“A Little Crazy”: Psychiatric Diagnoses of Three Hemingway Women Characters

Abstract

United States Naval Academy in 1952, Philip Young, reading Otto Fenichel's Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, suggested that Nick Adams suffered from traumatic neurosis (139-142), and, more recently, Ronald Smith updated that diagnosis to what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Neither Young nor Smith was or is a psychologist, but both help us understand that first Hemingway hero and, by extension, all of the rest of them. Hemingway's major women characters, however, although much has been written about them, have not been examined in such a strictly psychological way. Until the 1980s, Catherine Barkley, Brett Ashley, and Maria were seen as either destroyers of men or fantasy figures-"bitches or goddesses"-but a later generation of scholars has worked hard to move them from stereotypes to complex women characters worthy of our attention. 1 Still, the possibility that these women suffer from diagnosable psychological ailments has not received the kind of attention given to Nick Adams's all-too-clear symptoms. Hence this essay. 2 We first meet Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms when the doctor Rinaldi invites his friend Frederic Henry to the hospital to meet her, Rinaldi's new infatuation. But, after the men arrive, Catherine and Frederic become involved in conversation while Rinaldi talks with Catherine's friend Helen Ferguson. In the discussion between Frederic and Catherine, we learn important information about her.