“We think back through our mothers if we are women” Virginia Woolf famously declared in A Room of One’s Own, and she relished rescuing from obscurity women of earlier generations who had been lost to history, lost to memory. This chapter addresses the more complex relationship of Virginia Woolf with her own mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Drawing on Woolf’s diaries and letters, her unfinished memoir, her great autobiographical novel To the Lighthouse – and on Julia Duckworth Stephen’s own extant writings – the author explores Virginia Woolf’s lifelong, evolving relationship with what she called the “invisible presence” of her mother, who had died when she was a girl of thirteen.

Janet Malcolm famously described psychoanalysis as “the impossible profession.” Writing about “The Varieties of Psychoanalytic Experience” is an equally impossible task. Although the discipline of psychoanalysis was founded by Freud, it has altered dramatically since. I have chosen to focus on the following key issues and concepts: transference, countertransference, and intersubjectivity; the shift from oedipal to preoedipal concerns; the transformations wrought by feminism, social and political studies, and continental theory. These converge on questions of psychoanalysis in relation to history and culture, especially in regard to theories of trauma and mourning. In this sense, psychoanalysis (like literature and literary studies) demonstrates its flexibility, variability, and relevance to contemporary life. The very instability of Freud’s narrative method, as demonstrated in his Dora case history, insures its significance and continuity over time.

The Partition of the South Asian subcontinent in 1947 into modern nation states of India, Pakistan is the historic event that not only inaugurated nationalities where political identities were based on religious differences, but also erased the collective identities different religious communities shared in their struggle against British colonialism over two centuries. In the celebration of India’s independence, the unprecedented violence of Partition is written out of the narrative of the nation as an aberration, a cataclysmic moment of madness. This chapter engages with this moment of madness captured in the Urdu short stories of Sa’adat Hasan Manto and highlights the psychoanalytic role of literature in remembering the violence that haunts India in the its pervasive communal strife. Focusing on Manto’s short stories, this chapter explains how literature allows working through the repressed violence of Partition fostering possibilities of mourning collective communal losses.

This chapter draws on the thinking of Freud, Bion, Ricoeur, Winnicott, as well as on the literary-psychoanalytic writings of Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas, to consider the value of psychoanalytic thinking and procedures in understanding the experience of reading literature in groups. The chapter argues that shared literary reading – specifically the live read-aloud model pioneered and practised by UK charity The Reader – creates conditions analogous to those of the psychoanalytic situation, particularly in providing a "holding" environment for, and stimulating the release of, unconscious material in ways that cannot be predicted in advance. In addition, the neutrality of the literary text in respect of the reader’s inner life makes available a wide range of possible interpretations of the unconscious material disclosed (in place of the single interpretative authoritative of the therapist) while also offering a personal-human language for interpretation and expression (in place of the language of therapeutic orthodoxy).

Building on Gustavo Pellón’s classification of Spanish-American novels as documentary novels (novela testimonio), historical novels, detective novels, and marginalized novels, this chapter places them into two groups of psychoanalytic categories: voyeurism/exhibitionism and sadism/masochism, that influence the identity of the subject. The schematic voyeurism-exhibitionism/sadism-masochism in the novels explored in this chapter places focus on concepts that imply an Ego placing its gaze on the world; it acknowledges that we are in constant repetition, learning how to deal with the levels of violence and pain, which, in essence, is translated into how to deal with the Eros and Death drives. Examining Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco as a case study, the chapter explores the applicability of psychoanalysis as it applies to these texts and considers some of the other categories of novels that emerge from this larger, complex cultural context of Latin American literature.

This chapter shows how Shakespeare’s influence on Freud influenced Freud’s reading of Shakespeare. Using the Oedipus complex as the means which Freud famously negotiated questions of literary drama, the chapter revisits his well-known preoccupation with Hamlet by focusing specifically on the issue of recognition. Recognition (or anagnorisis, as Aristotle termed it) is a structural element within drama – and tragedy above all – because it involves relations between things both like and unlike. Freud did not simply recognize his own oedipal dramas enacted within Shakespeare’s play. He also responded to the multiple recognitions staged within Hamlet itself, and to the relations of likeness and unlikeness that are played out there on many different levels. The chapter thus sheds new light on the mutual and creative relationship between literature and psychoanalysis by showing that – as a form of recognition – it, too, is a relationship characterized by an ongoing play between sameness and difference.

A close reading of Bruce Chatwin's novel, Utz, illuminates the tangled relationships between man and his material things in his physical environment, thereby illustrating the rich reciprocity of psychoanalytic approaches to literature. The eponymous protagonist of Utz is obsessed with his valuable collection of Meissen figurines, shutting himself off from the external world and retreating to a world populated by material things – objects he can buy, sell, and manipulate. Utz is interpreted as a fictional proxy for its author, a former director at Sotheby’s, who had an intense relationship to the antiquities and artifacts that he collected, yet would periodically leave his home, loved ones, and collections to travel abroad. Chatwin’s Utz affords a model for the conflicts inherent in man’s relationships to things, which variously operate as symbols and trophies; as dehumanized substitutes for human relationships; as markers of domination and control; and as agents of self-creation. (148)

Psychoanalysis is one of the central interpretative frameworks of modern Western cultures, but there is a widely-held view that it is has little, if anything, to say about class and class difference. This chapter challenges that view by creating a dialogue between the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and the contemporary British film-maker Andrea Arnold. It is central to my argument that, to explore the conjuncture between psychoanalysis and class, we need a provocative encounter between psychoanalysis and creative and critical works engaged by the living facts of material and symbolic disadvantage. Arnold’s short film Wasp and Winnicott’s writings on creativity and mothering are used to open up the space for thinking between psychoanalysis, class and contemporary culture.