Psychoanalytic Theory

Abstract

Psychoanalytic readings of narrative fiction advance the idea that the novel's most important feature is its depiction of human subjectivity. The psychoanalysts who have most influenced literary studies believe that reading, whether clinical or literary, reveals the unconscious dimension of the human mind in particular. Scholars of the novel who employ psychoanalytic theory, accordingly, presuppose that the principal function of the novel is to describe the unconscious. Psychoanalytic study of the novel can be said to have originated in 1907 by none other than the founder of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), but psychoanalytic theory did not become established as a preferred method for analyzing novels until the mid‐1970s, following the introduction of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's (1901–81) theories into literary studies. In what follows, I will explain why Lacan had such a tremendous influence on novel theory. Lacan is known for his revision of the Freudian conception of the unconscious, and this change in psychoanalytic theory turns out to have overlapped, historically and theoretically, with narratologist Roland Barthes's (1915–80) influential revision of the idea of the author. In the 1970s Lacanian theory was taken up by literary scholars interested in Barthes, and in combination, psychoanalytic theory and narratology created a significant conceptual approach to understanding the novel as a genre (see novel theory , 20TH a). Two of the three psychoanalytic readings Dorothy Hale identifies as crucial to the development of novel theoryby literature scholars Peter Brooks (“Turning the Screw of Interpretation”) and Shoshana Felman (“Freud's Masterplot: Questions of Narrative”)were published in Felman's 1977 collection, Literature and Psychoanalysis . Of these early psychoanalytic readings influenced by Lacan, I will focus on Brooks's to demonstrate the particular version of psychoanalytic theory that would qualify it as a movement in novel theory.