13 - Why Literature? Why Psychoanalysis?

Summary

This chapter explains the relevance of literature to understand psychoanalysis, and the importance of thinking psychoanalytically when reading literature. Paying attention to Freud's interest in Oedipus, Hamlet, and the theatre, and his fascination with the uncanny, which shows itself particularly in literature, I distinguish between Freud's sense of the unconscious as what psychoanalysis addresses itself to, and Lacan on the importance of language, as that which the individual subject enters into and which structures existence as the "symbolic order." The debates this produces with Derrida, critiquing Lacan for phallogocentrism, and also with varieties of feminist analysis, and with the place of sexual difference within psychoanalytic theory, are outlined as topics for further study. Suggestions too are made of literary texts that offer themselves for discussion in the light of psychoanalysis, Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and post-Lacanian.