Richard, François

What Literature Can Teach the Psychoanalyst - 2009.


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The author considers the relation between psychoanalysis and literature in the light of Green’s hypothesis (that effectively dates from his initial work on the question at the end of the sixties up to his recent book on Joseph Conrad) concerning the role of the reader in so far as the analysand of the text. This leads him to consider the complexity of the psychoanalyst’s ambivalent identifications with the writer and the paradoxical notion of « psychoanalysis applied to literature ». The text’s unconscious is, it seems, structured by a negative hallucinatory capacity. Faulkner’s text and a number of his own comments exemplify the pertinence of the notion of the unconscious of text and the reader in so far as they are effectively the analysand of the text. There follows a debate with the poet and writer Édouard Glissant on the work of William Faulner. É. Glissant’s manner of using Freud’s theory whilst nevertheless detaching himself from the latter, reveals the complexity of the processes of subjectivisation at work in neurosis and borderline states and poses a modern epistemology of mixity and the multiple.