On Reading Psychoanalytically

Abstract

THE RELATIONSHIP between the theory and the practice of psychoanalysis is presently in the state Thomas Kuhn calls a poor fit. Roy Schafer, George Klein, Robert Holt, Merton Gill, and Benjamin Rubenstein are among many analytic theorists who have expressed discomfort with the various metapsychological of the mind, and the roots of these models in nineteenth century biology, neurology, and physics. The old models are felt to have decreasing explanatory value for the data of psychoanalysis (that is, what goes on in the mind of the analyst, and in his consulting room). Criticisms of psychoanalytic metapsychology must inevitably affect those of us who attempt to apply psychoanalysis to the study and teaching of literature. Like the analysts, we literary scholars and teachers must sooner or later recognize that the aspect of psychoanalysis which remains most nearly constant and most vital in the face of sweeping theoretical criticism is the analytic process itself: the ability of the analyst and the analvsand to establish a unique human alliance which is oriented to the analyst's empathy, on the one hand, and to the analysand's mental processes, on the other. I will not attempt to summarize here the criticisms of Freudian metapsychology, or the efforts to create new hypotheses and models for analytic theorists. Instead, I will point out that the study of literature is currently in a situation similar to that of psychoanalysis. A poor fit exists between literary theory and the data of our field. In particular, literary theorists are uncomfortable with questions of literary epistomology. How does a reader know literature? Where does literary meaning reside? In the time of the New Criticism literary meaning was believed to inhere in the text (that is, the object). Partly because of the influence of psychoanalysis on literary studies the philosophical position of the New Critics has largely collapsed (though not, fortunately, their emphasis on close reading). David Bleich (and following Bleich, Norman Holland) have established what Bleich calls a stance with regard to literary epistomology.1 Bleich's subjective paradigm holds that meaning inheres not in the text but in the reader. The shift from objectivist to subjectivist position, following the ancient dualism of Western philosophy, coincides with a shift in the philosophy of science from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries-the same shift which has made Freud's metapsychology seem archaic. But despite the efforts of Bleich and Hol-