Past, Present, and Future of “Psychoanalysis and Literature”

Compared to other sciences, psychoanalysis has a rather short history, but it does have a long prehistory. As we all know, the concept of the unconscious was not invented by Freud. Speaking about psychoanalysis as a method, a way of self-examination, self-analysis, we can even go back as far as the Renaissance, when the modern European began to create himself against the background of a disappearing divine Subject. It was then that Ignatius of Loyola wrote one of the most famous books of his time, the Spiritual Exercises, which we could call, like Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, a “school of sentiment,” one of the very few “schools” of that kind in the history of our mainly rationally inspired Western civilization. Ignatius wants us to be men or women of desire; he teaches us how to scrutinize our feelings, and to “discern” or recognise the different good and bad “spirits” that are governing those feelings. He maintained that the person who goes through these exercises reorganizes his inner and external life, becoming a new being. This should be achieved in a month of silence and retreat, interrupted—and this is important—by regular, even daily talks with a spiritual adviser to whom one should be as open as possible. There are striking resemblances with psychoanalysis today. Obviously, before they became secularized, practices like these, where the inner life of an individual person was so systematically the center of a shared experience, had to occur in a religious setting. Prayer and images of biblical history shared the stage with personal feelings, individual history.

I had this experience when I was young, during a whole month, sometimes in peace and at other times in pain, floating between hope and despair—heaven and hell, if you prefer— for its effects were also rather the same as those that I would experience in my psychoanalysis years later. Though Ignatius