Orwell, Freud, and 1984
Paul Roazen
GEORGE Orwell and Sigmund Freud seem mutually uncongenial figures in intellectual history. In print Orwell rarely referred to the founder of psychoanalysis. According to his friend Geoffrey Gorer, Orwell regarded psychoanalysis with mild hostility, putting it somewhat on a par with Christian Science. Another friend, Sir Richard Rees, had no recollection of Orwell's ever once mentioning Freud's name, and considered this an aspect of Orwell's "psychological incuriosity." Orwell's first wife Eileen had a little training in the academic psychology of the late 1920's and early 1930's. Even though some eminent English intellectuals were psychoanalysts in that period, Orwell evidently had no contact with them nor any interest in their subject. On the other side of the kinship that I should like to explore, Freud in all likelihood never heard of Orwell. Freud's taste did not include many of the most illustrious 20th-century writers and artists. In his last years Freud liked to relax with a good mystery story and relished in particular Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.Orwell also enjoyed detective stories, and he wrote about some of their implications and source of appeal. His novels that appeared in Freud's lifetime were narrowly read and artististically not unconventional; it is Orwell's masterpiece 1984, published in 1949, ten years after Freud's death, that retains its uncanny, horrifying—and one might say its Freudian—air.
The Freud of history was a bourgeois gentleman. The commercial imagery of his writings reflects the declassed poverty of his youth and the middle-class character of his strivings: Freud wrote in terms of psychological "compensations,"
