Toward a Methodology for Applying Psychoanalysis to Literature

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodology which seeks to use psychoanalysis to fathom the unique quality of the literary text without turning the text into a symptom or its author into a patient. Its hypothesis: the literary text evokes an unconscious fantasy in its readers; critics who respond to the text empathically but without conscious understanding re-enact aspects of its organizing fantasy in the way they write their criticism. To test this hypothesis, the criticism of Jacques le Fataliste et son Matître by Diderot is examined. The phenomenon of parallelism is suggested as a clinical analogy for the re-enactment which takes place.