seeking literary cases to support his emerging theories, Melville simply wasn't part of the recognized literary landscape in either America or Europe. American literature more broadly struggled for European recognition during the 19th century, with critics usually considering American works "inferior" imitations of European models.
Contemporary scholarship reveals the richness of what Freud missed
The extensive post-Freudian psychoanalytic criticism of Melville demonstrates precisely what Freud overlooked.
Multiple dissertations and academic analyses have applied Freudian concepts to Moby Dick with remarkable success, revealing psychological depths that would have provided rich material for Freud's theoretical development. For example, Seth A. Hagen's 2013 analysis explores how Ahab's masculine identity formation and internal conflicts contribute to his obsession with the white whale as a symbol of repressed childhood traumas.
The broader pattern of European cultural orientation in psychoanalytic criticism
Freud's omission of American literature reflects his deep European cultural orientation and classical literary grounding. Cambridge University Press documentation of "Freud's Literary Culture" reveals his immersion in classical European literature, with contemporary literary parallels drawn from European modernists like James Joyce and Marcel Proust rather than American contemporaries.
Freud's view of the Western literary canon of his era remained heavily Europe-dominated; his literary analyses focused exclusively on European cultural products.
Perhaps most significantly,
The absence of scholarly commentary on Freud's omission of Melville appears to represent a genuine research gap in psychoanalytic literary criticism.
and someone else should node about it!