Literature and Psychoanalysis

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements and a note on the text (p. vi)
• 1 Introduction: Freud's Copernican revolution (p. 1)
• 2 Freud and literature (p. 8)
• 3 Freud and memory (p. 23)
• 4 Freud and guilt (p. 45)
• 5 Klein and 'object-relations': the mother and creativity (p. 65)
• 6 Introducing Lacan (p. 87)
• 7 Freud, Lacan: hysteria, paranoia, psychosis (p. 120)
• 8 Between literature and psychoanalysis (p. 147)
• References (p. 154)
• Index (p. 163)