Depression on a Screen. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the Light of Cognitive Theories of Depression

Abstract

This article analyses “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the light of the American psychiatrist A. T. Beck’s diagnostic criteria and cognitive theories for interpreting and evaluating symptoms and levels of depression. This study aims to show that many symptoms listed in Beck’s Inventory for Measuring Depression (sixteen out of twenty-one) are recognizable – at different levels of signifier and signified – in both the poetical structure and the imagery of the poem, whereas specific aspects included in Cognitive Therapy of Depression (for instance, the cognitive process defined by Beck as “Faulty Information Processing” and two crucial points of this process, “Selective abstraction” and “Arbitrary inference”) are identifiable in some of the most relevant figurative isotopies of the poem. DOI : 10.17456/SIMPLE-154 Keywords Prufrock, Beck, Modernism, psychology, depression. Bibliography Beck, Aaron T., C. H. Ward, M. Mendelson, J. Mock, & J. Erbaugh. 1961. An Inventory for Measuring Depression. Archives of General Psychiatry , 4: 561-571. Beck, Aaron T., A. John Rush, Brian F. Shaw & Gary Emery. 1979. Cognitive Therapy of Depression . New York: The Guildford Press. Calimani, Dario. 1998. T. S. Eliot. Le geometrie del disordine. Napoli: Liguori. Crivelli, Renzo Stefano. 2015. T. S. Eliot. Roma: Salerno Editrice. Eiss, Harry. 2016. The Joker . Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 1962. An Interview. Grantite Review , 24, 3: 17. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. 2018. The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Volume I, Collected and Uncollected Poems . Cristopher Ricks & Jim MacCue eds. London: Faber & Faber. Goodwin, Frederick K. & Kay Redfield Jamison. 2007 [2 nd ed.]. Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenner, Hugh. 1978 [1960]. “Prufrock”. Brian Charles Southam ed. “Prufrock”, “Gerontion”, Ash Wednesday and Other Shorter Poems. A Selection of Critical Essays . London: MacMillan, 127-134. Paige, Douglas D. ed. 1971. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound. 1907-1941 . New York: New Directions. Perry, Seamus, 2016 (May, 25), https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/a-close-reading-of-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock (consulted on 20/02/2020). Plato. 1973. Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII . (trans. Walter Hamilton). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Schuchard, Ronald. 2017. Eliot’s Allusive Legacy and Obscurity in “Prufrock”. John D. Morgestern ed. The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual . Liverpool: Clemson University Press - Liverpool University Press. Wellek, Rene & Warren Austin. 1978 [1949]. Theory of Literature . Harmondsworth: Penguin.