ABSTRACT
Detective fiction and psychoanalysis share many points of convergence. This chapter concentrates on the most influential ways in which psychoanalysis has been brought to bear on the genre. It focuses on Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “A Case of Identity” in order to illustrate how Sherlock Holmes’s reading strategy both converges with and departs from the psychoanalyst’s. The chapter considers a more recent psychoanalytic approach to detective fiction: Pierre Bayard’s “detective criticism”. Doyle’s story, by focusing on the question of identity, overlaps with the analysands’ probing of their identities in psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan observes that the first scene is repeated in the story, and that this repetition puts the stolen letter in circulation, changing the characters’ positions relative to each other. Peter Brooks suggests that readers constantly shift positions from one place to the other in reading.
