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This book is an exploration of the different ways that psychoanalysts and literary critics think and write about literature. One author, Thomas Ogden, is a practicing psychoanalyst and the other, Benjamin Ogden, a literary scholar. The question asked is, “What is essential to psychoanalytic thinking apart from the psychological vocabulary?” In the first chapter, the authors look at the work of Robert Frost and Franz Kafka to examine how a psychoanalyst attends to the effects of language. Chapter two deals with elements that are fundamental to thinking, reading, and writing about literature as a psychoanalyst. The final chapter deals with how literary critics think, feel, and write about literature in an attempt to give psychoanalysts and literary critics a fuller understanding of the differences between the two different viewpoints. Their perspective is that psychoanalytic literary studies have gone astray of the essential experience and practice of psychoanalysis as applied to literary studies. An attempt is also made to make psychoanalysis relevant to literary studies by providing literary scholars with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of psychoanalysis. The authors limit themselves to the two papers of Frost and Kafka. The final chapter also deals with particular kinds of literary thinking central to literary criticism but foreign to psychoanalysts. There is an appendix to each of the three chapters, including an interpretive reading of Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer. These appendices further elaborate on the basic themes of the book.
The authors deal with psychoanalytic literary criticism that is devoid of jargon or specific psychoanalytic formulations. Thus, psychoanalytic literary criticism resides as much in the experience of psychoanalysis as it does in theory. Language, being more than a medium for expression of the self, is integral to the creation of the self, and the authors speak of “voice” in this regard.
Early in the book, there is a psychoan