Literature

An enormous number of books and articles relating literature and psychoanalysis have continued to appear in recent years. Every category in interaction between the two fields is amply represented. Literary critics apply psychoanalytic ideas and methods to literary texts and authors; analysts interpret literary works; literature and psychoanalysis are seen as variations on general narrative strategies; critiques of the relation between the disciplines appear regularly. As the boundaries of each field shift and expand, so their contributions to one another become at once richer and more difficult to fix with certainty.

Despite the difficulty of fishing in a fast moving stream, I have chosen several book-length examples to represent valuable work that has appeared recently. Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1989), by Louis Breger, can serve as a model of (and for) contemporary applied psychoanalysis. Breger explores Dostoevsky's creation of fictions as a psychoanalytic process. As “the Freud of fiction,” Dostoevsky created characters who are then set free to develop in ways that enable their author, an observing ego, to use them in his own self-development. Breger moves comfortably between biography and interpretation of Dostoevsky's major works, with brilliant chapters on Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and the significance of Dostoevsky's gambling. His Appendix on epilepsy is likely the most concise and lucid statement of “how feeling and meaning were integrated into life and art” in the applied psychoanalytic literature of the past decade. Without reduction or jargon, Breger shows how physiological-psychological experience “was the enactment of a fantasy of idealized merger, rageful attack, death like punishment, guilt and resurrection.” Breger's scholarship, confident use of evidence, and clear, engaging writing have resulted in a book of great and equal value to students of literature and to psychoanalysts.

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