SOURCE: “Beryl Bainbridge: The New Psychopathia,” in The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 59-77.

In the following essay, Punter examines the presentation of psychological trauma in Bainbridge's novels and the struggles among her characters, particularly those who are female, to deal with both familial and cultural forces of alienation, deprivation, abuse, and rejection.

Beryl Bainbridge has acted Krafft-Ebing in response to the self-aware Freudianism of many of her fellow-writers; where Lessing, Carter, Barth, have paraded analysis, she has presented herself during the 1970s as a meticulous chronicler of ‘everyday’ events, who would raise an innocent eyebrow at any mention of psychosis, whether attached to writer, character, reader or text.¹ The calamities she depicts are, so the surrounding authorial fiction goes, conventionally implicit in our lives: they are a mechanical consequence of our upbringing, and either they will spring out, fully armed, at a...