Psychoanalysis, literature and writing

Abstract

What can literature offer to psychoanalysis that does not involve serving it as an example or evidence, that is, as a reproduction of itself? This essay aims to further investigate the articulation between literature and psychoanalysis. In previous works, I have already presented a critique of psychoanalysis applied to literature (understood as the use of literature to illustrate a pre-existing knowledge), in order to imagine other modes of relationship, capable of bringing psychoanalysis into contact with the differential otherness of literature. Thus, I have proposed ways in which psychoanalysis can contribute to literary criticism and theory, without implying a reduction to its own knowledge. Now, I would like to take up new arguments not only to insist on the flaws of the usual practice of applied psychoanalysis, but also to consider a way of articulation that goes this time not from psychoanalysis to literature, but from literature to psychoanalysis. To do this, I will first briefly visit Pierre Bayard's proposal of applied literature. Then, I will seek to develop the idea that literature can offer air to psychoanalysis by making psychoanalysis literature. Thus, I will try to think about the necessity of a work on psychoanalytic writing under the formalist concern of a de-automatization of language.