The Buffalo Symposium on Literature Psychoanalysis (May 1992) (original) (raw)

The Price of Admission: On The Predicament of Psychoanalysis and Literature (Keynote Address)

This paper describes why a psychoanalytic approach to literature often seems, to those working from within literature, to overlook or fail to appreciate what is inimitable and irreplaceable about literature. The paper does this by identifying an underlying rationale within the field of psychoanalytic literary criticism that governs how psychoanalysis is brought to bear on literature. This rationale detracts from what can be expressed about psychoanalysis in psychoanalytic literary criticism, and restrains literature within formulations that make it impossible to preserve what is most vital and irreducible about literature. How the Field of Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism Defines Itself Underlying the field of psychoanalytic literary criticism is, I find, a fairly consistent logic, one that must be confronted if the field of psychoanalytic literary criticism is to understand the rationale that determines its relationship to literature. This logic motivates even those works of analytic criticism that have attempted to move away from the more pathological, allegorical readings of literature that were common between sixty and ninety years ago.

Press for the Habilitation of Psychoanalysis

Using Lacanian Clinical Technique, an introduction, 2002

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Articulating Psychoanalysis and Psychosocial Studies: Limitations and Possibilities

Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2008

Of the limitations and possibilities raised by Frosh and Baraitser's discussion of psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies, three themes are particularly deserving of further attention. The first concerns the epistemological and ethical break that divides psychoanalysis' clinical praxis from its role as a means of qualitative or interview methodology. A second deals with the status of psychoanalytic discourse as a touchstone of authority, as a 'master's discourse'. Debating such problems opens up two possible routes of methodological enquiry: the potential of using psychoanalysis, following Parker (2008), as a means of subverting effects of mastery, individuality and truth, and the idea of focusing on libidinal economy rather than on individual subjects when it comes to combining textual and psychoanalytic forms of analysis. The paper closes by discussing the notion of a trans-individual unconscious, proposing that psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies might find some common ground with reference to the Lacanian idea of the unconscious as the subjective locus of the Other.