Freud on Schreber. Psychoanalytic Theory and the Critical Act: By C. Barry Chabot. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1982. 174 pp.

Barry Chabot, who is an Associate Professor of Literature at The American University and who credits Norman Holland with introducing him to psychoanalysis, hopes with this book to renew a dialogue between psychoanalysis and literary studies by showing how similar are the interpretive processes in the two disciplines. He sees psychoanalysts and literary critics as engaged in a common enterprise: the understanding of another through an understanding of his or her language. He also sees the two disciplines as having much to learn from one another. Previous efforts to align the two disciplines have left the impression, according to the author, that literary studies bring no dowry. He seeks to redress the balance by showing psychoanalysts that an exclusive focus on the language of the text (and here "text" can mean either case history or literary work) can produce an interpretation without recourse either to past history or to psychoanalytic theory.

This is not a study in esoteric linguistics. Chabot's approach is that of a reader with a text, sensitive to the meaning of the words, their sequence, and their metaphors. He states that "the interpretive