Humanity Dehumanized: Fordian and Freudian Models in Huxley’s "Brave New World"

Abstract

This essay deals with major topics in Huxley’s Brave New World, the concepts of production efficiency applied to every day’s life, psychology and psychoanalysis. These concepts, which came to the public’s general attention in the beginning of the 20th century, are in the novel taken to the extreme, thus becoming instrumental in the fictionalized controlled society: the figures of Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud are assimilated to one, divine person. The first part of this essay describes how Fordianism and the newly invented incubators were implemented into the society of the New World. The second part focuses instead on the views that Huxley had about psychoanalysis, on how John’s affective relationships have been inspired by the tales of Hamlet, Oedipus and Huxley’s friend and writer D. H. Lawrence and on what Huxley’s thoughts about psychology could have been.