The influence of dynamic psychiatry on <i>Tender Is the Night</i> by F. Scott Fitzgerald

<p class="MsoNormal">This study is an attempt to redress the historical misapplication of literary and cultural theory in reading the psychiatric material of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s <i>Tender Is the Night</i>. Critics have applied several, sometimes contradictory, theoretical lenses to the text. As a result, the text has been characterised either as ignorant of psychiatry or in league with the so-called autocratic and “unscientific” basis of its practices. Often, it is regarded a revenge project aimed at his wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (herself a psychiatric patient periodically between 1930 and 1948). </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br/>Medicine’s rediscovery of the humanistic dimensions of its practice during the past thirty years provides a useful framework that Tender criticism can use to break the cycle of restatement of tired and misapplied theoretical premises from a by-gone era of anti-psychiatry, psychoanalytic theory, and second-wave feminism. Such a text-centric framework allows one to turn both to the history of psychiatry and the personal history of the Fitzgeralds’ interactions with psychodynamic psychiatry by way of the archive. It creates a clearer picture of what the author intended for the text, and how it reflects a time in his life in which the author had exceptionally close contact with the foremost psychiatric clinics and psychiatrists in the world.</p><p class="MsoNormal"/>

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral Thesis

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Queen's University Belfast

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Moffat, Lauren

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• McGowan, Philip
• O'Neill, Francis

• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Tender Is the Night
• psychiatry
• Zelda Fitzgerald

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

oai:pure.qub.ac.uk/portal:studenttheses/6e4b52e3-3b11-417d-badc-92ea74bfbf5c

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:pure.qub.ac.uk/portal:studenttheses/6e4b52e3-3b11-417d-badc-92ea74bfbf5c