Is it Possible to Apply Literature to Psychoanalysis?

If I make myself elaborate the reasons why I tried ten or so years ago to invent a new approach to literary texts, I fear that I would have to recognize reasons that don't bear mentioning, such as the concern to find something new at all costs, to mark myself out. Yet at that time in France the currents of Freudian criticism left little room for new openings. Numerous works that renewed our perception of the links between life and artistic creation issued from psychobiography. Charles Mauron cleared an original path with psychocriticism, which took the author into account without confusing him or her with the real person. As for refocusing on the text—or text analysis—it had already been carried out, to my great regret, by Jean Bellemin-Noël. In short, there were no heuristic possibilities, at least not moving from psychoanalysis towards the text.

However, the concern to create something new was not the only motivation behind my research. Equally involved was my awareness—as a psychoanalyst and critic—of a whole series of reproaches that had for a long time been addressed toward the psychoanalytical approach to texts, reproaches that, despite excesses, did not seem unfounded to me. The same applies to the uniformity of the results obtained that were often repetitious and similar to one another, as is the feeling of arbitrariness that certain interpretations provoked. Finally, the reproach of subjectivity seems fair to me, even if it is in principle applicable to every interpretative process.

One type of criticism seems to me to dominate the others, synthesizing them all the while. As it is often practiced, the psychoanalytical approach to texts places knowledge on the side of psychoanalysis and not on that of literature. In doing so, it risks diminishing literature and underestimating literature's own