ABSTRACT
Early in graduate school, I decided to train as a psychoanalyst. Because both my parents were Freudian analysts, this seemed like a natural career choice. I had grown up with psychoanalytic jargon in my ears, had listened at the perimeter to the complex and intriguing conversations of my parents' analyst friends. I had the sense that something special went on behind the soundproof office doors of the consulting room in my apartment. And so, when a high school English teacher introduced me to the fundamentals of psychoanalytic thought, following in my father's intellectual tradition, I tried to apply it to the study of literature.
