ABSTRACT

The relationship between psychoanalysis and literary criticism spans much of the twentieth century. Fundamentally concerned with the articulation of sexuality in language, it has moved through three main emphases in its pursuit of the literary ‘unconscious’: on the author (and its corollary, ‘character’), on the reader and on the text. It starts with Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the literary work as a symptom of the artist, where the relationship between author and text is analogous to dreamers and their ‘text’ (literature = ‘fantasy’); is modified by post-Freudians in a psychoanalytic reader-response criticism where the reader’s transactive relation to the text is foregrounded (see Chapter 3); and is contested by Carl Jung’s ‘archetypal’ criticism in which, contra Freud, the literary work is seen not as a focus for the writer’s or reader’s personal psychology but a representation of the relationship between the personal and the collective unconscious, the images, myths, symbols, ‘archetypes’ of past cultures. Subsequently, psychoanalytic criticism has been remodelled in the context of poststructuralism by the work of Jacques Lacan and his followers, in which the coupling of a dynamic notion of ‘desire’ with a model of structural linguistics proved innovative and influential. This is especially the case in feminist psychoanalytical criticism (see Chapter 7), which, as Elizabeth Wright has said, is concerned with

Key figures here have been Juliet Mitchell (1975 and 1984) and the French feminists Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, who have engaged especially with concepts in Lacanian theory. There has at the same time been

a broad and consistent interest in contemporary Literary Studies in the Unconscious (it was Freud who gave this term a capital letter and definite article) and the notion and effects of ‘repression’, linked often with debates on sexuality. Some other concepts (discussed below) – for example, ‘Nachträglichkeit’ (‘deferred action’) referring to the ‘working through’ of trauma, and the ‘uncanny’ – have come into renewed prominence, quite possibly because they are compatible with contemporary concerns and a readiness to accept and probe uncertainties of time, subjectivity and meaning. Concepts such as these gained a new critical currency in the context of poststructuralism and cognate tendencies in postcolonial studies where this interest in destabilized borders and identities is evident in the use of terms such as ‘hybridity’, ‘syncretism’ and ‘liminality’ (see Chapter 10). Also, where postcolonial literatures have confronted the repression of past pre-or anti-colonial histories they have often had recourse to the tropes of gothic or horror stories in narratives of haunting, nightmare, phantasms, ghosts and spectres. Here again there are cross-overs between psychoanalysis and insights in poststructuralism (see Chapter 8 on Jacques Derrida).