Literature and Psychoanalysis

Students and lecturers in English and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literature Literature and Psychoanalysis looks at Freud, Melanie Klein and Lacan, to explain their key concepts, and to suggest why they are essential in the study of literature. With a range of examples from Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, the Sherlock Holmes stories and Ibsen and from Surrealism, the book traces through the significance of literature in psychoanalysis, and why psychoanalysis is essential reading for those who are interested in literature. It looks fully at Freud on memory, and guilt, and on repression, and narcissism, and traces his key concepts as these morph into Melanie Klein’s work on the mother, and into Jacques Lacan’s studies of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. Each of these concepts are illustrated through plentiful literary examples. Psychoanalysis is seen to be absolutely engaged with language in all its richness and power of ambiguity. All those who have wondered what Freud really said, and why he remains so important, and all those who want to follow the story of psychoanalysis through the twentieth century, will want to read this book, and to see how it intersects with, and is virtually identical with, the study of literature, and how both relate to writing as a kind of madness. The book is for students and teachers alike in literary and cultural studies, for those interested in gender studies and in feminism, and queer theory, and for all who are interested in what criticism and the study of texts means in University departments of the Arts. Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.