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Psychoanalysis at its origin was saturated with literature. Freud’s literary engagement extended well beyond his familiar uses of the Oedipus myth and Hamlet to ground his concept of the nuclear complex, and beyond his efforts to psychoanalytically understand literary works and creative writers. He compared his written case histories to novels, and he was awarded the Goethe Prize for literature. But more than this, he imbued his writings with allusions to literature that helped to capture his psychoanalytic insights ranging from some (Shakespeare, Goethe, etc.) that will be familiar to most educated people today, to others that most of us would know nothing about without the help of Strachey’s footnotes. Already in Studies on Hysteria he refers to Goethe; The Interpretation of Dreams begins with
a quote from Virgil and is packed with other literary connections. Literature was part of how Freud thought, and so literature shaped psychoanalysis even as psychoanalysis explored literature.
As can be seen in the valuable chronology near the beginning of The Cambridge Companion, some psychoanalysts have continued to explore literature, even if too few of us write in a way that could be mistaken for novels. But as editor Camden shows in her introduction, a split has occurred in the USA, with mainstream Anglo-American psychoanalytic writing on one side, and critical theory on the other. Most mainstream psychoanalytic writing focuses on theory and/or technique with little attention to literature, while university literature departments in the 1970s seized upon and became dominated by Lacanian thought, including his contempt for the belief that there could be any unified ego or self. As a result, academic scholars’ work on psychoanalysis on the one hand, and clinical psychoanalysis on the other (even when it considered literature), proceeded largely in ignorance of each other.
Camden intends for this volume to avow “that psychoanalysis itself derives life and purpose from li