The process of Freud's mourning, melancholia and death instinct in Lord Jim and Mrs. Dalloway

Among the great "troop of masters" who changed society so greatly, Freud stands out as one of the most influential. A practicing physician whose interest turned toward the curing of his patients' mental illnesses, Freud attempted to plumb the underlying mental depths of the individual. In this instance, the goals of Freud and the modern novelists are similar. Woolf states that one of the great interests of the modern writers lies in probing, "in the darkest places of the psychology." Through his clinical studies, Freud's quest to explain the inner workings of the human mind and the underlying causes for human action, lead him to set up a psychological network, which in many instances is mirrored in the characters in modern literature. Freud's probing analysis of the human mind lead him to redefine the view of human actions in a new method which is discernable in works of writers of the time.