Beyond Applied Psychoanalysis

A phrase came to mind as I was thinking about what I might say about being trained as both a literature scholar and a psychoanalyst. The phrase was “a warped coin,” and it is my association to a letter John Donne wrote to his friend Sir Henry Goodyer, probably in 1615, about the effects of multiple religious conversions. Like re-stamping a coin, they leave a person's mind “awry and squint” (Gardner and Healy 1967, 147), according to Donne. That is, while one conversion may “stamp” or “type” a person for life, more than one has the effect, for better or worse, of undermining or exposing the workings of conversion itself, of destabilizing notions of absolute truth.

My dissertation, which I wrote at Bryn Mawr College, was about the role of seventeenth-century moral theology and casuistry in the evolution of psychoanalytic discourse and the modern psychoanalytic subject. Donne's work provided me with a focus for this exploration, which employed readings of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, among other psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners. Donne found himself in the position of having to convert from Catholicism in order to be able to have a career, or even a life, in Jacobean England. The metaphor of the “warped coin” captured his sense of no longer having a clear self-image or impress, of having been twice-stamped, as it were. Although it connotes deformation and ambiguity, the comparison also conveys the possibility of an ethics beyond absolutism, a skepticism that is deconstructive in the best sense of the word.

When I began my literary training, my first professor warned us about applying theory to literature. He felt that theorists commit a “rape” of literature in this way. So, although I was always the one in any graduate seminar who used psychoanalytic theory in my work, I was from the outset equally attuned to the misuses of theory and to the sin of reducing the complexities of literature to the procrustean bed of this