A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature

Reading the Reader

Merav Roth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429750007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

What are the unconscious processes involved in reading literature? How does literature influence our psychological development and existential challenges? A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature offers a unique glimpse into the unconscious psychic processes and development involved in reading. The author listens to the 'free associations' of various literary characters, in numerous scenarios where the characters are themselves reading literature, thus revealing the mysterious ways in which reading literature helps us and contributes to our development.

The book offers an introduction both to classic literature (Poe, Proust, Sartre, Semprún, Pessoa, Agnon and more) and to the major psychoanalytic concepts that can be used in reading it – all described and widely explained before being used as tools for interpreting the literary illustrations. The book thus offers a rich lexical psychoanalytic source, alongside its main aim in analysing the reader's psychological mechanisms and development. Psychoanalytic interpretation of those literary readers opens three main avenues to the reader's experience:

• the transference relations toward the literary characters;
• the literary work as means to transcend beyond the reader's self-identity and existential boundaries; and
• mobilization of internal dialectic tensions towards new integration and psychic equilibrium.

An Epilogue concludes by emphasising the transformational power embedded in reading literature.

The fascinating dialogue between literature and psychoanalysis illuminates hitherto concealed aspects of each discipline and contributes to new insights in both fields. A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature will be of great interest not only to psychoanalytic-psychotherapists and literature scholars, but also to a wider readership beyond these areas of study.

Part I

Transference relations of the literary reader

Introduction

Part I explores the nature of the transference relations of the reader towards characters in a literary text, including the narrator and author. Before discussing the texts themselves I wish to clarify the main psychoanalytic concepts discussed in this section and their relevance to the transference relations triggered by the reading experience.

Object relations: a psychoanalytic perspective

The form of relations portrayed in a literary text parallels actual relations in our lives in both the external world as well as in our internal world. In an individual’s internal world there are numerous unconscious representations of the ‘self’ and of ‘objects’ (the meaningful others internalized in his mind). From a psychoanalytic point of view we continuously conduct – partly in awareness but mostly unconsciously – relations in the internal world between representations of self (the ‘romantic self’, the ‘persecuted self’, etc.) and representations of objects (the ‘sadistic father’ the ‘seductive mother’ and so on). These relations are termed ‘object relations’. According to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein ‘There is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process that does not involve objects, external or internal; in other words, object relations are at the centre of emotional life’ (Klein, M., 1952, p. 53). These relations shape our mental health, influence our encounters with others and the way we conduct ourselves in the world.

Internal objects

‘Internal objects’ are not solely the outcome of an internalization of the actual figures in our lives. They are derived from the sum total of all phantasized and real experiences, which combine to form an array of inner objects. In her article ‘What Are Internal Objects?’ the psychoanalyst Catalina Bronstein points out that ‘internal objects underlie a multiplicity of phenomena and affective states which are conditioned by them. Consciously, they appear to us through images, memories, dreams, of an infinite variety’ (Bronstein, C., 2009, p. 117). Thus, for example, we don’t have just one memory of the mother within us but rather a reservoir of ‘mother objects’. For instance, the ‘depressed internal mother’ is a representation expressing a collection of phantasized and real experiences with the mother figure in her moments of depression. On the other hand, moments of contentment with the mother create the internal ‘good mother’, etc.

In The Book of Disquiet ([1982] 2017) the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa describes this poetically, in a way that can be applied to both the internal world as well as to the characters in the literary text. Analogously to the multiplicity of internal objects there are within us also ‘multiple selves’. These develop from the diverse modes of existence of our ‘self’ in the course of a lifetime, which have created multiple representations of our selves. Fernando Pessoa offers an insightful description of these representations:

Each of us is more than one person, many people, a proliferation of our one self … Today, as I note down these few impressions in a legitimate break brought about by a shortage of work, I am the person carefully transcribing them, the person who is pleased not to have to work just now, the person who looks at the sky even though he can’t actually see it from here, the person who is thinking all this, and the person feeling physically at ease and noticing that his hands are still slightly cold. And, like a diverse but compact multitude, this whole world of mine, composed as it is of different people, projects but a single shadow, that of this calm figure writing on Borges’s high desk, where I have come to find the blotter he borrowed from me (Pessoa, F., [1982] 2017, p. 363).

Elsewhere, Pessoa briefly notes that ‘I only know myself as the symphony’. He sums up the existence of the internal objects and multiple selves within him thus:

Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once I’ve perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, I’m forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere to flee to, unless I were to flee myself (ibid., p. 71).

Transference relations

In psychoanalysis transference is a term indicative of:

A process of actualisation of unconscious wishes. Transference uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with these objects. Its context par excellence is the analytic situation. In the transference, infantile prototypes re-emerge and are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy (Laplanche, J., and Pontalis J.B., 1973, loc. 12083).

The patient ‘transfers’ his internalized relations with the significant others in his life (from early childhood and onward) to the analyst. This revival in the transference relations enables the patient to become reacquainted with and work through these early relations and their impact on shaping his psyche and ways of coping with his past and present.

A person enters every relationship in his life with a store of memories. This reservoir is loaded with drives, anxieties, wishes and defences that he directs at people with whom he makes contact, not only because he fears recalling painful aspects of his past but also out of a wish for reparation. The deeper the relationship so the individual will direct the more significant and complex aspects of his internalized relations towards the person with whom he is in a relationship. These aspects include: anxieties that stem from the past (abandonment, rejection, aggression, loss of love etc.); unrequited yearnings (the fulfilment of wishes coming to terms with deprivations, recalling the good and repairing the bad); reconstructed conflicts looking for resolutions in the newly formed relationship (such as the conflict between the wish for merger and the fear of being swallowed up); or, for example, between the desire for supremacy and the sense of guilt for the defeat of the object; and typical defences (such as schizoid or manic defences). In the course of the psychoanalytic process the transference relates most profoundly to the figure of the analyst.

It is important to note transference’s live and dynamic characteristics. Betty Joseph (1985) highlights the idea that transference is not a static replica of one of the figures from the patient’s internal world and his past projected on to the analyst. Rather, it is a live happening subjecting the analyst to various pressures stemming from drives, feelings, anxieties and defences awakened in the here-and-now relations of the patient towards the analyst as a transference figure. This is what turns transference relations into a catalyst for movement and change. In what follows we will discover that in literature there are powerful transference relations towards the work’s fictional characters. The vivid characteristics of transference relations in analysis are also highly relevant to the nature of the reader’s transference towards the literary characters and to his ability to use them for psychic development (Joseph, B., 1985, pp. 447–454).

Transference relations towards literary characters

In his essay On Reading (1905), Marcel Proust describes the reader’s powerful psychic responses to the fictional characters and takes the argument to an extreme in claiming that this response is sometimes even more intense than anything we allow ourselves to feel towards the real people in our lives:

These beings to whom one had given more of one’s attention and affection than to those in real life, not always daring to admit to what extent one loved them (and even when our parents found us busy reading and seemed to be smiling at our emotion, closing the book with a studied indifference or pretence of boredom); one would never again see … these people for whom one had yearned and sobbed, would never again hear of them (Proust, M., 1905, p. 21).

In the same vein, Fernando Pessoa writes: ‘I’ve often noticed that certain characters in novels take on for us an importance that our acquaintances and friends, who talk and listen to us in the real and visible world, could never have’ (Pessoa, F., [1982] 2017, p. 313).

There are significant areas of similarity between the framework of the psychoanalytic and the reading structures that contribute to the awakening of transference relations in both. Thus, for example, the nature of the setting for these two kinds of encounter reinforces the capacity of both to set internal processes in motion. Freud observed that in the therapeutic space transference relations are also facilitated by a certain vagueness on the part of the analyst, enabling the patient to project on to him in accordance with his internal and historical relations (Freud, S., 1915). The literary textual space is similarly characterized by ambiguity, (Kris, E., 1993), indeterminacy (Iser, W., 1972) and poetic expressiveness (Iser, W., 1978). All the above encourage active and projective communication with the literary text and its characters on the part of the reader (Zoran, R., 2009). Moreover, ‘the fact that the literary text is an undefined world in a defined format (aesthetic structure) opens up the possibility of relating to it as one would to “another person”’ (ibid., p. 93). The textual space is rich in possibilities but definitionally ambiguous, thus inviting the reader to lend meaning to the disposition of the characters involved and the nature of the relationships described in the story in accordance with his evolved transference relations. In other words, he identifies with the characters and also projects his internal objects and relations on to the fictional characters described in the text.

Jean Paul Sartre describes such identification and a strong transference reaction to the literary character thus: ‘Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting which I lend him … His hatred of the police magistrate who questions him is my hatred’ (Sartre, J.P., [1948] 1988, p. 45). The characters are experienced as real fellow beings to whom we ‘lend’ our feelings. In the playwright Pirandello’s ironic tongue:

A character may always ask a man who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own, marked with his especial characteristics; for which reason he is always ‘somebody’. But a man – I’m not speaking of you now – may very well be ‘nobody’ (Pirandello, L., 1921, p. 60).

The literary characters both mirror the reader’s experiences of his own self as well as echoing the significant others in his life – both the internal and external objects – and so awaken in the reader communication with his internal objects. The more intense the involvement the bolder the reader’s transference relations become, and what Shoshana Felman (2003) has termed the ‘reading effect’ will also be reinforced.

The reader’s transference relations towards the text’s characters are bidirectional. He sometimes experiences the characters as ‘taking care’ of his existential issues, at other times he experiences himself as ‘taking on’ their existential challenges. As the psychoanalyst Emmanuel Berman has noted:

The experience of the reader, viewer or listener, whether a layman or a professional critic, is conceived in this perspective as combining an attempt to uncover and spell out the work’s meanings, with unavoidably personal identifications and emotional reactions – positive, negative and ambivalent. It therefore necessarily combines transference (to the work of art as a source of insight and growth), countertransference (the fantasy of artist and figures as patients – maybe sick patients – to be analysed) and interpretation (the striving to understand more deeply) (Berman, E., 2003, p. 122).

The reader of literature alternately takes on the perspectives of the analyst and of the patient (Berman, E., 1993). On the one hand, he turns to the characters, the narrator and the writer just as a patient turns to the analyst, a figure capable of helping him cope with his world and lending meaning to his life. In doing so the reader places himself in a position similar to the transference position of the patient. On the other hand, he takes on the role of the text’s interpreter who endows it with meaning. In his sense he listens to the character’s text as an analyst would listen to a patient’s text and attempts to lend it new meaning. The text ‘needs’ the reader to breathe life into it and lend it meaning (Sartre, J.P., [1948] 1988). Relational psychoanalysis emphasizes the fact that there is no ‘pure’ interpretation of the patient’s free associations because every such interpretation also includes the analyst’s inner world as a crucial part of forming the interpretation. In the same way, the reader of literature is involved in the interpretation that he lends to the text and its heroes. Every bestowal of meaning in the course of reading – be it conscious or unconscious – is an act that opens up the reader’s horizon of possibilities.

Novelists, we are told by Milan Kundera, ‘grasp one possibility of existence (a possibility for man and for his world) and thereby make us see what we are, what we are capable of’ (Kundera, M., [1986] 1988, p. 44) The more dynamic the transference relations towards the characters is, the more interested and involved we become in their lives; our curiosity as to how the story will unfold now heightened by our own needs, desires and fears. At times the sense of anticipation is so intense that we can’t put the book down or, alternatively, feel compelled to stop reading at least for a while. As Sartre noted:

In reading, one foresees; one waits. He foresees the end of the sentence, the following sentence, the next page … The reading is composed of a host of hypotheses, of dreams followed by awakenings, of hopes and deceptions. Readers are always ahead of the sentence they are reading in a merely probable future which partly collapses and partly comes together in proportion as they progress, which withdraws from one page to the next and forms the moving horizon of the literary object (Sartre, J.P., [1948] 1988, p. 41).

From a psychoanalytic perspective every expectatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Permissions Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: reading the reader
• Part I: Transference relations of the literary reader
• Part II: Reading literature as a means of transcendence
• Part III: From psychic equilibrium to psychic change: the dialectic forces of literature
• Index