Faulkner's Return to the Freudian Father: Sanctuary Reconsidered

Abstract

Faulkner's disclaimer that he was "not familiar with" Freud (Faulkner in the University 268) often has been regarded skeptically by scholars. John T. Irwin, for example, identifies Freudian allusions in Mosquitoes (1927) and wryly observes that "if the author of the novel was not familiar with Freud, his characters certainly were" (Doubling 5). Possibly Faulkner meant that he had not formally studied Freud since he readily admitted that he had been exposed to Freudian ideas: "Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I never read him" (Lion 251). Alternatively, we could interpret Faulkner's statement as a Bloomian denial of influence. Irwin theorizes that Faulkner may have actively resisted acknowledging Freud's work "to avoid the threat to his own creative energy and enterprise that might be posed by a sense of his own work having [End Page 411] been anticipated by Freud's" (Doubling 5). Of course, Faulkner himself subscribed to the view that all such speculation is irrelevant since the artist can intuit the psychic paradigms that the scientist analyzes: "a writer don't have to know Freud to have written things which anyone who does know Freud can divine and reduce into symbols. And so when the critic finds those symbols, they are of course there. But they were there as inevitably as the critic should stumble on his own knowledge of Freud to discern symbol" (Faulkner in the University 147). Faulkner's understanding of the creative process mirrors Freud's, who frequently stated that poets often "discover" what philosophers and scientists theorize about many years later. However we choose to read Faulkner's acquaintance with Freud—whether as a direct influence or as an independent, parallel investigation of similar psychic processes—as countless critics have demonstrated, the texts of his novels reveal a persistent, even obsessive, engagement with Freudian motifs. In particular, in Sanctuary he compulsively revisits and refashions a centerpiece of Freudian thought, an image out of the unconscious mind that Freud called the primal scene.