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In Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis, Alicia Mireles Christoff makes a highly original and scholarly argument for the value of post-Kleinian British psychoanalytic thinking to literary studies, and for its special relevance to her own field, Victorian and novel
studies. The pleasure of seeing this area of clinical theory appreciated and brought to bear on works of art would be enough to recommend the book, but more surprising is the significant contribution it offers to clinical thinking, which will be the focus of this review. Although Christoff’s aims are many, a signal achievement of her scholarship is the new life it breathes into the writings of the Independent and Contemporary Kleinian worlds, enhancing them through her engagement with them in her readings of the Victorians.
Christoff, an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College, argues for an approach to literary scholarship that she terms “relational reading,” by which she means several things. First, an appreciation for the phenomenology of reading brings the reader’s affective and imaginal experience fully into the literary critical conversation. Paraphrasing Winnicott, she proposes that “there is no such thing as a book,” meaning that individual readers co-create and re-create the world of the novel as they feel and imagine in the process of reading. Aspects of this reader-focused approach touch on familiar clinical phenomena of transference and nachtraglichkeit; for example, the relation of reader to author, to narrator and to characters, which she points out can be deeply loving and enduring; or what happens in the passage of the text through minds never imagined by the author, minds developed in vastly different historical and cultural contexts. Moreover, Christoff’s stated aim of bringing psychoanalytic authors and novelists, separated by time and genre, into creative “conversation” highlights her firm repudiation of the notion of “applied psychoanalysis” in whi