The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas

The White Hotel is divided into seven sections, a prologue and parts 1-6, each of which forms a part of the story of Elisabeth, a young woman of a privileged European family whose life is structured as a journey from psychological dysfunction to psychological wholeness, more or less in the manner described by Freudian theory. Indeed, The White Hotel uses the historical Freud, as well as a putative psychoanalytic case history (his method of presentation to the world), to frame and advance the narrative of Elisabeth's development. The Prologue is an epistolary literary conceit in the form of a collegial correspondence between Freud and fellow psychologists Ferenczi and Sachs. The letters function as an introduction to Elisabeth the psychoanalytic object (and the novelistic subject). Indeed, one of the letters serves as a transmittal note explaining what become Parts 1 and 2 of the novel, a poem written by Elisabeth between the lines of a script for the opera Don Giovanni, and a journal, both in a stream of conscious

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well as the impact the waking world, whether as family or cultural environment, exercises on sleeping and dreaming. The line of argument that implicates the whole of humankind in the dream work of neurotics also has the effect of implicating human culture, configured as social structure. This points in the direction of a totalizing social theory (where Freud took the argument in such works as Civilization and Its Discontents) and aesthetics, which has appropriated a good deal of Freudian terminology embedded in The Interpretation of Dreams for the purposes of artistic creation and interpretation. In The White Hotel, Thomas uses Freud's theory and implications, as well as the character of Freud himself, to explain the psychological life of Elisabeth and to locate development of her consciousness and experience in the illogic of her dreams within the larger and equally illogical experience of the death instinct of Western civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. The larger picture seems implicit in the individual psychology of Elisabeth. In the prose portion of Elisabeth's journal, as the stay at the hotel comes to a close, the woman betrays a felt tension between sex as love and sex as something dirty and more, some
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2813
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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