Abstract
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis provides a powerful and insightfully edited collection of essays treating the productive and sometimes uneasy coexistence of two unruly disciplines, literature and psychoanalysis. The relationships between them span fruitful collaboration, smug condescension, and challenging rivalry.
Professor of English at Kent State University, training and supervising analyst at Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center, and assistant professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, editor Vera J. Camden rehearses the conceptual thematics of this conversation and highlights new developments in the field. The result is a collection of stand-alone essays about an inordinately wide range of subjects including the de novo creation of memories, queer melancholy, the place of attachment and affect theories in today’s landscape, and the inner lives of children. Comprehensively researched, the essays provide robust academic foundations for each complex question, ranging in form from a close reading of the familial psychodynamics governing Anne Elliot’s marriage in Jane Austen’s (1818) Persuasion to a conceptual probe into both humanism and posthumanism.
Camden states in her introduction that the contributors “avoid using psychoanalysis to excavate literature of its life . . . [or using a] model of psychoanalysis that speaks over literature, putting it in its place” (p. 10). The book itself enacts analytic goals—to listen to things spoken in relation to things unspoken, to listen beyond the sentence, to not dissect the muscle from the bone. I emerge from its reading with a spatial polyhedron in my mind of the facets of the questions themselves, cohering and containing the dimensions of genre, language, theoretical orientation, time, and space. (My own engagements with these two disciplines stem from my dual life as a general internist and literary scholar, specifically a Jamesian and narrative theorist trained by Steven Marcus at Columbia.)
The book is divided into four parts: “In History,” “In Society,” “In Sight,” and “In Theory.” Already, the reader can foresee the tensions between interdisciplinarity (Levine, 2015) and the singular attention of close reading (Culler, 2010). All contributions are single authored. Most authors are trained in more than one discipline, giving each essay a prismatic texture. The formal structure of the collection itself and the conceptual linkages among its parts suggest that (a) cognitive, sensory/embodied, storied, and lived-through knowledge coexist; (b) metaphorical, historical, performative, and allusive properties contribute to the essays’ meanings; and (c) harmony and dissonance coexist, perhaps in every sentence (Thompson, 2010).
Camden proposes that literature is the source of psychoanalysis, not its handmaiden. Literature produces psychoanalysis, she asserts, not only because Freud read Sophocles and Shakespeare but because his own discoveries came about through his literary writing and thinking. Individual essays contribute examples that address her position. To contextualize the collection’s arguments, the Freudian and post-Freudian lineage is repeatedly invoked—Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and others—while Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan are simultaneously invoked, elaborated, and/or contested. Contributions from Leo Bersani, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Julia Kristeva, Dori Laub, Steven Marcus, Adam Phillips, and Eve Sedgwick pepper the text. Less unified, the literary landscape in the book emphasizes classical drama and 19th- and 20th-century novels without excluding contemporary fiction, films, and comic books. Beyond Shakespeare, particular attention goes to Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf. Oddly, poetry does not get much attention.
Camden uses the word “consilience” twice in her short preface. E. O. Wilson’s (1998) Consilience tried to unite the warring tribes of environmental policy, ethics, social science, and natural sciences into an ecology of common sense and action to replace the hierarchy and in-fighting among individual fields with productive unity (Wilson, 1998). A consilience between psychoanalysis and literature does not intimate serene mutual acceptance but sets the stage for vivid confrontational pressure on one another’s perhaps hidden assumptions. Or, to use Catherine Bates’s words from her muscular and macular “Recognitions: Shakespeare, Freud, and the Story of Psychoanalysis”: “In the relation between psychoanalysis and literature neither is the master discourse, for both expose the illusoriness—the folly—of such supremacy even as they strive for it” (p. 48).
Several chapters examine high-stakes arguments on both sides of the ampersand. Both psychoanalysis and literature are riven by conflicts pitting fragmentation against affiliation and seeking or discarding the utility of attachment, affect, or relation (Sedgwick, 2003). Both fields struggle, with their own affordances, to address human subjectivity or lack thereof. And neither field seems to have achieved a neutral view of those who disagree with them on these highly polarized issues.
The act of reading emerges as a controversial topic. The act of analytic listening may share some of its features. The close reader has been theorized as engaged in a dyadic act in which currents arise between the text itself and the person holding the book. The reader makes contact with individual characters, with the avatar the reader has created of the author, with formal considerations, and with the reader’s own situation (Gallop, 2007). But when the subjectivity of the entity holding the book is contested, as it is by recent posthuman formulations of the fragmented or decentered self, this process of engagement comes to a halt (Braidotti, 2013). Essays in this volume by Lisa Ruddick (“Beyond the Fragmented Subject”) and Carla Freccero (“Animal Figures”) take up issues of posthumanism or antihumanism and interrogate such issues as interiority and subjectivity. Placing these essays next to careful close readings of complex fictional, visual, and performative texts italicizes the urgency of efforts not only to “conciliate” but also to permit the messy and necessary discourse both fields require to proceed.
Some of the essays display collaborative ways forward. Josie Billington’s superb essay “The Uses of Literature and Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Reading Groups” discusses a long-standing United Kingdom project of group close reading, showing the mutuality of literary and psychological processes in action for patients or clients in rehabilitation centers, prisons, hospitals, and dementia care homes. Here, psychoanalysts supervise the literary scholars who teach these sessions to help them consider the consequences for participants of their engagement. An effort toward collective work is described at the end of Jean Wyatt’s “Dislocating the Reader: Slave Motherhood and the Disrupted Temporality of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” that draws on Freud’s (1895/1966b) account of Nachträglichkeit to explain Beloved’s delayed report of Sethe’s infanticide. Toward the close of the essay, Wyatt discusses an imagined character’s memory of the Middle Passage in Beloved (Morrison, 1987) and quotes from an interview Morrison gave about the scene: “I had the impression that it was something that needed to be thought about by . . . Afro-Americans. With Beloved, I am trying to insert this memory that was unbearable and unspeakable into the literature” (Carabi, 1993, p. 105). As an additive to the close reading necessary to absorb Beloved, Morrison’s effort to make “readable” both Sethe’s actions and the Middle Passage’s genocide of African-Americans’ ancestors seems to offer a site for collective response for this community of readers historically subjected to unspeakable trauma.
There are similarities to be found between the two fields. They share a basic mechanism of thought—the singular case. Almost every essay in this volume takes up an exhibit—a novel, a film, a scholarly process—as a case to help them think. Analysts and clinicians of other medical specialties more and more frequently publish their clinical cases for their and their fields’ benefit, being scrupulous to protect patients’ privacy. Informal conversation among doctors, formal teaching rounds, and the New England Journal of Medicine’s landmark Clinicopathological Conferences rely on details of an anonymized single patient’s clinical course (Ackerman, 2018; Reisman, 2015).
Do literary practices too require the singular case? Most scholarly work, like in this book, proceeds by glossing a text that functions as a case. Creative work in literature too develops what I am calling cases. Whether realist or not, a work of fiction or drama or poetry spotlights individual characters or entities and, abetted by the quality of the writing itself, entrances the reader into an “as if” relationship with a pseudo-real figure (Auyoung, 2018). No reader of Persuasion forgets that Anne Elliot loved Frederick Wentworth. The recognizability of a made-up entity activates the reader’s own capacity to pull the multiple, contradictory elements of a described individual or entity into the portrait of a lady or a gentleman or a thing. Psychologists are demonstrating that reading fiction enables readers to recognize actual humans in their lives. Such efforts, of course, are open to interrogation (Oatley, 2016).
Katherine Dalsimer’s essay “Encountering Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and Julia Duckworth Stephen” combines the fictional case of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1927) with the memoir description of Woolf’s lived experiences with her mother in Moments of Being (Woolf, 1985). Dalsimer provides critical clues to the questions of the contribution of fiction—in this case, the writing of it—to an individual’s capacity to comprehend her own life.
To turn, now, to situations where the two fields may disagree. Camden’s Companion includes essays on edgy feature films, book-length comics, violence-saturated detective stories, historical mournings of national traumas, and posthumanist conceptual forays that may ignite contesting reactions between or among the literary and the psychoanalytic readers.
Beatriz Botero’s essay “Latin American Violence Novels” and Vicky Lebeau’s examination of the short feature film Wasp (Arnold, 2003) of family life in an underresourced community in “Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Class” have instigated polarized reactions among readers and viewers, as they perhaps will do among readers here. The works can activate and demonstrate discomfiting class-based, culture-based, and gender-based assumptions, implicit bias, and automatic judgment. Emmy Waldman’s “Frames of Mind” reviews the cartooning work of Art Spiegelman, R. Crumb, an EC comic book from the 1950s on psychoanalysis, Alison Bechdel’s books, and comics created by persons living with psychiatric illnesses. Waldman makes the case—which may or may not be endorsed by readers—that comics say something otherwise unsayable, that mimesis must include visual ingredients (gesture, facial expression, cut-aways to multiple reactions) beyond words on a page. Carla Freccero’s essay “Animal Figures” summarizes posthuman animal studies, including conceptual and textual work. She wonders if rethinking humanism as anti-Cartesian can allow it and posthumanism to focus “not only on the cognitive dimensions of consciousness, but also on the embodied affective aspects of the always ongoing and partly unconscious process of ‘becoming human’” (p. 291).
I will close by pointing to the two primary themes that sound throughout the collection. Unsurprisingly, they are memory and death. Freud’s (1896/1966a) “Letter 52” is cited by Jeremy Tambling: “Memory traces” are “subject from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances—to a retranscription. . . . Memory is present not once but several times over” (p. 233). Tambling suggests that, unlike New Criticism’s “reading for the whole,” psychoanalysis recommends listening for contradictions, omissions, and Althusser’s “absent cause” (Althusser, Balibar, & Establet, 2015, pp. 343–344). In “Remembering Violence and Possibilities of Mourning,” Zehra Mehda mourns the historical debacle of Partition in India through a careful transit through the stories of Sa’adat Hasan Manto that memorialize the torture and loss throughout the countries.
As we have seen even in this short review, death provides the common thread for most of these essays. Themes of death and mourning ring through each section and essay. Katherine Dalsimer proposes that Virginia Woolf (1927) tries, in To the Lighthouse, “to induce grief, to inflict it on the reader. . . . [The novel] is a hard look into the heart of a child’s grief” (p. 82). Adele Tutter’s fine study “A Man and His Things: Bruce Chatwin’s Utz” depicts the work of the collector as a gesture against the triumph of death. Literary studies globally are anchored in death—who among English majors can afford to forget Walter Benjamin’s edict that “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death” (Benjamin, 1955/1968, p. 94). One can argue that the works of Freud, of Anna Freud, of Klien, of Winnicott, and of Bion are, as it were, dedicated to death, to neither surmount it nor understand it, but to tacitly or purposefully endorse its fact.
In summary, this collection asserts that our intertwined disciplines of literature and psychoanalysis touch foundational issues of health, culture, and existence. This comparative and collective effort provides groundwork for expanding both fields with mutual examinations of issues past and to come that will challenge our ideas, call forth our creativity, and respond to contemporary dangers and opportunities that demand our attention.
