ABSTRACT
Our goals for this book appear in its fi rst chapter: “we hope to bring literary criticism and the practice of psychoanalysis into conversation in such a way that each discipline takes from the other some of its most essential and less evident qualities, rather than limiting this conversation to most manifest contributions of each discipline. This should give literary critics who are interested in psychoanalysis (as both a set of ideas and as a therapeutic process) a deeper and more nuanced sense of the forms of thinking that are integral to psychoanalysis; and it should give to psychoanalysts who are interested in literature a better feeling for the ways that academic literary critics attend to the demands of literature in their own unique ways.” We hope that the fi rst two chapters of this book have fulfi lled these aims, and that the reader now has a better understanding of the forms of thinking that are fundamental to psychoanalysis.
