Psychoanalysis and the Poem: On Reading in Sándor Ferenczi and D. W. Winnicott

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how returning to the question of interpretation in twentieth-century psychoanalysis can help us readdress the discipline's bearing on literary studies, in particular the study of poetry. Reading the work of Sandor Ferenczi and D.W. Winnicott, the article sets out their responses to well-documented controversies surrounding psychoanalytic interpretation. Using original research on the correspondence of both analysts and key references to poetry and 'the poetic' in their writing, I examine how their theories of interpretation rely on notions not only of language but of poetry, and how this reliance prompts us to consider the implications of their conclusions for the project of critical reading. These analysts' understanding of aesthetic as well as psychoanalytic relationship stretches our sense of what interpretation is for and what impulses might be behind it. The status of poetry in their work invites us to bring this discussion back into the field of literature.Keywords Psychoanalysis, Interpretation, Literary Criticism, Poetics, Poetry, Sandor Ferenczi, D.W. Winnicott.At the end of Freud and. Philosophy, Paul Ricoeur probes psychoanalysis with this pointed question: 'does not this discipline of the real, this ascesis of the necessary, lack the grace of imagination, the upsurge of the possible?'1 To whom or what the principles of imagination and possibility are being ascribed, and how they might be lacking in psychoanalysis, are queries Ricoeur leaves ajar here. Just how can the 'grace of imagination' be at stake in a discipline that, like the study of literature, champions the creative work of the mind?Psychoanalysis, 'this discipline of the real', has long try sted with literature, discipline of imagination par excellence. The legacy of psychoanalysis in literary theory is a complex one, with critics and advocates perhaps in equal measure.2 Yet among psychoanalytic readings of texts, critiques of psychoanalysis by analysts themselves are largely absent, critiques that, in this reading, force quite a different set of questions out of the encounter between psychoanalysis and the work of literature, and invite new forms of critical reading. In this essay I examine the work of two twentieth-century analysts whose critiques of psychoanalytic interpretation encourage a rereading of what psychoanalysis can offer the interpretation of language beyond the psychoanalytic discourse - principally, but not solely, the literary text. For Hungarian analyst Sandor Ferenczi and British child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, interpretation, that staple of psychoanalysis, presents an abiding problem for the discipline: their thinking holds a question mark over the politics of language in interpretation, over what precisely an analyst does when he 'reads' a patient.The theoretical leap from psychoanalytic to literary interpretation is often made on the impulse of analogy - between the forms of the Traumarbeit, and the linguistic resources of poetry, for example, taking its cue from Freud's elaborate comparison between literary and psychic symbolism.3 Here I will be making the leap on the basis of an experience of language both Ferenczi and Winnicott call 'poetry', a reference that not only raises the question of literature and specifically poetic form but invites a striking way of thinking about interpretation in critical culture, beyond clinical psychoanalysis and beyond poetics. 'Poetry' in their work invokes a potential in language that, for both analysts, begs to be heeded by interpretations that otherwise acquiesce in a form of subjective idealism: a discourse of the other, 'poetry' refers to language as it resists an interpretation. It is out of a valorisation of this resistance that their critique of interpretations that privilege non-resistance arises, along with a query as to what interpretation excludes to the advantage of its own logic, even its own poetics.Such resistance poses a challenge to the self-centred subject of interpretation who, while the subject of parole finds his own speech debunked by the revolutionary Freudian insight of the unconscious, has escaped the psychoanalytic critique of the subject largely unscathed, his sovereignty over the interpreted language remaining more or less intact. …