ABSTRACT
The last book Freud ever read was Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, an appropriate choice, he observed, dealing as it did with ‘shrinking and starvation’. 1 Yet given his avowed debt to imaginative literature of the nineteenth century, there are surprisingly few references to Balzac in Freud’s voluminous writings. It was left to his followers to explore the ways in which Balzac’s work positively invited psychoanalytic interpretation as a result of being so manifestly rooted in the workings of desire. As Georges Poulet has observed, at the centre of Balzac’s writing is ‘the man of desire, that is to say […] the being who, eternally, projects himself beyond his being’, 2 while Lucienne Frappier-Mazur has not hesitated to claim Balzac as one of the precursors of Freud’s concept of psychic energy. 3
