In “Dislocating the Reader,” I use psychoanalytic theory to think about how the language of Toni Morrison’s Beloved works on readers. Placing the text of Beloved into dialogue with Jean Laplanche’s theory of the belated time of trauma enables me to think through the ethical and emotional effects of Beloved’s delayed narrative structure on readers. Visual images from the past lives of the characters intrude into the narrative, without explanation; in confusing the reader, these intrusions convey the distortions of time, thought, and memory that disturb these survivors of slavery’s traumas. The chapter centers on the main character, Sethe. I read the mothering practices of Sethe and of her own slave mother through the lens of historical research on actual slave mothers, who were torn between the demands of the master for their labor and the needs of their babies for their time. Throughout, the chapter attends to the difficulties of writing Beloved, as Morrison herself explained them in interviews: to capture the psychic damages inflicted by slavery on her ex-slave characters Morrison had to invent a new narrative language.

In Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Elizabeth Bennet and Elizabeth Elliot, the preferred daughters of their fathers, are prey to blind spots in their judgments. Austen differentiates Elizabeth Elliot’s static character, certain of her “rights” to preference and pride of place in her father’s life, from Elizabeth Bennet’s character despite her prejudice as the favorite child of her father, in relishing quick judgments of others. Elizabeth realizes in time that she has been misled by her vanity in judging both Darcy and Wickham: “she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.” Elizabeth Elliot, favorite of her father and his consort, her mother having died when she was 16, suffers a harsher fate, in her oedipal victory. She remains an adolescent with self-centered misperceptions. Trapped in her narcissistic defenses, she misjudges the flattering Mr. Elliot and Mrs. Clay, suffers humiliation at their deceptions, but remains unchanged and alone with her father.

This chapter considers psychoanalysis and the visual form of comics, a necessary turn for psychoanalysis as articulated by psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu. Comics and graphic narratives today are more popular than ever and are used to tell stories once considered unpresentable in other media forms. These stories of traumatic experience and historical and political traumas that cannot be put into verbal language have been captured in comics form throughout the twentieth-century as in Art Spiegelman’s Maus or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. As a form used to tell stories of lived experience for so many, comics is ideally suited to the application of literary study through psychoanalysis. The chapter will explore the vexed history, once again, of a psychoanalytic establishment that once endorsed the banning of comics, to the great detriment of the medium, its emerging genres, and the lives and careers of its creators. Now in our own day this form which was so denigrated is gracing the covers of elite journals and has become the central medium of recent autobiographical comics and narratives that take up the subjects of mental health and trauma. This chapter will describe how the turn to visual media as a force for capturing and reconfiguring contemporary culture may be understood from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Since the 1980s, the theories of subjectivity that have most influenced literary studies have shared an antihumanist perspective, one that posits that both human selfhood and the experience of authentic contact with another are merely illusions born of a modern Western ideology. Along with other subfields, the domain of literature and psychoanalysis has been affected by this bias toward antihumanist theories of subjectivity. But it is not because these represent the most sophisticated, best validated theories available to us. As I here argue, practicing psychoanalysts have taken a very different conceptual path, grounded in their own clinical findings and in recent experimental work in psychiatry. In fact the most influential current psychoanalytic theories support the idea that some form of self-integration is valuable. Ironically, then, scholars working in literature and psychoanalysis adhere to our profession’s default antihumanism at the expense of hiding out from the most important conversations in psychoanalysis today. What keeps this system in place is a widespread form of intellectual intimidation, which in fact depends conceptual trickery. In explaining the trickery, I hope to help to clear the way for a more capacious theoretical conversation within this subfield.

This chapter explains the relevance of literature to understand psychoanalysis, and the importance of thinking psychoanalytically when reading literature. Paying attention to Freud's interest in Oedipus, Hamlet, and the theatre, and his fascination with the uncanny, which shows itself particularly in literature, I distinguish between Freud's sense of the unconscious as what psychoanalysis addresses itself to, and Lacan on the importance of language, as that which the individual subject enters into and which structures existence as the "symbolic order." The debates this produces with Derrida, critiquing Lacan for phallogocentrism, and also with varieties of feminist analysis, and with the place of sexual difference within psychoanalytic theory, are outlined as topics for further study. Suggestions too are made of literary texts that offer themselves for discussion in the light of psychoanalysis, Freudian, Kleinian, Lacanian, and post-Lacanian.

The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis historicizes the link between literature and psychoanalysis, addressing current trends in the field, while predicting the impact the volume can have on its future directions and discoveries. Born within the cultural matrix of nineteenth-century Vienna, the theory of psychoanalysis found its way into the intellectual mainstream in the first part of the twentieth-century. In the second half of the twentieth-century, it went on to take hold in the American and European academy, first in medicine and then in the humanities. Now in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the academic influence of psychoanalysis has waned, due to sweeping cultural and critical forces. This falling off is important to understand as the original bond between literature and psychoanalysis is revived to offer new directions for our century. The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis will place literature at the generative core of this ambition, for it remains a repository of knowledge derived from creativity that makes us human. The consilience between literature and psychoanalysis predicated Freud’s discoveries of the unconscious; that same family bond can foster revelatory and revolutionary truths for the next generation.

Animal Figures examines the ways literature and psychoanalysis interact in their deployments of “animals,” while also suggesting how they might address the other-than-human. What might be required of both to think animal subjectivity non-anthropocentrically? In a close reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s Name of a Dog, I demonstrate how the text reanimates animate being (specifically a dog) in linguistic figuration through the literary or the rhetorical and according to analytics resembling psychoanalysis more than philosophy. While thematically Levinas’s chapter addresses the ethical and religious as they pertain to the figure of the dog, the chapter, in its linguistic and rhetorical performance, enacts a relation between language and animal being – elsewhere neologized as animot or animetaphor – more akin to psychoanalysis than to philosophy.

This chapter adopts, describes, and critiques three complementary perspectives on children’s literature: (1) psychoanalytic studies of and interpretations of children’s books; (2) effects of psychoanalysis on the work of children’s book authors and artists; (3) ways in which psychoanalysis might learn from the wisdom of children’s literature. Among the authors discussed are Bruno Bettelheim, Maurice Sendak, Beatrix Potter, and Elena Ferrante.

This chapter considers the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to queer theory and literature, using James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a case study. The chapter traces the ways in which queerness – particularly queer love – is haunted by melancholia by highlighting the manner in which melancholia is inextricable from the passionate relationship between David and Giovanni, the lovers at the novel’s core. Yet Baldwin arguably also universalizes melancholia by demonstrating that all of the novel’s characters, including David’s girlfriend Hella, are deeply melancholic. Melancholia, then, is not merely a queer predicament but rather – as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also claimed – a part of the human condition. The chapter consequently draws a distinction between constitutive (existential) and context-specific (socially imposed) forms of melancholia, illustrating that queer melancholia tends to fall into the latter genre of melancholia due to the discrimination, persecution, and shame that often characterize queer lives and loves.

An examination of the precarity and poverty of dispossessed lives in India, see through narrative non-fiction by Katherine Boo and Sonia Faleiro and with reference to Hollywood and Bollywood cinema.

The chapter starts with Fanon’s criticism of the so-called dependency complex of the colonized and ends with him playing the Arab Doctor in Blida--Joinville, devising forms of social therapy and ergotherapy. In between, I read fiction by Aminatta Forna which examines forms of resilience in the dispossessed not graspable by ubiquitous psychiatric paradigms.

This chapter examines two novels by Teju Cole and one by Rawi Hage to examine the intersection of race, class, and migrancy in the context of the psychoanalytic unconscious. The Cole novels have analysts as their city-walker protagonists, while the Hage novel gives us a character who is being analyzed (when he is not scuttling around the city like a cockroach). The chapter ends with the work of Abbasi, a migrant analyst.