SOURCE: "Psychiatry in the Postwar Fiction of Simone de Beauvoir," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, 1979, pp. 123-33.

In the following essay, Keefe examines Beauvoir's interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in The Mandarins, Les Belles Images, and The Woman Destroyed. According to Keefe, "Beauvoir's broad view of the development of the individual and of family life has very obviously been much influenced by psychoanalytic theory and modern psychiatry in general."

In a review recently published in Literature and Psychology, Dr. Simon Grolnick reminded us of some of the complexities of Jean-Paul Sartre's attitude towards psychoanalysis. As one of the contributors to the reviewed volume points out, 'One day the history of Sartre's thirty-year-long relationship with psychoanalysis, an ambiguous mixture of equally deep attraction and repulsion, will have to be written'. An interesting side-light is already thrown upon aspects of that history, however, by the postwar fiction of...