Joseph Conrad, master of ships and master of affect: His gift to Robert Hobson and the Conversational Model
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, & flatterer. For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organised particulars.’ William Blake, apart from Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shakespeare, Robert Hobson declared his indebtedness to the Polish/English novelist, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). But what in particular did Conrad give to Hobson? His Darwinian biological conceptions? His Jamesian (Henry, if not William) psychological concept of an unconscious? His awareness of Newtonian Physics? (O’Hanlon), Maybe?
If we are to re-read Forms of Feeling, however, we find that Hobson is less interested in Conrad’s passion for nineteenth century science and more concerned with the novelist’s enduring capacity to make us see, feel and intuit what there is: loneliness and darkness on the one hand, and if transformed, ‘solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts…which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity.’ (Conrad)
This paper examines Conrad’s literary uses of language that Hobson came to value in his own psychotherapeutic work. It claims that attention to detail of language within the dyad provides access to attention to detail of affect and that Hobson’s indebtedness to Conrad lies in the art and science of a particular use of language.
