Literary symptomology and Jewish fiction: ‘Envy; or, The New Yiddish in America’

At least as early as Freud’s 1908 essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, critics have spoken of literary texts in terms of an authorial unconscious. ‘Psychoanalyzing’ texts and/or their authors has become increasingly sophisticated since the 1950s and 1960s when critics read with the aim of discovering within the text one or another Freudian plot or neurosis – whether on the part of the author or of the characters. Contemporary psychoanalytic criticism of literary texts has abandoned this more simplistic, reductive, allegorical reading of literary fiction. Instead, and more profitably, it has increasingly focused on the dynamics of transference within the psychoanalytic setting and the corresponding, analogous intersubjectivity of the writer-reader or text-reader relationship.