The influence of dynamic psychiatry on 'Tender is the Night' by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This study is anattempt to redress the historical misapplication of literary and cultural theory in reading the psychiatric material of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Tender is the Night'. Critics have applied several, sometimes contradictory, theoretical lenses to the text. As a result, the text has been characterised either as ignorant of psychiatry or in league with the so-called autocratic and "unscientific" basis of its practices. Often, it is regarded a revenge project aimed at his wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (herself a psychiatric patient periodically between 1930 and 1948). Medicine's rediscovery of the humanistic dimensions of its practice during the past thirty years provides a useful framework that Tender criticism can use to break the cycle of restatement of tired and misapplied theoretical premises from a by-gone era of anti-psychiatry, psychoanalytic theory, and second-wave feminism. Such a text-centric framework allows one to turn both to the history of psychiatry and the personal history of the Fitzgeralds' interactions with psychodynamic psychiatry by way of the archive. It creates a clearer picture of what the author intended for the text, and how it reflects a time in his life in which the author had exceptionally close contact with the foremost psychiatric clinics and psychiatrists in the world.