5AAEB016 Literature and Psychoanalysis
Level/Semester taught: 2nd year module, Band 2, taught in Semester 1
Convenor: Neil Vickers
Teaching: 1 hour lecture & 1 hour seminar weekly
Arrangements Credit Value Assessment: 15 credits
1 x 4,000 final essay (100%)
MODULE OUTLINE:
Description
Psychoanalysis is a highly influential and contested form of twentieth century
discourse. This module is designed to introduce students to key Freudian and
post-Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and perspectives. By bringing these into
dialogue with a wide range of literary texts, it will encourage students to
consider how issues of unconscious motivation, sexuality and madness operate
in and around different forms of writing. It will serve as a starting point for
students to engage with existing psychoanalytic literary theory but will
emphasise the close reading of foundational texts alongside literary works with
the hope of generating new, mutually informed readings of both psychoanalysis
and literature.
In the first five seminars students will read Freud and be introduced to concepts
such as hysteria, repression, defence, dream work, infantile sexuality, narcissism,
neurosis and psychosis. In the second set of seminars students will read Klein,
Winnicott, and Bion, and consider how developments in psychoanalytic
knowledge have led to both new concepts and the re- conceptualisations of basic
issues. The course will pay special attention to the role of the mother, playing
and reality, the nature of psychotic anxiety, transference, unconscious language
and the Oedipus complex.
Each week we read a text by a psychoanalyst or psychoanalysts alongside a work
of imaginative literature and we ask how the former might illuminate the latter.
You will learn about a different psychoanalytic concept each week. Unusually,
you won’t be allowed to write about any of the literary works or films that we
study on the course. Instead students are required to write an original piece of
psychoanalytic criticism using the concepts and the understanding they acquire
over the semester that the course runs.
In this course it is essential that students contribute to seminars: that they share
their views with other students and that when they don’t understand something
they say so. If your idea of participation in a seminar is hiding behind a laptop
computer or writing down everything that everyone else says while saying
nothing yourself, then this is not a course for you. Under no circumstances
should you register for it. It can only work if people are open with each other.
The course of readings for this seminar can be demanding and students may be
asked at random to present on them. This too should be borne in mind before
applying for a place on this course.
Please note that there will be no opportunity to study or write about the ideas of
Carl Jung on this course.
Required books
You should own a copy of Richard Wollheim’s Freud in the Fontana Modern
Masters series or Anthony Storr’s OUP Past Masters/Short Introduction to Freud.
Storr’s book is easier to understand but Wollheim’s is more comprehensive.
Many of the secondary works we will discuss will be provided via the e-learning
platform. You might also consider owning copies of the literary works on the
course, outlined below.
Indicative lecture schedule
1. What is psychoanalysis? (Freud, Encyclopaedia entry on psychoanalysis)
2. The Oedipus Complex (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex)
3. Dynamic unconsciousness (Jane Austen, Emma)
4. Transference (Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night)
5. Psychosis (Freud, The Schreber case history)
6. Femininity (Hilary Mantel, Giving Up the Ghost)
7. Freud and Klein on melancholia (A selection of poems by John Clare)
8. Transitional objects and transitional space (Wordsworth, The Two Part
Prelude)
9. The container and the contained (Woolf, To the Lighthouse)
10. Perversion (Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher)
Supplementary Bibliography
Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, In Dora's case: Freud--hysteria-feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) Bruno Bettelheim, The
Uses of Enchantment (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976) Harold Bloom, The
Anxiety of Influence (New York: OUP, 1973)
Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1933) G. Deleuze and
F. Guettarri, Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972); translated
(London: Athlone, 1984) Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in
the Psychology of Artistic Imagination (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967)
Stephen Heath, Psychopathia Sexualis: Stevenson's Strange Case', Critical
Quarterly, 28 (1986), 93-108 Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary
Response (New York: OUP, 1968) Luce Irigaray, Spé culum de l'autre femme
(Paris, 1974), translated by Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)
Melanie Klein, 'The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the
Ego', in Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works (London: Virago, 1988) R.
Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (1876) Ernst Kris, Psycho-Analytic
Explorations in Art (London: Allen and Unwin, 1953) Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva
Reader, edited by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) Jacques Lacan, É crits: A
Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977); especially 'The
mirror stage as formative of the function of the I'; 'The function and field of
speech and language in psychoanalysis'; 'The agency of the letter in the
unconscious or reason since Freud'. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan
Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977)
J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. D.
Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press, 1973) gives concise but thorough
definitions of the central concepts Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds.,
(London: Macmillan, 1982)
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen,
1985) Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983) Hanna Segal,
Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (enlarged edition, London: Hogarth
Press, 1973) Tony Tanner, Adultery and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1979) Anthony Wilden, System and Structure, second edition
(London: Tavistock, 1980) Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell, The
Chamber of Maiden Thought: Literary origins of the psychoanalytic model of the
mind. (London: Routledge, 1991) D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) Elizabeth Wright, Pyschoanalytic Criticism:
Theory in Practice (London: Methuen, 1984) Slavoj Ž iž ek The Sublime Object of
Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).