LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Love him or hate him—or both, as is more often and more fittingly the case—you must admit that Freud turned the world upside-down. Against the supposed supremacy of rational consciousness, he found the power of the unconscious. At the heart of civilized order, he uncovered ever more sophisticated mechanisms of repression. Where the world saw the march of progress, he saw the death drive. And he discovered all of this through a new invention, a science of narrative, called psychoanalysis. According to this science, we are the stories we tell. And this means that we, our lives, our joys and anxieties, our past and our future, are like any story: always open to interpretation. In this course, we turn this lens back upon psychoanalysis, opening its clinical history and fundamental concepts to critical, literary interpretation. Beginning with Freud but moving beyond him, we will read foundational psychoanalytic texts alongside plays, poetry, novels, short stories, and films that corroborate, complicate, and contest the Freudian framework. We will consider the intrinsically literary qualities of psychoanalysis and, inversely, we will ask what literature, literary criticism, and literary theory gain or lose in this critical relation to psychoanalysis.