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Published online: 22 May 2024
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
What is it that fiction can offer to psychoanalysis? At the heart of this question, Rosemary Rizq suggests, is the status of knowing that emerges from the way each field engages with language. Rather than contending that either fiction or psychoanalysis knows more, holds a truer access to knowledge, she asks us to consider how the experiences of reading and the experiences of psychoanalysis can mutually improve each other, allowing something to emerge that too often lies dormant: “How a work of fiction itself might inform, illuminate, even transform our understanding of psychoanalysis” (p. 8).
Rizq is not a literary scholar, although she is a good and careful reader of literature. Her readings will not put off those who may have come to see the esoteric work of post-structuralist critics and theorists as fatally involuted. Her goal is to step back from the most difficult psychoanalytic and literary theorists (there is little Lacan, less Derrida) to pursue a fundamentally human question of how we experience an encounter with unspoken limits of our lives.
Rizq notes that Freud hears in his patients' stories not a lack of knowledge about what ails them but instead hears “the way resistance itself seems to point to a particular kind of knowing, as if the patient's very unknowing announces an altogether different epistemology at work behind the scenes” (p. 2). There is something literary about hearing resistance, a turn away from the discovery of a hidden meaning and toward another activity at work. A literary psychology, thus, “is interested in what it is like to think, feel and act in a certain way” (p. 3). And in asking what it is like, she enters the dilemma of representation: how can what something is like tell us about an experience of the real?