You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Reading Psychoanalysis is an important intellectual history. Rudnytsky, a professor of English and psychoanalytic critic, explores the early history of relational psychology through an analysis of the lives and writings of Freud, Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi and Georg Groddeck. In many respects, this book is a sequel to earlier text, The Psychoanalytic Vision: Rank, Winnicott, and the Legacy of Freud (1991, Yale) where he first began the process of carefully mapping out the historical precursors to inter-subjectivity and relational psychology. Through a close reading of critical psychoanalytic texts, for example, 's ‘Delusions and dreams in Jensen's “Gradiva”’ (1907) and ‘Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy’, 's The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (1912), 's ‘Confusion of tongues between adults and the child’ (1932) and his Clinical Diary (published posthumously in 1985), and 's The Book of the It (1923), Rudnytsky examines the interface between psychoanalysis and literature in light of contemporary literary criticism.
The first three chapters provide a close reading of several early works by Freud through the lens of relational psychology. Chapter One re-examines ‘Delusion and dreams’, his longest analysis of a literary work, in terms of the multiple transferences woven into the fabric of Freud's text: to the principle characters of Jensen's story, to the author, and to literature as a whole. Rudnytsky contends that Freud treats literature as the uncanny double of psychoanalysis.
In chapters two and three, ‘Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy’ (1910) is re-examined with an eye on Freud's unacknowledged personal involvement in the case material, transference issues especially around race, gender, religion (Freud's Jewish identity), and the actual environment of Freud's office. Left out of the case history of Hans, a five-year-old suffering from a horse phobia, is the fact that on the occasion of Hans’ third birt