From Literary Criticism to Literary Anthropology

The answer, we all know this in psychoanalysis, is in the question, and I am particularly grateful to Henk Hillenaar and to Walter Schönau, the organizers of this conference, for having so clearly formulated the four questions which are at the heart of our debate today. That such questions could have been produced is no doubt a sign that the time has come for us to consider with new eyes the place of psychoanalysis in the study of literature, and this constitutes a first answer.

About the history of my own research, to begin with the first question, I shall be as brief as I can, and simply say that it coincided with my own history, the history of a never ending psychoanalytical interrogation. Starting to teach literature, at about the same time as I was seriously interested in Freud and in psychoanalysis, one of the first questions that came to me was: “How can one ever teach literature?” (I did not know then that one never teaches anything unless one is answering someone's question, unless something is asked of one, desired, to put it simply.) Yes, how can one teach literature? Which in turn led to a question on the nature of our object; for at the time I was beginning to teach there was no one to tell me what literature was. Naturally, I had learnt how to carry out all the necessary tasks of the professional of literary studies, but this still did not tell me what literature was. Indeed, once the text, and a corpus, had been established with care, once a research on forms, and genre, a research on the aesthetic code of each historical period had been carried out—and already this was a