✒️ Psychoanalysis and Literature – Towards an Interpretation of the Text

Honours Thesis completed as a part of my Bachelor of Arts at La Trobe University

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Introduction: WHAT IS PSYCHOANALYSIS?

The problem that has to be solved on this early, yet superficial level, must be stated in adult terms by the question, “What is something?” and not the question “Why is something?’’ because “why” has, through guilt, been split off.[1]
Source: Wilfred Bion ‘Attacks on Linking’

Discussing the numerous resistances inside and outside of psychoanalysis, Jacques Derrida declares, ‘psychoanalysis will never gather itself into the unity of a concept or a task. If there is notoneresistance, there is not“la psychoanalyse”– where one understands it here as [a] system of theoretical norms or as a charter of institutional practices.’[2]
By this Derrida does not mean that psychoanalysis is therefore paralysed and broken but quite the opposite, this absence of a foundational centre opens psychoanalysis up to the ‘chance for success’. As he argues, ‘to say that psychoanalysis does not havetheconcept of what it itself is … gives movement, it gives one to think and to move’. (p.21.) Denying psychoanalysis existence-in-itself, Derrida opens it up to the endless play of meaning that he has become so famous for. However far one enters into the Derridian quagmire, an emphasis upon the flexibility of meaning is something that is often over looked when we talk about psychoanalysis. Whether as a clinical practice or a literary device the thought that there is more than one impression of psychoanalysis is often denied in the hope of unity. In more recent literary criticism, there has been a push to see the literary text as open, an infinite mass of quotations and citations, yet for some reason psychoanalytic texts (such as theoretical papers or case studies) have been relatively exempt from this process, construed as texts with a meaning-in-themselves. Refuting the stagnant perception of psychoanalysis as a practice made up of privileged members of an undisclosed fraternity, I aim to open it to the world of textual analysis. Like Roland Barthes, I intend ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text’.[3]
If, as Derrida suggests, there is no unified concept of psychoanalysis, the question to be asked then is what is it we talk about when we talk about psychoanalysis? Not wanting to give another (banal) description of what psychoanalysis is or isn’t, I will discuss two aspects which work towards forming our understanding of psychoanalysis. Firstly, psychoanalysis as a cultural myth focusing on Freud, a definition of psychoanalysis ingrained within society’s ways of knowing and understanding, and secondly, psychoanalysis as a text, that is, as a practice characterized by readers reading and interpreting.

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Section One: WOULD THE REAL SIGMUND FREUD PLEASE STAND UP

For the outsider it is still Freud’s classic theory as it evolved over his lifetime. For the insider it is a multifaceted field representing many schools of thought, many innovative concepts, new building on old, new incorporating old, new discarding old, a field with rich diversity and rich in confusing contradictions. The outsiders are challenging psychoanalysis.[4]
Source: Marianne Echardt ‘Psychoanalysis – Myth and Science’

Uncovering the legend beneath the legend... [Content Continues, too long for demo]