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The question of whether psychoanalysis is a science or one of the humanities has been long debated and answered in various ways. The key to an answer seems to me to lie in the correct analysis of the place that is held in psychoanalysis by the functions of explaining and understanding. I would like to discuss this question in relation to the contribution that psychoanalysis can make to the study of works of literature. These works are outside the psychoanalytic situation, which excludes any third parties. All inferences can therefore be discussed with greater objectivity than is possible in clinical discussions, the subject of which is known only to the psychoanalyst who has treated the patient.
At the same time, I will seize the occasion to correct a widespread misconception that scholars seem to harbor with regard to Freud's approach to works of literature.
Psychoanalysis may make contributions to the explanation of works of literature in either of two ways, which are different in method, purpose, and result.
One I shall call exopoietic and the other endopoietic.1