Dickens's coterie of orphans, mistreated children and woeful caregivers certainly seem ripe for the insights of relational psychoanalysis. For Young, Bleak House anticipates and confirms "the significance of the mother-child relation to identity formation" (237). However, we do not necessarily require the occasionally banal insights from relational psychoanalysis to appreciate that Esther's harsh early life has sculpted a personality marked by self-abnegation and compensatory caregiving. Furthermore, Young's analysis perhaps underappreciates that Esther is more insightful, critical and self-reflexive than her own narrative persona (consciously.) reveals. Psychoanalysing Dickens's characters also assumes a high level of mimetic realism in Dickens's work, downplaying his melodramatic representation of character and locating in his fiction universal psychological truths that 'prove' the insights of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic accounts also tend to foreground (and pathologise) the individual psyche, neglecting historical, social and cultural determinants; Esther's 'malattunement' is, arguably, densely interwoven with historically particular socio-sexual norms. Indeed, the validity of universalising applications of psychoanalytic ideas might be queried here. While psychoanalysis offers a rich, imaginative mode for understanding Dickens's characters, it may be more useful for scholars working in the field of literature and science to excavate the medico-scientific and literary-artistic contexts in which he developed his representations of the human mind. Juliet John, for example, has persuasively argued that Dickens's use of a melodramatic aesthetics precludes the sort of depth psychology that is the foundation of psychoanalysis. Dickens's work, in other words, may actually challenge and undo some of the assumptions that underpin psychoanalysis, complicating its supposed universality. Despite these ongoing critical debates, this well-crafted, intelligent and insightful article usefully expands psychoanalytic and feminist accounts of loss, attachment and identity in Dickens's novels, while making a stimulating contribution to those modes of critical analysis
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