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Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips, eds. Literature and Psychoanalysis. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. viii, 403 pp. $30.00, (pap.) $12.95.
The title of Literature and Psychoanalysis cannot be read innocently this late in the century. It is necessarily provocative, a dare-literature and psychoanalysis coupled! This assertion/dare potentially means many things-that literature has priority over Freud because the poets, as Freud proclaimed, knew about the unconscious and its workings before the analysts. It could signal that literature is against Freud. That is, since literature stands supreme in the sciences humaines, and Freud with his scientism only invades literature to carry off its treasures to psychoanalysis, literature must necessarily oppose such pillage. It could be saying that literature may rest undecidably alongside Freud. That is, with literature and psychoanalysis laying claim to the same domain of the signifier, they grant each other's force and stature but cannot begin to reconcile their strategies (their techne), cannot deconstruct their opposition-and so on. Literature and Psychoanalysis, at least the title, seems to wager this challenge with its divergent readings and the unstable subordination of its title. Each half of the title has its hard-won technological advantages and its stable ground: Literature has literary interpretation based on (as Paul de Man shaped the strategy) the "error" of grammar and rhetoric, "literariness" as the glissement between a text's meaning and its assertion. Psychoanalysis has the Freudian subject and therapy based on the analysis of transference, the displacement of desire from one object to another.
Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips' collection for the most part gives this impression of a standoff amid twenty-six essays spanning the entire history of the association of literature with psychoanalysis. The overriding insight here is that Freudian criticism in America mirrors the Anglo-American preoccupation with substantial form-at...