Literature and Psychoanalysis: two lenses upon the primary scene

Abstract

Literature, as well as mythology, is not only an object of inquiry, but also a fundamental source of knowledge for psychoanalysis. In this paper, I will observe the primary scene through two different lenses, that of literature and that of psychoanalysis. In the context of an analytic group therapy, a primary scene acquires new meanings in the apres coup. The primary scene is thus a fundamental riddle that inhibits or stimulates our search for knowledge and our epistemophilic impulse. In the literary theory debate, some authors draw a distinction between two constitutive elements of a story, the fabula and the syuzhet. The former is the series of events in their reciprocal and internal relations, whereas the latter is the literary structure or distribution of events in the story. On the basis of the assessment of some clinical material, I will consider whether the primary scene could be conceived as a fabula that expands itself each time according to the different ways of the syuzhet.