Literature and Psychoanalysis is an exciting, and compulsive working through of what Freud really said, and why it is so important, with a chapter on Melanie Klein and object relations theory, and two chapters on Lacan, and his work on the unconscious as structured like a language. Investigating different forms of literature through a careful examination of Shakespeare, Blake, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and many other examples from literature, the book makes the argument for taking literature and psychoanalysis together, and essential to each other. The book places both literature and psychoanalysis into the context of all that has been said about these subjects in recent debates in the theory of Derrida and Foucault and Žižek, and into the context of gender studies and queer theory.

Combining literature and psychoanalysis, this collection foregrounds the work of literary creators as foundational to psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory introduces the key concepts, figures and movements of both psychoanalytic theory and the history of literary criticism and theory, engaging with Freud, Zizek, Plato, posthumanism, and beyond. Divided into two parts - concepts and movements – the structure of the book is clear and accessible. Each chapter builds upon the one before, allowing the reader to progress from little or no background in psychoanalysis, philosophy, or literary theory to the ability to engage actively with the relatively sophisticated ideas presented in later sections of the work. Mathew R. Martin consistently directs attention to the task of interpreting texts by illustrating abstract theoretical points with literary texts and at apposite moments provides brief readings of selected texts. This book will be essential reading for academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, literary criticism, and literary theory.

On the Lyricism of the Mind: Psychoanalysis and Literature explores the lyrical dimension (or the lyricism) of the psychic space. It is not presented as an artistic disposition, but rather as a universal psychic quality which enables the recovery and recuperation of the self. The specific nature of human lyricism is defined as the interaction as well as the integration of two psychic modes of experience originally defined by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion: The emergent and the continuous principles of the self. Dana Amir elaborates Bion's general notion of an interaction between the emergent and the continuous principles of the self, offering a discussion of the specific function of each principle and of the significance of the various types of interaction between them as the basis for mental health or pathology. The author applies these theoretical notions in her analytic work by means of literary illustrations showing how the lyrical dimension may be used to teach psychoanalytic readings of literature and explore the connection between psychoanalytic and literary languages. On the Lyricism of the Mind presents a new psychoanalytic understanding of the capacity to heal, to grieve, to love and to know, using literary illustrations but also literary language in order to extract a new formulation out of the classic psychoanalytic language of Winnicott and Bion. This book will appear to a wide audience to include psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and art therapists. It is also extremely relevant to literary scholars, including students of literary criticism, philosophers of language and philosophers of mind, novelists, poets, and to the wide educated readership in general.

This collection of essays provides students of literary critical theory with an introduction to Freudian methods of interpretation, and shows how those methods have been transformed by recent developments in French psychoanalysis, particularly by the influence of Jacques Lacan. It explains how classical Freudian criticism tended to focus on the thematic content of the literary text, whereas Lacanian criticism focuses on its linguistic structure, redirecting the reader to the words themselves. Concepts and methods are defined by tracing the role played by the drama of Oedipus in the development of psychoanalytic theory and criticism. The essays cover a wide generic scope and are divided into three parts: drama, narrative and poetry. Each is accompanied by explanatory headnotes giving clear definitions of complex terms.

What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development and existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature offers a unique glimpse into the unconscious psychic processes and development involved in reading. The author listens to the 'free associations' of various literary characters, in numerous scenarios where the characters are themselves reading literature, thus revealing the mysterious ways in which reading literature helps us and contributes to our development. The book offers an introduction both to classic literature (Poe, Proust, Sartre, Semprún, Pessoa, Agnon and more) and to the major psychoanalytic concepts that can be used in reading it – all described and widely explained before being used as tools for interpreting the literary illustrations. The book thus offers a rich lexical psychoanalytic source, alongside its main aim in analysing the reader’s psychological mechanisms and development. Psychoanalytic interpretation of those literary readers opens three main avenues to the reader’s experience: the transference relations toward the literary characters; the literary work as means to transcend beyond the reader’s self-identity and existential boundaries; and mobilization of internal dialectic tensions towards new integration and psychic equilibrium. An Epilogue concludes by emphasising the transformational power embedded in reading literature. The fascinating dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis illuminates hitherto concealed aspects of each discipline and contributes to new insights in both fields. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature will be of great interest not only to psychoanalytic-psychotherapists and literature scholars, but also to a wider readership beyond these areas of study.

This is a collection of psychoanalytical essays on a broad spectrum of well-known Russian authors, such as Puskin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belyj, Tjutcev, Axmatova, and Nabokov. The volume includes some reprints, among which a contribution by Sigmund Freud on Dostoevsky and Parricide'. The majority of the contributions are original publications by present-day specialists in the field. This is a book which may benefit literary scholars as well as professional psychoanalysts.

Taking Sigmund Freud's theories as a point of departure, Jean-Michel Rabaté's book explores the intriguing ties between psychoanalysis and literature.

In a draft attached to a letter to his friend and confidante Wilhelm Fliess (May 31, 1897), Freud develops an idea: The mechanism of fiction is the same as that of hysterical fantasies. He supports this thought with a brief analysis of the biographical sources of Goethe's Werther. A few months later, on October 15, 1897, Freud mails Fliess a detailed account of remembered events from his childhood that, Freud believed, underlined the universality of Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Freud's foray into literature initiated the beginning of a new critical approach. In Essential Papers on Literature and Psychoanalysis, Emanuel Berman presents classic and contemporary papers written at the intersection of literature and psychoanalysis. In bringing these essays together Berman traces the development of a discipline that has often been plagued by a polarization between self-confident, single-minded psychoanalysts reading literature as a series of case studies and literary loyalists who cling to manifest content or to the declared intentions of the authors, accepting them at face value and depriving the work of its emotional complexity. Berman covers the full range of old and new perspectives, and presents selections from today's mature phase. This collection includes papers by Sigmund Freud, Steven Marcus, Patrick J. Mahoney, Donald Spence, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Ernst Kris, Phyllis Greenacre, Florence Bonime and Maryanne Eckardt, David Werman, Ellen Handler Spitz, Jacques Lacan, Shoshana Felman, Norman N. Holland, Roy Schafer, Meredith Anne Skura, Gail S. Reed, Francis Baudry, Rivka R. Eifermann, and Bennett Simon.