Between Author and Reader: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Writing and Reading. : By Stanley J. Coen. New York: Columbia University Press. 1994. Pp. 210.

Coen’s thoughtful and valuable book is a response, within the changing climate of current psychoanalytic practice, to the question of what (if anything) psychoanalysis can bring to the study of literature. Coen argues that the frequent focus of psychoanalytic criticism on the identification of psychosexual fantasy content in a work of literature, understood as a compromise formation, leads to premature explanatory closure of a kind we would not find satisfactory in contemporary clinical practice. Too often, Coen suggests, attempts to analyse authors on the basis of their works, or to treat fictional characters as if they themselves could be analysed, yield reductionistic or unwarranted conclusions that are insensitive to the actual responses in the here and now of the reader experiencing the open-ended complexities of the work. Just as analytic practice has moved away from simply informing patients of what unconscious fantasy is at work as they freely associate, and towards focusing instead on what is actually happening between the two people in the room, so too in the realm of literature we should examine the interaction between an author and a reader, asking the same sort of questions we ask ourselves in practising analysis: what response does one person in this situation wish to elicit from the other at this moment, and why, and how?

Coen provides models of his suggested procedure by examining the cases of four writers: Jean Gênet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marquis de Sade, and Freud in his letters to Fliess. The argument, briefly encapsulated, is that writers, like patients, experience feelings of isolation, loneliness, neglect, and depression, and require readers, just as patients require analysts, to bring them back to life. But this is a problem because often effective writers experience themselves as rageful, destructive and needy, and are fearful that the other from who they hope to elicit vivifying connection will be repelled and will fail to give them the na