The psychological milieu of Lytton Strachey
Martin Kallich

Giles Lytton Strachey  was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of eminent victorians, he established a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit.

Sometimes deliberately sometimes not, Lytton Strachey adopted Freud’s views about the unconscious and the way in which irrational forces within the unconscious affect behavior. In the early part of his career as a biographer, up to the time of World War I, Strachey was generally influenced by the Freudian Zeitgeist. Fred’s ideas concerning depth psychology having at this time permeated British intellectual opinion. Thus Strachey became aware of the importance of studying the unconscious as a source of deep insights to the inner life; and he also learned how to structure personality by exhibiting its dual nature and to dramatize it by emphasizing internal conflicts. Later in the twenties, Strachey was consciously indebted to Freud, and he was able to show in a more complicated fashion how various neurotic complexes and obsessions, formed by early sexual experiences, contributed to the forming of the adult personality. Knowledge of his direct or indirect indebtedness to Freud contributes to an understanding of Strachey’s special psychological insights into human nature and permits an evaluation of his achievements in biography.