This article shows how psychoanalytic interpretation and literature, each in its own way, work on memory, in a fragile sublimation that contains a melancholic background and a risk of fragmentation. When reading a work of literature, the reader is confronted with his or her psychic bisexuality and the most archaic areas of the psyche through the poetics of language, whereas psychoanalytic interpretation aims to clear away the most pathogenic splits and repressions. The specific features of the psychic work mobilized by the psychoanalyst in his or her search for the right formulation, the style, of his or her interpretations, are highlighted – as are some of the ways in which literary writing actualizes the childhood past.