You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In his short essay “On the Teaching of Psycho-Analysis in Universities,” Freud (1919) predicted that his new science would have a role not only in medical schools but also in the “solutions of problems” in art, philosophy, religion, literature, mythology, and history. “The fertilizing effects of psycho-analytic thought on these other disciplines,” Freud wrote enthusiastically, “would certainly contribute towards forging a closer link, in the sense of a universitas literarum, between medical science and the branches of learning which lie within the sphere of philosophy and the arts” (p. 173). Although Freud apparently did not foresee the possibility of a genuine cross-fertilization, in which other humanistic disciplines would pollinate psychoanalysis, Stanley J. Coen's new book, Between Author and Reader, demonstrates the fertile interconnections between art and science, focusing in particular on the psychology of writing and reading.
A Training and Supervising Analyst at Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and, since 1984, the chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism, Coen has expertise in both psychoanalysis and literary criticism. As he notes in the introduction, his model of the psychoanalytic literary critic is one who has been trained in the “method (not only in the theory) of practicing psychoanalysis” (p. 4)—by which he means literary scholars who do not