"'On Her Late Acquaintance with the Psychoanalyst': Virginia Woolf e la saggistica come terapia"

The paper aims at suggesting that the reading of Freud’s works might have been a source of inspiration for the essays Virginia Woolf produced during the nineteen months of the Second World War she experienced. Although Freud had been one of the authors published by The Hogarth Press since 1924, it was not until his death in September 1939 that Virginia began reading his works. This late acquaintance might have been not only a pastime for Woolf’s idle hours, but also a sort of epiphanic realization of a shared – or rather parallel – path towards the understanding of the human mind. It is exactly in light of this working hypothesis that I want to read some extracts from her diary and her later essays, in particular “The Leaning Tower” and “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”.