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From its earliest stages, psychoanalysis has always claimed to be more than a therapeutic technique. Especially in the later, speculative Freud, we can see psychoanalysis stretching out to become not only a theory of mind, but a systematized method of describing, evaluating and imagining new forms of social and human relatedness. Until recently, however, at least within the official establishments of psychoanalysis, such imaginative projects have been dismissed as something of a “scientific” embarrassment. One of the genuine interests and excitements of modern intellectual discourse is the way cultural and literary historians have made use of these late speculations to extend and deepen our understanding both of cultural institutions and of psychoanalysis itself.
Leo Bersani, one of the most interesting, original and sophisticated of these literary historians, has written primarily on Modernism, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Genet, using Freud's metapsychology as a way of penetrating into the radical implications of their thought. In doing so, he has used Freud himself not as some unimpugnable authority, but as one, perhaps the greatest, of these literary modernists. That is to say, for Bersani's investigations, Freud is not scripture, but a literary text that Bersani finds