The specific question for our panel concerns the uses of the concepts of transference and countertransference in literary criticism. I intend to approach this question by exploring an analogy between the psychoanalytic setting and the contexts of reading and writing about literature. I believe that there is much to be gained by spelling out the uses and aims of the psychoanalytic setting with the goal of discovering how it is analogous to and also different from the situation of authors, texts, and readers in relation to one another.

Before I narrow my focus, however, I would like to sketch some features of the contemporary scene of psychoanalytic literary criticism. Since Freud first formulated relations between poetry and common strategies of the mind—making poetry indigenous to the human mind, as Lionel Trilling said—the complex and changing interactions between psychoanalytic theory and critical discourse have generated an enormous amount of psychoanalytic critical writing. The most important changes