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A Happening should be like a net to catch a fish the nature of which one does not know.
To make someone to love the unconscious, that is teaching art.
What is it exactly that makes one's reading of a literary text psychoanalytic? And in what respects, if any, do psychoanalysis and literary criticism differ in the ways in which they approach literature? Also, are there any necessary conditions for the encounter between psychoanalysis and criticism to be fruitful for both disciplines?
In this article, I will discuss how Benjamin Ogden and Thomas Ogden address these fundamental questions in their book The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Literature, published by Routledge in 2013. In so doing, I will make reference to Thomas Ogden's previous clinical and theoretical work, bringing to light a number of significant continuities between his approach to psychoanalytic therapy and the way in which he and Benjamin Ogden conceptualise what might, in view of their standpoint, be called the «literary encounter». More generally, I will also argue that the broader theoretical shift from a unipersonal to a radically intersubjective, post-Bionian psychoanalytic model of the mind (a shift that informs much of Ogden's clinical work) has important implications in terms of how a contemporary, up-to-date understanding of the intersection between psychoanalysis, literature, and literary criticism can be achieved.
One of the main nuclei, and possibly the very core of the volume, is the authors' analysis of Thomas Ogden's psychoanalytically-oriented readings of two literary works, Frost's poem Never again would bird's song be the same and Kafka's short story A Hunger Artist. Among other things, Ogden&Ogden compare the style