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As readers of American Imago know, literature and psychoanalysis have been companions since Freud recognized that the strategies of the mind shared intrinsic features with forms and insights embodied in literature and art. From his earliest writing, Freud told and composed stories to show how apparent chance could be made meaningful. A master stylist himself, he recognized creative writers as his allies in the service of a new science that embraced all cultural forms, including “the science of literature.” But, like the course of true love, the relationship has not always been smooth. Constant companions may be fellow travelers or, as etymology and an older meaning has it, “messmates,” sharing sustenance, but Freud’s valorization of Shakespeare and other writers contained elements of rivalry and ambivalence as well as identification. The paratactical “and” doesn’t specify a particular relation either of mutuality or hierarchy.
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis offers contemporary examples of the “synergy” of the two fields, with almost uniform success. Camden recounts in her introduction how, particularly in the United States, the status of clinical psychoanalysis was diminished by the 1970s in favor of medical psychiatry, even as “high theory,” mostly conveyed by the writings of celebrated French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, ascended in academia. This is true enough, but not the whole story, as the excellent chronology of important works at the beginning of this volume attests. In the academic world, by the 1970s much-maligned ego psychology (in Lacan’s rewriting of Freud’s concept of the ego) was already yielding spaces for other French analysts, British
object relations, self psychology, and D. W. Winnicott’s central concepts, as the academy provided humanities education for future psychoanalysts like Christopher Bollas and Adam Phillips, whose influence is prominent in these essays. At the same time, it was not accide