Literature and Psychoanalysis—The Question of Reading: Otherwise. Edited by Shoshana Felman. Baltimore:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.  508 pp.

This volume of essays assumes that psychoanalysis and literary criticism practice similar techniques in different realms, that the discourse of the analysand is a kind of text, and thus the principles of literary analysis may be of use in the clinical session. In the largest sense the volume deals with questions of language and how to read it, with sequence, with the repetition, structure, metaphor, and word-play that generate multiple possible interpretations of a text and thus lead to choices of procedure on the part of the analyst (or critic).

The epigraph, from Lacan, opens with the following statement: “This is what analytical discourse is all about: what can be read. What can be read beyond what the subject has been incited to say.” The question of reading “otherwise,” then, involves several implications of the word “other.” Lacan's epigraph refers in the first place to the unconscious, which for him is “the discourse of the Other.” No matter what the subject (whether analysand or author) consciously means to say, the form of his discourse will imply the shape of what lies beyond it in the form of unconscious forces that exert their shaping pressure on every conscious utterance. But in the second place, the volume represents an effort to find a new, a different, another way to read the discourse of the subject, whether that subject be analysand or literary text. That is the purpose of positioning literature and psychoanalysis in a mutual relation to one another as disciplines of discourse; in this new relation neither will dominate or interpret the other, but they will be understood to be enfolded within one another and interpenetrative. In the third place, this volume attempts to bring French and English styles of thought and argumentation into a mutually illuminating relation. No mean feat, this attempt involves several kinds of translation, not simply the linguistic. But, as Shoshana Felman points out in her introduction, reminding us that Freud compared the