This chapter discusses The Mill on the Floss and W. R. Bion that both care about sympathy and render it as paramystical and real, as a kind of unconscious communication. It points out fantasies of breaking novelistic, provincial, and subjective frames and reveals wishful thinking as the disavowed basis of George Eliot's theory of social realism. In The Mill on the Floss, books and subjectivities overflow like rivers. The key psychoanalytic interlocutor in the chapter is Bion, whose unconventional ideas fundamentally altered modern psychoanalysis in the 1960s and 1970s, and yet remain opaque to nonspecialists. The chapter also argues that The Mill on the Floss constructs an intersubjective model of mind that helps to shape Bion's later theories of unconscious communication. In turn, Bion's work helps to uncover Eliot's deeper aim in the novel: not necessarily to strengthen social sympathies, but to animate psychic processes in generative, unpredictable ways.
The Drive to Relate: How Modern Psychoanalysis can Join with Modern Medicine to Improve the Doctor-Patient Relationship
