Book Description

Drawing on methods and approaches from various schools of psychoanalysis, comparative literature, and cultural studies, the contributors to Psychoanalysis in Context examine how the circulation of psychoanalysis across time and place reflects and shapes literature and literary criticism. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range while attending to the historical moment of the literature, the psychoanalysis, and the interpretations—and misinterpretations—of psychoanalysis. Adrienne Seely examines the psychoanalytic dimensions of narrative structure in light of masochistic aesthetics and of the situating of women and robots both beneath and beyond humanist ideology. Simon Porzak analyzes the reconfiguration of the father figure through poetry. Nicholas Ray examines the close historical and theoretical connections between Freud’s interpretative appeal to tragic drama and his professed abandonment of the seduction theory. Vera Profit asks how the question of evil challenges the limits of literary representation. Laura Dawkins examines the applicability of psychoanalytic paradigms to African American literature and culture. Brian Glaser questions how psychoanalysis helps to distinguish insight and wisdom from mechanism or defense in reading the poetry of modernist male subjectivity. Shirley Zisser explores unseen dimensions of psychosis and establishes the main symptom of culture. Michael Angelo Tata analyzes the transformation of Lacan’s objet a under Late Capitalism and the emergence of a new form of desire. Erica Galioto strives to produce an alliance across multiple psychoanalytic discourses by redefining Freud’s notion of transference. Hilary Thompson challenges the historical legacy of psychoanalysis in the colonial context to demonstrate the polarity yet compatibility of psychic and political models of melancholia in the postcolonial context. In the final chapter Maire Jaanus provides a definitive reading of Albert Camus’s The Stranger and traces Lacan’s shift from conceptualizing the unconscious as able to constantly register and interpret language to that of a Real Unconscious which is amorphous and formless jouissance. Jaanus analyzes the development of ordinary psychosis; she ends her reading with a stunning reply to Edward Said’s identity politics reading of the novel to reveal how a phallic reading cannot imagine a corporeal fantasy beyond the sexual. This collection of essays offers a series of fresh and critical insights into the literary history of both psychoanalysis and literature. Contributors: Laura Dawkins, Erica Galioto, Brian Glaser, Maire Jaanus, Simon Porzak, Vera Profit, Nicholas Ray, Adrienne Seely, Michael Angelo Tata, Hilary Thompson and Shirley Zisser.