Textoanalysis and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

IN SPITE OF THE FAVORABLE reception in France of my book Psychanalyse et litterature (Paris, P.U.F. 1978, 3rd ed. 1989), the reaction of literary scholars to literary criticism founded in psychoanalytic theory is today generally negative. At best, devotees of psychoanalytic literary criticism are considered to be playing with riddles, imposing personal fantasies upon a helpless and innocent victim, the book. In spite of the example set by Freud, rare are the analysts who are willing to reconsider their categorical lumping of all psychoanalytic readings of literature into a marginal zone. Such ventures are considered to be echoes of a no longer urgent past, unrelated to the very therapeutic activity upon which their value in the domain of the unconscious is contingent. Strictly speaking, neither the universities nor the various institutes of have accepted the interrelation of certain aspects of these two arts, of these two very different bodies of knowledge. And yet, joined together, the words textoanalysis and psychoanalysis are somewhat redundant; the result is a partial pleonasm. As a term chosen to label analytical reading with reference to Freudian doctrines, textoanalysis clearly incorporates the word analysis (i.e psychoanalysis, according to standard usage). The purpose of such an incorporation or introjection is to sensitize us, for it presupposes a conflictive relationship, an ambivalence that generates questions. When we accept the hybrid term textoanalysis, is it not true that today, in both thought and speech, common usage rather harmlessly substitutes the term psychoanalysis for that which can be referred to as textoanalysis? In the modem era, is analyzing a psyche really any different than analyzing a text? By text I mean a discursive fragment or a series of enunciations, always more or less disconnected, which comprises and at the same conceals the un-spoken, i.e. the un-speakable; a series of enunciations which ignores an entire dimension of thought-objects that are never taken up again (heard and recycled) in the monologue named conscience that the subject delivers about his self and his others.