How the Analyst Thinks as Clinician and as Literary Reader

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Notes

*This paper is a slightly revised version of a chapter from The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature by Benjamin H. Ogden and Thomas H. Ogden. (New Library of Psychoanalysis). London and New York: Routledge, 2013.

¹We have chosen to use the terms Psychoanalytic Literary Reader (for which we have invented the acronym PLR) and the Literary Critic to refer to the psychoanalyst and the literary scholar coauthor, respectively. (Benjamin Ogden's published works of literary criticism include essays on the work of Samuel Beckett [2009], J. M. Coetzee [2010, 2011], William Faulkner [2008], Philip Roth [2012], and others.) We have elected to use these designations because they underscore the fact that the narrative “we” is both singular (in the sense that “we” reflects two or more people speaking with a single voice because they more or less share a point of view) and plural (in the sense that “we” is a pronoun that necessarily refers to two or more distinctly separate people with minds of their own, and ideas and sensibilities that are not held in common). The distance between our points of view is in movement throughout this chapter and throughout the book as a whole. We believe that the tension between the voice of the PLR and that of the Literary Critic in the voice of the narrative “we” constitutes a good deal of what is potentially most alive and interesting about the book.