(Eliot in Headings, p. 24)
In an interview in 1962, however, Eliot gave a very different explanation, saying that Prufrock was in part a man of about 40 and in part Eliot himself. Eliot also said that he was using the notion of the split personality, first studied and popularized in his youth.
While it is unclear which interpretation is closer to the truth, Eliot’s writing of “Prufrock” did coincide with major developments in behavioral science. During the late nineteenth century, the study of human behavior and human consciousness became more widespread. Experiments were conducted and observations made by a new generation of physicians and scientists, including the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), giving rise to what would become modern psychology.
The 1900s and 1910s witnessed the publication of groundbreaking works like Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Carl Jung’s The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which further explored the workings of the human mind (see Freud’s On Dreams, also in Literature and Its Times). In the first work, Freud maintained that dreams have meaning that can be interpreted on at least two levels—a dream’s surface details (what he calls its “manifest content”) and its hidden thoughts (its “latent content”).
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