You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Thomas Ogden, a prolific psychoanalyst and his son, a literary critic, have written a much needed monograph on the interrelationship between applied psychoanalytic studies and literary criticism—two fields which may address the same material yet use vastly different methods to decipher the meanings in written text. The authors use three previously published articles to explicate their differing, yet related viewpoints—Thomas Ogden's reading of Frost's “Never Again Would Birds' Song be the Same,” his article on Kafka's “The Hunger Artist,” and Benjamin Ogden's interpretation of Phillip Roth's “The Ghost Writer.” Each author comments on the other's article to compare and contrast their working methods. A subsidiary, but no less ambitious aim, is to articulate what is specifically psychoanalytic in the way an analyst listens, in his receptivity to language as it manifests in literary material and in his interactions with patients, apart from any ossified psychoanalytic terminology. To again “make psychoanalysis relevant to literary theory” (p. 2) the authors situate their personal style of reading a text in distinction to each other, yet pen their narrative in the “we” voice because the psychoanalytic lens is conceived of as one of many perspectives available to a literary critic. The “tension” between their viewpoints is central; in creating a dialogic text, they espouse a Bionian notion of change as growing out of different vertices. Although the book's subtitle suggests equal attention to both fields, the book will be primarily useful to psychoanalysts, as less specific attention is devoted to the working methods of the literary critic.
Applied psychoanalysis, while having a long history dating back to Freud's study of Hamlet, has ceased to be a central methodology in literary studies. The authors argue that this is because of the strategy of applying analytic concepts in a formulaic and rote manner to “decode” the text or to use the text as a window into the unconsc