How the Analyst Thinks as Clinician and as Literary Reader *

In the first chapter of The Analyst's Ear and the Critic's Eye, we described and made use of a form of psychoanalytic literary thinking and writing that reflects the psychoanalyst's lived experience of his own work as an analyst and that eschews barren psychological terminology. We stated, “What the psychoanalyst (or the literary critic who wishes to be responsibly psychoanalytic) can bring to literature is a particular type of awareness of the relationship between voice, effects of language, and complex emotional states.”

We realize that this way of describing psychoanalytic literary criticism will draw objections of many sorts. Taken to its most radical conclusion, the first chapter of this book might mistakenly be viewed as rendering irrelevant to literary criticism the entire intellectual tradition of psychoanalysis—that is, the concept of the unconscious mind and the psychological work that is done unconsciously; the importance of early infantile and childhood experience in the shaping of the personality; the ways in which we incorporate experiences with other people into the very structure of our mind; the ways we think and construct meaning; the ways we live out derivatives of our early childhood experience in our relationships with other people and with ourselves for the rest of our lives, i.e., transference.

The idea that we reject the use of these foundational concepts in the type of literary criticism that we described would represent a fundamental misunderstanding of our point of view.

In the first discussion, we talked about a particular form of psychoanalytic literary criticism that, despite the fact that it did not use psychoanalytic terminology or formulations, was in fact profoundly influenced by psy