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T.S. Eliot's therapy with Dr. Roger Vittoz in 1921 is examined here in context of the production of The Waste Land. Eliot's (positive) attitude to his therapy, and its influence on the completion of his poem, are compared with his on-going concern with the alterity of the literary tradition as represented in his salient essays on the poetic process. The therapy Eliot enjoyed at Lausanne with Vittoz is particularly interesting in light of the Expressivist production method which Modernism supposedly disavows. Intriguingly, Vittoz's own conception of intra-psychic processes participates, respectively, in an orthodox Christian and Romantic Expressivist phenomenology of creativity.
Keywords: T.S. Eliot / Vittoz / The Waste Land / alterity / psychotherapy
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie
-(THE WASTE LAND TRANSCRIPT 146)1
T.S. Eliot's "nervous breakdown" and writer's block have been much speculated upon. Criticism has so far failed to treat with any serious depth, however, the possible literary effect of the "cure" he underwent in the Autumn of 1921, and its relation to Eliot's creative process and interests. The potential causes of the breakdown may be biographically intriguing, but Eliot's strange experiences with the Swiss psychiatrist Roger Vittoz at Lausanne are more relevant to the poet's participation in an ongoing tradition of literary production. The question becomes, how might Eliot's sessions with Vittoz fit reflexively into his critically expressed conception of himself as a writer engaged with the literary tradition around the period when he was composing The Waste Land?
After visiting a variety of doctors and considering numerous treatments, Eliot, on the advice of Ottoline Morrel, went to stay at Lausanne under the care of the Swiss psychiatrist Roger Vittoz. He wrote to his friend Julian Huxley on October 26th of 1921 about his intention to follow Morrel's advice, and the failure of his previous treatment:
I went to this specialist on account of his great name, which I knew would bear weight with my employers. But since I have been here I have wondered whether he is quite the best man for me as he is known as a nerve man and I want rather a specialist in psychological troubles. Ottoline Morrel has advised me to go to Vittoz in Lausanne and incidentally mentioned that you had been...