Murdoch

Iris Murdoch and the Good Psychoanalyst
Author(s): Jack Turner

Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 300-317
Published by: Hofstra University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441557
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Iris
Murdoch
and
the
Good
Psychoanalyst
JACKTURNER
Several . . . films [Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade, Field of Dreams, and Star Trek
V: The Final Frontier, 1989] send their
heroes searching for hints of God's presence in the universe, on quests for spiritual
meaning....
And like many New Age approaches
that cloak self-absorption in a veneer of
spirituality, the films are not really about
God and faith.
In every case, the religious quest masks
a more human concern, a reconciliation
with the hero's own father. (Caryn James)
What seems to us so grandiose about ethics,
so mysterious and, in a mythical fashion, so
self-evident, owes these characteristics to its
connection with religion, its origins from
the will of the father.
(Sigmund Freud 370)
Thomas McCaskerville, the Scottish psychoanalyst in Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice (1985), is meticulously ethical, constantly
concerned with doing what is right, always thinking of the effects of his
words and actions on others, and also religious in a way, practicing what
Harold Bloom calls Murdoch's "astringent post-Christian Platonism," a
kind of "negative theology." "Let's say that God is a permanent
non-degradable love object," Thomas says to young Stuart Cuno. "Must
we not imagine something of the sort?" Then, running through a
typical, even stereotypical, Murdochian litany, Stuart eventually says
300
IRIS MURDOCH
that he wants to go it alone, without a god, "Just to try to be good, to be
for others and not oneself. .. . [The good is] all, everywhere, as if
everything spoke it and showed it-and it's so deep that it's entirely me,
and yet it's entirely not me too-." "Steady on," says Thomas. "All that
sounds like God. You say there is no God, then you aspire to be God
yourself, you take over his attributes. Perhaps that is the task of the
present age" (140-41).
John Updike, himself a religious quester in his fiction, writes that
Murdoch, "unable in good conscience to locate depth in the external
cosmos where God once reigned, turns, in the paradoxical gesture of
Christian humanism, toward Man himself to supply the depth that Man
demands.... Murdoch's central male triangle of Harry [Cuno], Edward
[Baltram, Harry's stepson], and Stuart [Harry's son] . . . does not
illustrate much in the way of depth" (126). However, Thomas, the
artistic "saint," and Jesse Baltram, the saintly artist (Edward's biological
father), supply plenty, maybe too much.'
"The esthetic puzzle," Bloom writes, "is whether the comic story
and the spiritual kernel can be held together by Miss Murdoch's archaic
stance as an authorial will." Pearl K. Bell argues that the novel is
"peculiarly disjointed and uneven" (36); Gillian Wilce calls it "a moral
soap opera" (30). The GoodApprentice,however, does include a realistic,
sensitive portrayal of an analyst-the first and only such portrayal in
her canon-and, as in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1971), itself a social
and psychological comedy, and of equal rank with this one, here
Murdoch creates characters and landscapes that come to life, colorful
and vibrant people and settings. Further, in showing Stuart beating
everyone over the head with his heavy-handed ethical message,
Murdoch is lampooning the didactic side of herself (undercutting her
usual moral agenda), a tactic that allows the surface of the novel to have
a light and airy feel, even as dark, mysterious forces seem to be at work.
Her command of detail and her painterly descriptions invest the book
with what Peter J. Conradi calls her "luminous, lyrical accuracy" (4).
The moral agenda is allowed to drift and grow beneath the surface, as it
often does in good literature. Ironically, by blatantly calling attention to
morality with the naive character Stuart, Murdoch manages to push her
own moral philosophy into the shadows awhile, where it becomes even
more effective. Stuart is portrayed as a good person, but unintentionally
a clown, not a saint.
Thomas is the saint figure, but although he is presented as an
almost ideal man (resembling Murdoch's father in his intelligence,
steadiness, and success),2 he nonetheless has faults as both man and
301
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
analyst, which are used indirectly to criticize Freudianism once again (as
Murdoch often does in both her fiction and nonfiction).3 Thomas is not
a caricature of an analyst, like Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head
(1961), or Blaise Gavender in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
(1974); Thomas comes across as real. As we watch and listen to his own
neuroses-he is always concerned about the neatness of his hair, and
often thinks of his parents and of his own power-we are meant to see
his clay feet. When he himself questions the bases of psychoanalysis,
since he is one of the most sympathetic characters in the Murdoch
canon, the questioning takes on more depth and is more damaging than
it has been before. Thus, while presenting an analyst who is perceptibly,
undoubtedly a hero, Murdoch uses him to drive her imagined stake
even deeper into the heart of Freud.
The fine shape of the prose in this novel and her careful
evocation of suspense form a strong defense, in Norman Holland's
terms, and obscure the central fantasy. But it is there and is familiar,
though distorted. Murdoch again, as in several previous novels
(including A Fairly Honourable Defeat; The Sea, the Sea; and The
Philosopher'sPupil), presents her father/self as saint and her mother/
self as artist, and again punishes them both: Thomas is cuckolded by
Harry, verbally attacked both behind his back and to his face by
almost every other character, and tortured by self-doubts; Jesse is
"imprisoned in a decaying 'enchanter's palace' by the sea" (Koger) and
eventually drowns. Stuart and Edward play the apprentice roles to
these mentors, Stuart deciding to teach and Edward deciding to write
fiction. "Homosexual attraction among young males seems a more
considerable factor than formerly," Updike notes, also saying that "the
female characters become even more fey and glimmery will-o'-thewisps-sex objects, or quest objects, of a rarefied sort. Or else they are
brisk masculine professionals" (123-24). Familiar Murdoch motifs and
predilections recur, therefore, in The Good Apprentice,but do not ruin
the artistry or effect of the book. If anything-as has been the case
serve to deepen and enliven the plot, characters, and
before-they
settings. Playing upon the fears, beliefs, and prejudices of her
audience by playing with her own has always been a Murdoch
strength and standby.
The fear of losing one's father and the need to find or replace him
if he is lost, or if one is separated from him, form the central focus of
the novel, as indicated by the names of its three parts: "The Prodigal
Son" (referring to Edward); "Seegard" (the name of Jesse's house); and
302
IRIS MURDOCH
"Life After Death" (namely the death of Jesse). The novel begins with
these paragraphs:
I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father
I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more
worthy to be called thy son.
These were not perhaps the actual words which Edward
Baltram uttered to himself on the occasion of his momentous and
mysterious summons, yet their echo was not absent even then,
and later he repeated them often.
(1)
With this passage we are introduced to what Bloom calls
"Murdoch's archaic stance as an authorial will," such an approach being
evident in the biblical quotation (Luke 15:18-19), solemn tone, and use
of the words "momentous and mysterious," an alliterative phrase that
recalls eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prose. And The Good
Apprentice is firmly formed, one of Murdoch's "closed" novels as she
refers to them, a comedy in the Aristotelian sense (beginning in chaos
and ending in resolution), but not a funny one, and replete with
old-fashioned melodrama. The formula is reminiscent of the novels of
Fanny Burney, Samuel Richardson, or-more appropriately-Charles
Dickens. In some ways Edward resembles a tortured heroine (Jesse
even more so); the homosexual attraction between Edward and Mark
Wilsden, and even between Edward and Jesse, is obvious. Updike calls
Edward and Stuart "rather priggish" (123). But mostly Edward is an
Oliver Twist/David Copperfield/Pip Pirrup figure, a young man on a
quest to find love, peace of mind, and his father, all of which are
interrelated and eventually come his way in one form or another. On
the path to happiness, though, are many "momentous and mysterious"
obstacles. Of course this reductive criticism sells the book short. But the
archaic stance and style-"neo-traditional," to give it a name-and the
archaic formula are there. Unexpected twists in the plot are by now to
be expected from Murdoch, as are fresh, vivid details, but the plot line
never wanders away from her. Her authorial will is always in control;
there is no ad-libbing. She seems to have abandoned here the idea of
the good novel being "a house fit for free characters to live in"
("Sublime" 271).
One example of her control shows a bit of overcontrol, even plot
manipulation for psychological aims, and it is the only serious flaw in
the book. Harry and Midge, Thomas's wife, in the course of their affair
take a drive in the country; their car gets stuck. Conveniently they
wander to the cottage of Elspeth Macran ("a horsy and vindictive
feminist . . . spurned by this author of protean sympathy" [Updike
303
1241]) and her daughter, Sarah, a friend of Edward's. Even more

conveniently, Sarah leads them to Seegard to use the phone (her
mother not having one). It happens that they encounter Edward,
Stuart, and Jesse there, and Harry and Midge's affair is no longer
secret. Until these three other men appear on the scene, however, the
illicit couple have tried to mask their real identities. When all becomes
obvious and Edward has introduced them by name to Jesse's wife and
daughters, Bettina, one of the daughters, utters the funniest line in the
book: "First they were Mr. and Mrs. Bentley. Then he was Mr. Weston.
It's an evening for charades!" (289). There are other startling
coincidences, but none as forced as this one-the technique momentarily creaks.
From a psychological standpoint. Murdoch needs to have the lovers
discovered in their treachery in order to initiate their punishment for
deviating from the good. Harry "despises women" according to the
character Dr. Ursula Brightwalton, a general practitioner and friend of
Midge and Thomas (34). Critic Grove Koger calls Harry "a monster of
will, a disappointed spoilt child" (128). He is a dominant, irascible,
arrogant male and has to be punished. (Losing Midge almost destroys
him, as she eventually unites more firmly than ever with Thomas.) On
the other hand, Midge, unlike Harry, is so impressionable and weak of
ego as to be nonexistent as a force: she tends to believe what she is told
and goes where the wind of gratification and impulse blows her. And
she is young and beautiful. Murdoch's Sword of Damocles is always
visible just above Midge's gorgeous curls. But it never completely falls.
For Murdoch the fact that Midge will be roundly and summarily
condemned by most readers and that she must continue to live in the
prison of her own fragile ego, cursed by an innate shallowness, is
punishment enough. Thomas loves her, though, even as he pities her,
and finds her a refreshing counterpoint to his own personality-Ursula
claims he is "too deep" (35).
Given a definite atavism in outlook and a tendency to ramble
eloquently, Thomas resembles his creator: Murdoch takes her archaic
stance knowingly, analyzes her characters ad infinitum, through their
reported thoughts and the opinions of others, and occasionally indulges
in wordiness-usually interesting verbosity but verbosity nonetheless.
The book could be a hundred pages shorter and achieve almost
precisely the same effect. Its length (522 pages) is another facet it shares
with its two-hundred-year-old ancestors. It is a book to be leisurely
pondered, as Thomas ponders his patients and his inner demons, with
little anxiety but with great care and fascination. Murdoch makes no
304
IRIS MURDOCH
concessions to the high-tech, high-speed world around her; neither
does Thomas. Ursula wants to try a quick-fix approach to Edward's
mental anguish: "I'll go and see Edward and get him back on pills....
Everyone's behaving so oddly these days. I'm the only sane person
around" (390).
However, underneath the antiquated surface and traditional
morality there moves a revolutionary power, a subliminal thrust that
occasionally shows through, and a depth of wisdom not previously as
evident in Murdoch's work. For example, in the second paragraph we
see and feel an echo of Virginia Woolf when Murdoch writes, "These
were not perhaps the actual words which Edward Baltram uttered to
himself." There is an implicit uncertainty there, much like the quiet,
subterranean uncertainty in Woolf's To the Lighthouse(1927). It is as if
Murdoch is only partly able to penetrate her characters' minds. Again
her previous didacticism is undercut and she moves ever so slightly
away from the archaic stance. Fittingly, such uncertainty and mutinous
questioning of assumptions, together with a deep, resonating wisdom,
can also be seen in Thomas. He had "meandered into psychiatry by a
route which Ursula Brightwalton would have disapproved of ...
Thomas had studied literature, then took a medical degree to please his
McCaskerville grandfather," and later had gone into psychiatry. He
now sees that he was "spiritually 'destined' for it" (81). At one point
Edward tells him that "this stuff [advice] of yours just sounds like
poetry," and later in the discussion Thomas tells Edward, "We need
priests, we miss . . . their power" (690. Thomas is not a conventional
analyst, to say the least, but he is more than merely artistic or religious:
"About drugs and electric shocks he knew a good deal more than
Ursula imagined." More important than his technical, medical
knowledge, though, is this fact: "He knew whom he couldn't treat" (81).
With The Good ApprenticeMurdoch, too, seems to have found her
limits and to honor them. She is poetic and religious, powerful and wise,
but she is not completely modern, not experimental. Her innovations
are subtle, and some of them are reinventions, or rejuvenations, of old
forms. She dares to be archaic. Her criticism of Freud here is subtle,
too, and-to the non-Freudian or the not-completely-convinced-can
be effective, even disturbing.
The novel poses a great many big, metaphysical questions and
offers no answers to most of them. Updike points out that these
important questions "are the very ones upon which the interest of all
fiction depends. Our lives are momentous: all of her tremendous
novelistic energy is bent to sustaining that faith. Our lives have
305
meaning, there is such a thing as goodness; the head supplies so little

evidence ... but the heart keeps insisting" (126). A Freudian has more
answers and would point to the use of the word "heart" here-and its
same use in the novel-as an empty metaphor cherished by romantics.
Nevertheless, art has always dealt with cosmic concerns and with
romance-which are linked in Wolfgang Iser's notion that we have an
"inherent drive to make accessible the inaccessible ... [and to] attempt
to explain origins." Literature is "a staging of the constant deferment of
explanations" (228). In The GoodApprenticethere are many conjectures,
but few explanations for anything.
Stuart thinks he has all the answers and, in a way, represents the
majority of Murdoch's previous novels. He preaches the good and
eventually shows it, but as his father, Harry, perceptively asserts, Stuart
in the end becomes a kind of "power maniac" (520), wanting to force his
philosophy on others as the true way, the only way. "We can
understand," Freud writes,
how a primitive man is in need of a God as creator of the
But it is
universe, as chief of his clan, as personal protector....
less easy to understand why there may only be a single god....
No doubt it is true . .. that the believer has a share in the
greatness of his God. .... Pious believers ... say that the idea of
a single God . . . is a portion of the eternal truth which, long
concealed, came to light at last and was then bound to carry
everyone along with it.
(Origins 376-77)
Stuart is a pious believer in the Good; so is Murdoch. Only, in this novel,
she no longer is preaching or teaching as openly or loudly. Most of the
message is delivered through the thoughts and actions of Edward and
Jesse, the quester and the Holy Grail, but ironically much of the
message also comes through Thomas, the psychoanalyst, a successful
practitioner of what, in previous novels, has been presented by
Murdoch as anathema, as a dangerous and false religion, as mental
poison. Has she truly tempered her attitude, or merely gone
underground with it?
Evidence in the novel shows she has done a little of both. The book
also shows again why she was initially opposed to Freudianism, and still
is: it is not mystical enough. Almost immediately the line between
science and religion is drawn, at the McCaskervilles' dinner party for
"the unfortunate Edward" (18), who has inadvertently contributed to
the death of his friend Mark (who jumped or fell out of a window) by
slipping him a hallucinogenic drug in a sandwich. Midge, who claims
she "can't understand" such concepts as pure science and free will, says
306
IRIS MURDOCH
she "heard ... on TV" that "the subatomic world needs us to rescue it
from chaos. It all sounds perfectly made. No wonder there are
terrorists. No wonder we need religion" (27). In a discussion of
computers Stuart says that "computer logic can't be a model for the
mind, there's no ideal model and there can't be because minds are
persons, they're moral and spiritual all the way through, the idea of a
machine isn't in place" (29). (The concept of minds being equivalent to
persons recalls the idea of severed heads, nonpassionate people, in
Murdoch's 1961 novel.) Toward the end of The Good ApprenticeHarry
argues that "Stuart's a menace, he's a simplifier, he's got no
imagination, he's got no sense of drama" and Edward, in Stuart's
defense, says, "Perhaps he's got no unconscious mind." Harry, speaking
for Freud (as he often does --tellingly-throughout
the book), replies,
is
an
illusion"
that's
one,
(521). Thus,
why religion
"Everybody's got
from beginning to end, the novel analyzes the contrast, and sets up a
dialectic, between scientific and religious (romantic, mystic) views of the
human mind.
Computers work in binary systems (off/on, yes/no), but the mind,
Ursula claims-and Murdoch and Stuart would agree-" is a bottomless
mystery" (390), rather like the subatomic chaos that "needs" our
organization schema to "rescue it." Such a schema resembles psychoanalysis: the machine as a metaphor with which to characterize the
mind, with some of Freud's terms, such as "condensation," "displacement," and "compensation," coming from physics. The universe,
according to Ursula, is only "a totality of observations ... a work of art
created by us" (27). One of Murdoch's women whom Updike calls "brisk
masculine professionals," Ursula deconstructs herself. During the
dinner party she speaks of the need for scientific, "pure" thinking and
the existence of "such a thing as human nature" (28, 30); yet any
scientific investigation of such a phenomenon is out of bounds in her
philosophy: "Only people like Thomas imagine they understand it, and
my God they're a menace ... All the same I can see he's losing his grip,
he's losing his confidence, and that's vital. They can only function if
they're supremely confident, like God" (390-91). Having such a
muddled, but supremely confident, even overbearing, character such as
Ursula (or Stuart) verbally attack a psychoanalyst and his profession
would seem to be almost an endorsement of Freud by Murdoch. But
having Harry, the male chauvinist, and arguably the most selfish person
in the novel, speak up for Freud's ideas sends the opposite message.
What is clear is that Murdoch wants to underscore the tension between
the two viewpoints: chaos versus order; religion versus science. Having
307
TWENTIETHCENTURYLITERATURE
Ursula, the scientific doctor, say the word "God" twice in one paragraph
is not an accident.
Midge, too, like Harry, often speaks for Freudian concepts,
perhaps to show off her knowledge for Harry or Thomas. When Stuart
chastises her for being too complacent about Meredith (the McCaskervilles' son) watching pornographic videos, Midge says, "Sex is
everywhere. . . . Anyway, children aren't innocent, psychoanalysis
proves that" (32), an allusion to the most questioned and controversial
area of Freud's theories. Showing such a sycophantic, selfish character
mouthing such simplified, popularized psychology casts a shadow on
the value and truth of the underlying ideas, but since Harry and Midge
are clearly the characters most concerned with sex, Murdoch may
simply be having some fun at Freud's expense. But the homogenized,
over-digested Freudian homilies uttered by Harry and Midge show
again that Murdoch's full knowledge of the field is apparently scanty.
Or, one could argue, it is simply Harry and Midge's knowledge that is
scanty.
Murdoch's presentation of Thomas, though, is further evidence
that, while she knows enough about Freud not to like his ideas and
while she knows exactly why she disagrees with them, she has either not
taken the time to become intimately familiar with them or does not want
to present them in great detail, perhaps fearing they will undermine
her own philosophy in the minds of readers. Even a romantic,
semi-religious writer such as Updike admits that claiming that the mind
is "bottomless ... seems extreme. And the bog of the quasi-supernatural
seems a dubious proving ground" (126). Incredibly though, Thomas, a
professional analyst, implicitly agrees with Ursula's assessment of the
mind as bottomless: "What is more extraordinary and inexplicable than
human consciousness?" (148).
But, strictly speaking, Thomas is not religious. Neither is he strictly
scientific. Nor is he always presented as either objective or subjective.
All the characters in this novel, even the minor ones, are given a densely
realized life of their own; Murdoch's characterization is Dickensian in
this regard. Nowhere else-with
the possible exception of The
Philosopher'sPupil (1983)-does she achieve the depth of believability in
characterization that she does here. And Thomas is the most completely
realized of all. Because she seems to have a deep empathy with him,
such a presentation of character requiring the enormous amount of
energy and concentration that can flow only from a firm psychological
identification, Thomas must be a close approximation of Murdoch's
father, and his actions and overall aura do resemble a classic, traditional
308
IRIS MURDOCH
superego. He is the only fully effective ethical force in the novel. If
Murdoch symbolically killed her father (in the figure of Rupert Foster)
in A Fairly HonourableDefeat, here she resurrects him almost molecule by
molecule, no longer comfortable with only psychological, ghostly
stand-ins. In The Good Apprenticethe prodigal daughter returns to the
repressed and breathes life into it.
Casting her father-saint figure in the role of psychoanalyst must
have presented the biggest and most complex challenge in her career.
Freud himself, however, could represent a kind of father figure for
Murdoch, albeit a threatening one, and Plato is apparently the best
father substitute she has ever found. Thomas is a blend of both, with
some Jean-Paul Sartre also evident in his composition. Thus, while
supremely challenged, Murdoch was prepared. She had the material.4
But piecing together the creation must have been one of the most
difficult tasks she ever set herself. The result is possibly the most
fascinating character and situation (in terms of the reader/character/
author dynamics) that one will ever find in her canon.
Thomas is sympathetic toward other characters and is a
sympathetic character for the reader. Even so, there are facets of his
personality that upset other characters and may well bother many
readers. Such being the case, one is tempted to say he is more person
than character, more real than fictional, and if he is indeed a portrait
of Murdoch's father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, such a statement
would not be far from the truth. But it would be a mistake, for such
a critical stance is itself, to use Bloom's word, archaic. It denies the
creativity of the artist and simplifies the complexities of reader
response. Yes, Thomas is a realistic figure, and yes, he likely calls to
mind the reader's own father (superego), with his constant efforts to
stay in control and to do and bring about what is right. But he is also
an individual creation that sets in action individual reverberations
within each character and each reader who encounters him. Jesse and
Brownie Wilsden, Mark's sister and one of the objects of Edward's
love, are both compared to jewels (296, 313), but it is Thomas who
has the most intricate and refractive facets. Both he and Jesseostensibly the main father figure in the novel, the goal of Edward's
quest-are multiplicitious characters, both more saint/artist figures
than merely saints or artists, but Jesse is limited by his ill health,
madness, and myopia. Thomas is vibrant and powerful, showing all
the sides of his varied self. Jesse has a preference for yellows and
browns-he
could be seen as topaz-whereas
Thomas is like a
diamond: hard, finely detailed, and valuable.
309
TWENTIETHCENTURYLITERATURE
Although, like Hugo Belfounder in Under the Net (1954) and James
Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea (1979), Thomas does not appear in the
novel often, he is given slightly more space than Jesse and is often on
the minds of the other characters, especially Harry and Midge, who
seem to talk more about Thomas than anything else (and they mostly
talk, period-again, as in Murdoch's other novels, the sex is offstage).
Thomas, more than Jesse, is the spiritual and emotional center of the
book, Jesse turning out to be more a myth than a man, more imagined
than solid. Before Edward meets him at Seegard, Edward thinks,
"Perhaps Jesse does not exist at all? Perhaps he's someone whom they
invented, or something they just believe in, like God?" (163). It is
Thomas who sets in motion Edward's visit to Seegard and to Jesse-by
writing to Jesse's wife, Mother May, and suggesting she invite Edward
(which Edward only discovers much later, after his return to
London)-and it is Thomas to whom Edward returns. Thomas is not "a
mystery," "a magician," or a "radiant sphere ... in the middle of [which]
there was a child," as Edward imagines Jesse (518); Thomas is a solid
man, someone to depend on, an anchor in reality, a good father. (As
James Arrowby tells his cousin Charles Arrowby in The Sea, the Sea, "the
good are unimaginable"[445]). Perhaps one reason Thomas appears so
seldom is that, as Murdoch said concerning the villain Julius King in A
Fairly Honourable Defeat, it is easier to depict bad men, and they are
more interesting because more varied.
Nonetheless, Murdoch imagines Thomas very well and manages to
make him believe, thus meeting and overcoming another type of
challenge, that of depicting a good man interestingly. His being an
analyst probably helps her maintain the reader's interest. Thomas's
physical description somewhat resembles that of Palmer Anderson:
"Thomas, whose ancestors were Jacobites and Rabbis, was thin, with a
narrow dog-like jaw and cool blue eyes and a square-cut fringe of wiry
light grey hair, and thick robust rectangular glasses which he was rarely
seen without" (18). He is never without a comb and often uses it to keep
his hair just right, unlike Jesse, whose hair, always wild, "fell in long
locks as far as his shoulders" (191). Toward the novel's end, though,
Thomas is tellingly described as he mows the lawn: "Head down, grey
hair flopping forward, without his glasses, he appeared to be propelling
the big yellow machine which in fact propelled itself, making great play
with it when at the end of each journey it had to be turned" (485). The
flopping hair, the color yellow, and the word play all evoke thoughts of
Jesse, whose playful but disturbing surrealistic paintings feature yellow
prominently. Thomas, the saint and father figure, has become more
310
IRIS MURDOCH
artist-like, more Jesse-like. He has also replaced the now-dead Jesse in
Edward's mind, although sharing the place with Harry, Edward's legal
father.
The reader sees the seeds of such a transition early on in Thomas's
thoughts and in Edward's words and actions, and the metamorphosis is
one of the novel's central concerns, a major part of Edward's quest
narrative: he talks with Thomas, is indirectly sent by him to find his real
father, finds Jesse but ultimately loses him, momentarily sublimates
thoughts of him by falling into an infatuation with Brownie, then
returns to Thomas, and ends up toasting the "good things in the world"
with Harry and Stuart (522). This transformation is placed side by side
with Thomas's own personal changes.
At the start Thomas seems a classic Freudian: "The patient must
minister to himself," he tells Harry. "Yes, yes," Harry replies, "of
course, call yourself a mediator, an enabler of the gods, what you like,
but can't you do something?" (19). Like Ursula, Harry is impatient with
Thomas's court-mandated psychiatric treatment of Edward, but as it
turns out the hands-off, objective treatment is exactly the type Edward
needs and responds to. Thomas is not merely cheering the patient up,
as Murdoch (in her interview with Jack I. Biles) has accused analysts of
doing. He says to Edward, "I'm not offering you cheerfulness and
commonsense. And of course, don't worry, you are permanently
damaged and you won't be cured. ... You will always carry this pain
inside you. Many people carry such pains. But it will not always be like
this" (70). Thomas's approach sounds like excellent therapy, an
admirable view of the problem, one that Freud would have endorsed.
But then Thomas goes on to lecture Edward over the course of the next
two pages, a nonstop harangue that sounds like a sermon or a self-help
book. No analyst who knows proper procedure would ever talk to a
patient in such a manner or at such length. Edward properly points out
when Thomas has finished that he knows Thomas is "trying to impress
... and persuade" (73), precisely what an analyst should avoid at all
costs. After a brief pause, Edward starts telling about a dream he had
and thus singlehandedly gets the analysis back on a better footing.
It soon becomes apparent that Thomas is moving away from Freud
in more than technique. He is growing more concerned with religion
and drifting away from atheism, and in this respect as well as others he
resembles Murdoch. "I am more interested in religion than I used to be,
and more concerned with religious belief," she told William Slaymaker
in 1983 (425). Possibly this movement in Thomas's mind grows out of
his "rabbinical ancestral puritanism" (23). Thomas is yet another
311
puritanical, bookish father figure in the Murdoch canon and even has a
"bookish study" (137). It is also apparent that he, more than Stuart, who
spouts what amounts to a caricature of Murdoch's philosophy, is the
primary spokesman for her. "Isn't it true that science proves free will?"
Midge says to Thomas at their dinner party. "They used to think," she
continues, "that everything was like a machine, and now they think it's
all random" (the "they" being characteristic of someone who gets her
news strictly via television). "I don't think either of those ideas has
anything to do with free will," Thomas replies (27). In her interview
with Slaymaker, Murdoch had said: "I would connect freedom with
knowledge and with the ability to discipline emotion and to love and to
live in some more disciplined and better way" (425). Thomas is the only
character in the book who exemplifies those qualities.
Ursula is the first to mention his changing attitude toward his
profession: "Thomas is moving away from science, he's a traitor," she
tells Midge privately, "that stuff about all analysis being lay analysis, it's
a bad line of talk, and people listen to him [as Murdoch knows readers
will also do].... He sees his function as priestly, it's all those rabbinical
ancestors. It's a substitute for the religion his trendy parents deprived
him of" (35). And Murdoch makes sure we know that young Meredith
McCaskerville is also being deprived of it, his parents nearly ignoring
his juvenile interest in pornography. Ursula, the "purely" scientific
doctor who prefers prescribing pills to offering counseling ("Drugs are
the solution, everything else is frivolous" [35]), says "Thomas is crazy"
(33)-a classic example of the pot-and-kettle phenomenon. Ursula is
jealous, and not just intellectually. After her talk with Midge on the
McCaskervilles' bed, Ursula's "stiff skirt now liberally covered with
particles of Midge's perfume," she says to Midge, "You look even more
beautiful when you're tired" (36).
Thomas would not likely argue with Ursula's remark about his
being priestly. After all, he says to Edward, "We need priests" (69), and
Thomas's half-Jewish ancestry, combined with the characteristic "curl of
his mouth" (79), recalls an earlier priestly, saintly figure in Murdoch:
Honor Klein in A Severed Head. Thomas says to Stuart, as mentioned,
that maybe "God is a permanent non-degradable love object" that
people "must . . . imagine" (140). Such a statement is reminiscent of
C. G. Jung's conjecture that an essential "religious function" was
inherited from the primitive mind. Harry imagines that Thomas could
be "a fierce primitive Scotsman with a dirk" or "a fierce unforgiving
Jew" if he learned of Midge's affair with Harry. However, when
Thomas does find out, he exhibits, for the most part, the emotional
312
IRIS MURDOCH
discipline that Murdoch so admires. Thus, while primitive, even
mystical, elements may affect his thinking, he does not allow them to
control his life. "He loved his parents very much, but constantly, out of
a kind of tact, concealed from them many of his deepest feelings. This
laconic, secretive discretion . . . became in the growing boy a major
characteristic" (79). As Ursula rightly points out, Thomas is a private
person, only she puts it in less flattering terms: "He's withdrawn. God
knows what he's thinking now" (36). Of course, it is a common phrase,
but again we see an atheist using "God" in a sentence about another
supposed atheist. Murdoch never lets up.
Thomas is not completely withdrawn, though; he interacts
effectively with others and even shows love, but indirectly. The "secret
romanticism of his heart" (79) is displayed in his patient, caring
dialogues with Edward and Stuart, whom he thinks of as sons (83): "He
could have hugged them, only that was inconceivable" (76). His
affection is also directed toward Midge and Meredith: "They were
absolutes" (83). "He loved [Midge], he admired her, and in an odd way
he pitied her, and this intense pity was stored in the centre of his love"
(82). But "Thomas's puritanism, both Catholic and Jewish, shunned
physiological conversation about sex," so that he cannot be as openly
sexual as Harry. Thomas and Midge's "love-making [was] dependent on
mute signals" (361). Such an aversion to talk of sex necessarily inhibits
Thomas from being a good, completely Freudian analyst. Moreover, he
himself, as a student, had "shunned and feared deep analysis" (81), and
is perceptive enough to know that his secretive, puritanical personality
acts as a handicap to his effectiveness as a psychiatrist: "On bad days he
felt he was a charlatan" (81), a thought that recalls similar ones in the
mind of Blaise Gavender. But on good days Thomas is ten times the
analyst Blaise is, because Thomas is not selfish and because he has had
all the necessary academic training (with the exception of going into
analysis to round it out).
However, his "secret romanticism" also makes him lean toward
religion, "whose half-remembered songs he could sing only in his heart"
(80). Here is a sensitive, intelligent, usually effective professional,
Murdoch is saying, who is well respected by most, even if grudgingly,
who has doubts about Freud's theories even as he puts them into action.
The perceptive reader, though, will note that Thomas's childhood has
caused him to be what he is, that Freud's matrix of ideas explains why
Thomas would naturally question those very concepts. His parents were
atheists, his grandparents deeply religious. To appease such a complex
he was almost as close to the latter as to the
superego-for
313
former-Thomas
has entered an atheistic profession but conceives of
his role as priestly: he has melded the facets of his superego into an ego
he can live with. At the same time, for the sake of independence, he
must rebel against his parents, the most potent part of the superego.
And this he does by thinking and talking of God; his feeling like "a
charlatan" is a form of self-punishment for such rebellion, as is his
cloistered life style itself. The physician cannot heal himself, but he can
hide the wounds and splits cleverly enough to appear unharmed.
Murdoch deals explicitly with Thomas's distance from Freud:
"Deeply he was aware that he was an unbeliever, he did not share with
his colleagues a certain traditional faith in this form of healing. He did
not think that he was a scientist" (81). There are also some specific
self-doubts that Thomas has: "At times ... he felt that he was making
risky guesses. How he dared to do what he did, he did not know" (81).
And he is moving toward "trying to 'finish' his patients ... and release
them or find them another 'place'.... He felt he was beginning to need
his patients, and this was dangerous" (82). In addition to the reverse
transferences taking place between him and his patients, Thomas needs
power, but he is aware that he does and meditates on the need. He is
well aware that he is "a calculator ... a manipulator" (430), and that to
be so effectively requires strong self-confidence, a feeling he no longer
has as surely as before, especially not in regard to basic psychoanalytic
theory: "He had so far changed his early assumptions that he sometimes
felt he ought to invent a new name for what he was doing" (77).
Murdoch would probably suggest "moral psychology," as Conradi
refers to her approach. Thomas is practicing Murdochian philosophy
from the critically safe, thoroughly modern position of being ostensibly
a psychoanalyst.
Murdoch seems to be directly attacking Freud in the following
passage, when Thomas thinks,
Where the individual mind is concerned the light of science
could reveal so little; and the mishmash of scientific ideas and
mythology and literature and isolated facts and sympathy and
intuition and love and appetite for power which was shown as
psychoanalysis, and which of course did sometimes "help
people," could make the most extraordinary mistakes when it left
the path of the obvious.
(496)
aside
Murdoch's
own
Leaving
apparent thirst for power, no analyst or
I
writer
can
psychoanalytic
imagine would vouchsafe that mistakes are
never made, but full knowledge of the field, with proper, thorough
training, greatly expands what is "obvious." When Thomas thinks that
314
IRIS MURDOCH
"the person he found most puzzling was himself" (496), one needs but
to recall that he shunned going into analysis as a student who was
undergoing an education to prepare him to do analysis. Most
practitioners would view this course of action as unthinkable,
unforgivable, and profoundly unfortunate. When Thomas thinks of
human consciousness as being "inexplicable" (148), and being almost
inaccessible to "the light of science," he is taking the Murdoch line and
thus showing his, and her, deep resistance to and lack of knowledge of
Freudian psychology, such a tenuous position resulting in a tendency to
question it and even rail against it, as Murdoch sometimes does.
Overall, though, Murdoch's critique of Freud in The GoodApprentice
is subtle and, to some readers, probably compelling. Thomas is a
seductive figure, and a potent one, both intellectually and sexually.
That he guards and reinforces his sexual potency can be seen in his
concern with his hair and his obsession with "well-sharpened pencils,"
which he always "set out ... in a neat row .... He liked sharpening
pencils" (360). And to initiate his successful reconciliation with Midge,
he puts his "confident key in the door" of their house and comes in to
talk to her (after having left following a cold confrontation). Midge
thinks that his arrival before Harry's (who also has a key) was perhaps
"something arranged by God" (485).
The disparaging of Freud in the novel is not always subtle, though,
as we have seen. For example, Murdoch puts these words in Harry's
mouth: "People obsessed by power envy what artists know by instinct.
Psychoanalysis attracts failed artists" (171). Putting aside the fact that
Harry himself is a failed artist, a hack writer, and often speaks in terms
of psychoanalytic ideas (he points out the reason for Jesse's popularity,
saying to Edward, "Your father is a sex hero!" [519]), one could see his
statement about failed artists as a bitter indictment by Murdoch of
Freud and his followers. It has the ring of her confident, epigrammatic
remarks in interviews and books on philosophy, remarks that,
incidentally, seem to show quite an interest in power themselves. And
exactly what is it that "artists know by instinct"? Does it have nothing to
do with power, or sex?
Murdoch, while unquestionably a superb and accomplished artist,
still, for some reason, has the need to denigrate Freud. Maybe she
blames him and other dominant males like him for her lack of
comparable success in the realm of philosophy. Perhaps, to twist the
statement above, art attracts failed philosophers. In reviving Platonic
ideals in her philosophy and in showing them active in Thomas,
Murdoch is essentially reviving her father, or a father, to speak for her.
315
She has said she is "not very much interested in the female
predicament" (Biles 119), which could be an example of Freudian
negation: time after time her novels involve women or effeminate men
imprisoned, either physically or emotionally. Could it be that Murdoch,
encaged in the body of a woman, resents her lack of power, which
resulted in a weakened impact on the field of philosophy? So she turned
to art to make an impact, women as writers being more accepted, more
a part of "the ordinary human condition" (Biles 119), and she works out
her frustrations in her art, often attacking and punishing dominant
male characters, and often directly or indirectly reviling Freud, one of
the most dominant philosophers of the twentieth century?
In The Good Apprentice Thomas asks Stuart, "Shouldn't there be
theorists who can make radical criticisms of theorising?" (139), and
Murdoch seems to have made herself, from Under the Net onward, just
such a theorist. But I would argue that her theorizing is not at all
radical, that it is more archaic, more an outgrowth of Greek idealism
(Thomas plays Socrates to Stuart's Plato), eighteenth-century rationalism, and nineteenth-century Romanticism than anything strikingly new,
her play with the novel's form, her careful carelessness, and clever
misdirections notwithstanding. Fanny Burney and Charles Dickens
could have had, and probably did have, beliefs similar to Murdoch's,
but the two earlier writers were not so technically playful or so
interestingly sadomasochistic in presenting them.
NOTES
The "artist/saint"dichotomy in Murdoch's novels is fully explored by
PeterJ. Conradi.
2 In
Jeffrey Meyers'sinterview Murdoch says her father "entered the civil
service . . . and worked his way to the top.... I think my father was a really
good man. . . . He was a great inspiration to me and certainly the greatest
influence in my life. He wasn'ta religious man in any ordinary sense.... My
father had exceptional integrity, truthfulness and compassion. He had very
high moral standards,though not in a priggish sense" (103). Incidentally,in the
same interview she refers to herself as a "ChristianBuddhist"(110).
3 See
Jack Turner.
4
See Murdoch's first book, Sartre, RomanticRationalist.
WORKS CITED
Bell, Pearl K. Review of The GoodApprentice.New Republic 194 (1986): 36.
Biles, Jack I. "An Interview with Iris Murdoch."Studiesin LiteraryImagination

11.2 (1978): 115-25.
316
IRIS MURDOCH
Bloom, Harold. Review of The Good Apprentice.New YorkTimes Book Review, 12
January 1986: 1.
Conradi, Peter J. Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist. New York: St. Martin's,
1986.
Freud, Sigmund. The Origins of Religion: Totemand Taboo,Moses and Monotheism,
and Other Works. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Albert Dickson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
Holland, Norman. The Dynamicsof LiteraryResponse. New York: Columbia UP,
1989.
Iser, Wolfgang. "Representation: A Performative Act." In The Aims of
Representation. Ed. Murray Krieger. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.
217-32.
James, Caryn. "Three Male-Dominated Summer Films Focus on the Quest for
the Father." Columbia(S.C.) State 7 July 1989: 12-D.
Koger, Grove. Review of The GoodApprentice.LibraryJournal 110 (1985): 128.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Interview with Iris Murdoch. Denver Quarterly 26 (1991):
102-11.
Murdoch, Iris. A Fairly HonourableDefeat. New York: Viking: 1970.
The Good Apprentice. New York: Viking, 1985.
The Philosopher's Pupil. New York: Viking, 1983.
. The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. New York: Viking,
1974.
Sartre, Romantic Rationalist. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953.
. The Sea, the Sea. New York: Viking, 1979.

. A Severed Head. New York: Viking,
"The Sublime and the Beautiful
1961.
Revisited."
Yale Review 49 (1959):
247-71.
. Under the Net. New York: Viking,
1954.
Slaymaker, William. "An Interview with Iris Murdoch." Papers on Language and
Literature21 (1985): 425-32.
Turner, Jack. "Murdoch vs. Freud in A Severed Head and Other Novels."
Literatureand Psychology36, 1-2 (1990): 122-34.
Updike, John. "Expeditions to Gilead and Seegard." New Yorker62 (1986):
118-26.
Wilce, Gillian. Review of The GoodApprentice.New Statesman 110 (1985): 30.
317

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Murdoch

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Iris Murdoch and the Good Psychoanalyst

Author(s): Jack Turner

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

1241]) and her daughter, Sarah, a friend of Edward's. Even more

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

meaning, there is such a thing as goodness; the head supplies so little

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

See Murdoch's first book, Sartre, RomanticRationalist.

Biles, Jack I. "An Interview with Iris Murdoch."Studiesin LiteraryImagination

Sartre, Romantic Rationalist. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953.

. The Sea, the Sea. New York: Viking, 1979.

Yale Review 49 (1959):

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