Like a river or a silver thread running through the vehement landscapes of reality – reflections on psychoanalysis and literary theory

ABSTRACT

The article discusses contributions from literary research and how they imply psychoanalysis in their field of research. Close readings of Freud and Lacan serve as an opening to an overarching question: what can literary research teach us about psychoanalysis? A question that generates a paraphrase: how is psychoanalysis already involved in the practice of reading? The historical ‘knowledge dependency’ of psychoanalysis on the myth, the rhetorical potential and the resonance made possible by the figures of the literary dimension, and methods of contextualization in psychoanalytic literary criticism are emphasized. Psychoanalytic knowledge construction – from a literary speech acts perspective – can be understood as attempts to represent and deal with practice or reality and, more specifically, traumatic experiences. The article reflects on how the extent of clarity to which both theory and poetry can find words for the unconscious or ‘the impossible’ might manifest itself in a movement of return and departure in language. The article discusses how listening and translation can be enriching concepts in the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature.

KEYWORDS:

• psychoanalytic literary criticism
• trauma
• performative
• testimony
• subjectivism

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Lars Sandberg for his persistence in sincere attention to my work. A big thank you also to my supervisor, Professor Kjell Ivar Skjerdingstad, for providing valuable input on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Refers to the breakdown of the sign into different parts: signifier (‘sound-image’) and the signified (‘concept’). For Saussure, the signified and signifier were form rather than substance while, for example, Barthes (1991, 2002) uses the concepts to differentiate between the literal and cultural meanings of the sign. Lacan translated these concepts from semiotics to psychoanalysis in regard to, for example, how a signifier also becomes signified through transference; see for example his text The Language of the Self: The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1968) (parts of this manuscript were republished in Écrits (2006).

2. In literary research, figures is a term for imagery language that indicates a shaping of the linguistic expression, for example the allegory and the apostrophe (see Andersen et al., 2020).

3. See, for example, Langås (2016) for an overview of literary research aims and contributions within the interdisciplinary trauma field. Whitehead (2004) and Sun et al. (2007) have reviewed parts of the works of Caruth and Felman, respectively.

4. In Felman’s essay Paul de Man and the Fall to Silence (in Felman & Laub, 1992), she reflects on Paul de Man’s work as an influential thinker and literary critic, and more specifically on how the discovery of his writing for Le Soir, a major Belgian newspaper that was seized by the Nazis in 1940 and that consequently functioned under Nazi supervision as a pro-German publication, created a discourse characterised by moral judgment. Felman also explores Paul de Man’s Fall to Silence in connection with the matter.

5. See Haugsgjerd’s (2015) afterword in the latest Norwegian translations of Moses and Monotheism for a thorough review of different themes and how the texts can be understood in relation to Freud’s other writings.

6. A figure she found in reading Tasso’s (1842) epic Gerusalemme Liberata, a text Freud also turned to in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920).

7. Freud (1939/2015 writes: ‘It may happen that someone gets away, apparently unharmed, from the spot where he has suffered a shocking accident, for instance a train collision. In the course of the following weeks, however, he develops a series of grave psychical and motor symptoms, which can be ascribed only to his shock or whatever else happened at the time of the accident. He has developed a “traumatic neurosis”. This appears quite incomprehensible and is therefore a novel fact. […] As an afterthought, it must strike us that – in spite of the fundamental difference in the two cases, the problem of traumatic neurosis and that of Jewish monotheism – there is a correspondence in one point. It is the feature which one might term latency.’ (pp. 67–68).

8. Trauma’s temporality is further explored by Caruth in her essay on Paul de Man’s notion of reference. Caruth reads de Man’s theory of reference as a narrative inextricably linked to the connection between reference and impact, and in particular the impact of a fall, a reoccurring figure of the falling body which Caruth suggests as de Man’s own translation of trauma (Caruth, 2016).

9. Felman shows us how the principle of triple reference seems to have its roots in what is considered the very first trace of a more systematic relation between theory and literature in psychoanalysis: Freud’s letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated 15 October 1897.

My dear Wilhelm

My self-analysis is the most important thing I have in hand, and promises to be of the greatest value to me, when it is finished. […] If analysis goes on as I expect, I shall write it all out systematically and lay the results before you. So far I have found nothing completely new, but all the complications which I am used to? […] Only one idea of general value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and now believe it to be a general phenomenon of early childhood. […] If that is the case, the gripping power of Oedipus Rex […] becomes intelligible […]. The Greek myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he has felt traces of it within himself. Every member of the audience was once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and his dream fulfillment played out, in reality, causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure of repression which separates his infantile from his present state. (Freud, 1897/1954, pp. 221–224)

10. Referring back to her earlier discussion on how Lacan argues for the importance of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920).

11. The early ideas of temporality of trauma and the clinical experience that traumas often remain unintegrated and inaccessible to words and thoughts are elaborated by neurobiological research showing how trauma is not usually processed as part of our normal memory functions. Brain imaging studies, for example, show stress-related changes in brain regions that mediate integration between different functions. See for example Van der Kolk, 2020 for an overview.

12. Ogden (1985) reflects on the implication of Winnicott’s concept of potential space for the development of subjectivity and symbolisation, and how symbolic function can be understood as involving the interrelationship of three distinct entities: the symbol (a thought), the symbolised (that which is being thought about) and the interpreting subject (the thinker generating his own thoughts and interpreting his own symbols). ‘Potential space ceases to exist as any two of these three elements become dedifferentiated: the thinker and the symbol, the symbol and the symbolized, or the thinker and the object of thought (the symbolized).’ (p. 137).

13. Through studies of testimonies from Holocaust survivors and literature, psychoanalyst Amir (2019) has identified various discourses that describe the extent to which the interpreting subject establishes contact with and marks distance from the traumatic material, which in turn affects the narrative’s potential for change. Amir finds that when it comes to literature (compared to other experiential material) there is a built-in metaphorical space which in itself can promote narrative changes. Even when the text is declared autobiographical, the author in a fictional text is not the same as the protagonist.

14. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle for Freud’s original account of the game (Freud, 1920, pp. 15–16). In Caruth’s readings her focus is on Beyond the Pleasure Principle’s connection to Moses and Monotheism, to departure and return (Caruth, 2016). In the wake of the First World War, Caruth (2013) also reads Freud’s depictions of the game as pointing towards not just a child’s attempt to make sense of his mother’s presence and absence but also towards the author Freud’s attempt to create meaning out of the threat posed by the war and to incorporate this into psychoanalytic thinking.

15. See, for example, Kittang (1976).

16. For a presentation on how Kristeva builds this concept on her reading of the literary theorist Michail Bachtin, see Franzén (1995).

17. See Hillis Miller (1982) Fiction and Repetition.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linda Sandbæk

Linda Sandbæk is a psychologist. She is a specialist in clinical adult psychology, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis. She has published several essays on trauma and object relations theory and how they relate to clinical practice within public mental health care. She has also published scientific articles in the interdisciplinary field of literature and psychoanalysis, and a short story in an anthology of children’s literature. She works at Oslo Metropolitan University as a PhD candidate in a project exploring how traumatic experiences are portrayed in literature, archives and psychoanalysis, and how these texts can enrich our understanding of trauma. She is a member of the research group Mediation of Culture and Literature at Oslo Metropolitan University.