Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis and Literature

Psychoanalysts concern themselves at every moment in their work with listening to, thinking about, and commenting on, a particular form of narrative which is simultaneously factual and fictional; the analyst’s task of sympathetic understanding involves examining the relationship between phantasy and reality, or between, on the one hand, two forms of reality, internal and external – and on the other, the psychological distortions of true experience for the purpose of avoiding reality.

The differentiation between phantasies – that is to say, fictions – that are created primarily to communicate psychological truth and those that are created to avoid truth is the basic stuff of psychoanalysis, of course: psychoanalysts deal all the time with narratives which express the rich, complicated and infinitely changeable representations of life in external and internal reality; but the analyst’s focus of attention is on the symbolic expression of what goes on in internal, psychic reality, in what we call unconscious phantasy. By this we mean both representations of the most basic ‘facts’ of human relationships, and the truthful and untruthful ‘fictions’ created around them; the reality of emotional experience, of the impact of relationships on human development, and the unconscious defences that we all use to make reality more palatable; the capacity to create conscious and unconscious phantasies is an essential factor in the working through of conscious and unconscious conflicts. The analyst’s task is to try to think differently, with the patient, about the many different stories the patient tells about the past, and about present states of mind, of relationships – the idea being that looking from different points of view, making links and observing patterns that hadn’t been seen before, will lead to greater flexibility, more mental space, greater fluidity of thought; and, most

importantly, that the conscious awareness of psychic reality (of how and why our minds function fro