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

Abstract

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.