SOURCE: "The Psychology of the Uncanny in Lawrence's 'The Rocking-Horse Winner'," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. XI, No. 4, Winter 1965-66, pp. 381-92.

In the following study, Marks asserts that specific writings by psychologist Sigmund Freud provide insight into "The Rocking-Horse Winner" and that Lawrence "seems to have made at least selective use" of Freud's work in constructing his short stories and novels.

"The Rocking-Horse Winner," one of a group of Lawrence's tales of the supernatural, appeared in October, 1926, in Cynthia Asquith's The Ghost Book. In 1925, the year of Lawrence's arrival in England from a three-year sojourn in North and Central America, the Hogarth Press had published Joan Riviere's translation of Papers on Applied Psycho-Analysis, the fourth volume of [Sigmund] Freud's Collected Papers [five volumes, 1924-1950]. Just one year previously Boni and Liveright had published her standard translation of A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, which had already gone through...