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Now, in a line of associations ambiguous words (or, as we may call them, “switch-words”) act like points at a junction. If the points are switched across from the position in which they appear to lie in the dream, then we find ourselves on another set of rails; and along this second track run the thoughts which we are in search of but which still lie concealed behind the dream.
—Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Toward the end of his hilarious Small World, which spoofs the international academic conference circuit, David Lodge (1984) constructs an antic scene that could not have been written had not both psychoanalysis and feminism pervaded academia in particular, and intellectual life in general. Angelica, a rising literary critic, is presenting a paper on the genre of romance (the novel in which she appears is, after all, subtitled An Academic Romance) at the Modern Language Association. Rife with sexual reference, her essay reveals the woman who, at once central and marginal to psychoanalytic thought, has uneasily entered the psychoanalytic stage, glad to have joined the nervously welcoming company of players, but not wholly sure that it's a good idea.
Angelica's theory unfolds in terms whose debt to Sigmund Freud states itself.
If epic is a phallic genre, which can hardly be denied, and tragedy the genre of castration (we are none of us, I suppose, deceived by the selfblinding of Oedipus as to the true nature of the wound he is impelled to inflict upon himself, or likely to overlook the symbolic equivalence between eyeballs and testicles) then surely there is no doubt that romance is a supremely invaginated mode of narrative. (p. 366)