Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic

BORN JUNE 27, 1899, at St. Rémy-de-Provence, Charles Mauron did not plan a career as a psychoanalytic critic of literature. In fact, he did not receive his first literary degree until 1954, and was sixty-four years old when he received his Doctorat és Lettres from the Sorbonne and took up his first and last brief teaching post at the Université d'Aix in his native Provence. Mauron's early intellectual leanings had been toward the physical sciences. After receiving his Diplôme d'Ingénieur Chimiste at Marseilles in the spring of 1921, he went on to become an assistant in Industrial Chemistry. In 1924, he received his Diplôme d'Etudes Supérieures de Sciences Physiques. His thesis on the crystalline structure of soaps was awarded the prize of the Due de Villars at the Académie de Marseille. A gifted, or certainly a competent scientist, Mauron was ready to take up his first laboratory position in the government service when a worsening eye condition (detached retinas) forced a radical change in plans. Abandoning science and its precision, which depended upon vision, he turned to the arts.