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A formalist approach to literature, one that bears witness to the movements of distinct levels of form as they compel one another to a kind of infra-literary psychoanalysis, helps move us beyond the critical dichotomies — text vs. context, history vs. form, realism vs. the avant-garde — that have sometimes hampered recognition of the topologically complex and uneven fashion in which literature intervenes in the world. This article argues that it is the particular modes of constriction, isolation and textual withdrawal that literature induces which paradoxically reveal literature’s psychoanalytic approach to its outsides. The article begins by close-reading a few short passages from Lacan, passages which when reframed offer the initial ingredients of a psychoanalytically informed materialist literary-critical formalism. It then turns to Paul de Man’s late reflections on literary form and materiality, before concluding with a reading of the poetry of Geoffrey G. O’Brien.