ABSTRACT
When the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis is considered from the perspective of the conceptual origins of each, an interesting resonance between the two fields results. At the heart of both endeavours is a concern with the function of writing, the significance of marks, letters, words, and their agglomeration as occasions of sense and meaning for both writer and reader. If we approach psychoanalysis in terms of the effects of psychic inscription as a kind of writing, i.e., the formation of mnemic traces and their expression in the analytic encounter, including the limits and obstacles that appear in that encounter, and simultaneously consider the status of the literary text as an effect of writing that may be similarly in question regarding the locus and boundaries of its meaning, then it becomes difficult and intriguing to say where literary theory ends and psychoanalytic theory begins. The equally elusive subject of writing and authority of the text are current concerns in both.
