How to theorise the pleasure of thinking? Psychoanalysis is the rare discipline of psychology that has accounted for the pleasure of thinking. Chapter 3 follows a historical presentation of psychoanalysis; it first presents how, when founding psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud theorised thinking and its pleasure, an experience he obviously himself had. The chapter then explores the two next generations of psychoanalysts. It thus focuses on two post-war authors, Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott, who, in very contrasting ways, give us elements to further understand psychic activity and its pleasures. Finally, it examines the work of contemporary theoreticians who, building on Freud, Bion, and Winnicott, turn their interests to the modalities of thinking and, with it, allude also to pleasure (André Green), whether in sublimation (Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor), daydreaming (Thomas Ogden), or the pleasure of insights.

This chapter traces the origins of psychodynamic psychotherapy back to the late eighteenth century and to the development of ‘moral treatment’ by Pinel in Paris and William Tuke in York. It also considers the contribution of Mesmer’s theory of animal magnetism, and its revival as hypnotism in the second half of the nineteenth century by Jean-Martin Charcot and others. It then goes on to consider the work of Freud and the various critiques of his theories. Next the chapter considers the phenomenon of shell shock in the First World War and how it led to further developments in psychotherapy. It then looks at the creation of the Tavistock Clinic in the early twentieth century and the work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Object relations theory is outlined, and the work of therapists such as Fairbairn, Bowlby, and Winnicott is examined. Finally the chapter briefly considers ‘the turn to the child’ in psychotherapy, the development of group psychotherapy, and the attempts to treat psychosis with psychotherapeutic methods.

Psychoanalysis is one of the central interpretative frameworks of modern Western cultures, but there is a widely-held view that it is has little, if anything, to say about class and class difference. This chapter challenges that view by creating a dialogue between the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the contemporary British film-maker Andrea Arnold. It is central to my argument that, to explore the conjuncture between psychoanalysis and class, we need a provocative encounter between psychoanalysis and creative and critical works engaged by the living facts of material and symbolic disadvantage. Arnold’s short film Wasp and Winnicott’s writings on creativity and mothering are used to open up the space for thinking between psychoanalysis, class and contemporary culture.

The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis historicizes the link between literature and psychoanalysis, addressing current trends in the field, while predicting the impact the volume can have on its future directions and discoveries. Born within the cultural matrix of nineteenth-century Vienna, the theory of psychoanalysis found its way into the intellectual mainstream in the first part of the twentieth-century. In the second half of the twentieth-century, it went on to take hold in the American and European academy, first in medicine and then in the humanities. Now in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the academic influence of psychoanalysis has waned, due to sweeping cultural and critical forces. This falling off is important to understand as the original bond between literature and psychoanalysis is revived to offer new directions for our century. The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis will place literature at the generative core of this ambition, for it remains a repository of knowledge derived from creativity that makes us human. The consilience between literature and psychoanalysis predicated Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious; that same family bond can foster revelatory and revolutionary truths for the next generation.

The chapter examines A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through the theory elaborated thus far. It reads Father Arnall’s sermon, Stephen’s account in the anatomy theatre, and Davin’s story from the Ballyhoura Hills as Joyce’s deepening and increasingly complex work on the challenges of the Loyolan Posiiton. These readings move towards a new understanding of the strange narrative apparatus of Portrait, an understanding rooted in both Loyola’s theology and Klein’s psychoanalysis.