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Jacques Lacan’s reformulation of psychoanalysis in directions Freud had not foreseen, his so-called “return to Freud” (first announced in 1953), forms the backdrop to Santanu Biswas’s The Major Literary Seminars of Jacques Lacan. A useful guide to the seminars, the book prompts one to move back and forth between Freud and Lacan, noting the similarities as well as the marked differences between their respective approaches. Lacan shared Freud’s view that writers and artists provide an example for analysts. But as the cumulative overview of the literary seminars clearly demonstrates, Lacan and Freud put literature to very different uses.
In a letter to Fliess, dated 15 October 1897, Freud, filled with the exuberance of a pioneer and the tenacity of an amateur archaeologist, writes about the “gripping power” of Oedipus Rex and, similarly, about Shakespeare’s unconscious understanding of Hamlet’s guilty conscience. Once the repressed motives that impelled Shakespeare to write Hamlet were set out on oedipal grounds, the prevailing version of literary psychoanalysis was up and running. It was plausible now to elucidate the text through the symbolic unconscious and, at the same time, to employ works of art or literature as testimonial proof of the unconscious.
The use of literature for illustrative purposes begins in earnest thereafter, starting with Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva . Further to the comments on Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams, the 1907 essay was Freud’s first published analysis of a work of literature. Ernest Jones proceeded to consolidate the Freudian interpretation in “The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery” ; written as an exposition of a footnote in The Interpretation of Dreams, Jones’s paper epitomises the use of literature for the sole purpose of validating psychoanalysis.
Biswas casts Lacan’s use of literature in a completely different light. In a series of cogent overviews of Lacan’s key literary seminars