Introduction

This is a psychoanalytic book written by an exceptionally creative psychoanalyst. It is also a book about literature, though it would be more true to say that it is a book that powerfully illuminates the possibilities available within both the psychoanalytic encounter and the act of reading fiction. A perceptive reader and imaginative writer, Sodré, in one paper after another, takes her readers by the hand and invites us into an adventure in which our minds open up and become a little more agile, a little more aware, a little less fixed in place. A delightful experience.

Ignes Sodré is a brave and independent thinker. Scholarly and well researched, the psychoanalytic ideas she presents have their basis in her vast clinical experience and a profound knowledge of the psychoanalytic texts. Freud and Klein are the two pillars of her thought and she pays tributes to each of them. She is also influenced by the work of some of their followers. But her ways of thinking about psychoanalysis are spectacularly her own: idiosyncratic, beautifully conceived and described with a characteristic clarity and verve. Her writing about the great writers in Western literature is equally scholarly and equally lucent. The voice in all these papers has a mixture of confidence and intimacy, even playfulness. Sodré is not afraid to poke gentle fun at Freud or to be fascinated and moved by an unresolved conflict in the author of The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch (‘… an error that is anguish to its own nobleness’).1