Foundations and Problems of "Textoanalysis"

When we speak about literature, we think not only of thousands of books but also of two disparate literary groups: those few who write or wrote and the huge majority of those who read. Psychoanalysis can be interested in the tasks and/or the pleasures of both these populations. But a “textoanalyst” is only interested in the reading of the text, and should ignore the problems which arise from the creative activity. ¹ The process of reading includes two aspects. One can try to describe what happens to the “naive” readers, who don’t see or hear themselves reading. One might think, for instance, of the intense affective reactions of little children, of any age, when listening to fairy tales. One can also theorize about the reception of literary works, by translating into a psychoanalytical language what Wolfgang Iser wrote down in phenomenological terms. However, those are not aspects I am interested in. Like Freud’s interpretation of King Oedipus, my research examines the listening of a literary critic whose aim is to measure that listening while reading, and to communicate his deductions to the public. That small public includes those who are interested in literature, and in the unconscious.

The history of textoanalysis originated with the rejection of the first endeavors of Freud and his disciples in what could be described as psychobiography, the attempt to psychoanalyze artists by viewing their work as an equivalent of the discourse that is normally delivered day after day on the couch. Charles Mauron also rejected this approach. He denounced such an enterprise as being difficult to practice, because the indispensable associations would always be absent. He viewed this approach as inappropriate because the aim of literary criticism cannot be to draw a psychological portrait of a writer, even if Sainte-Beuve, who believed in the treacherous French metaphor “like the tree, like the fruit” (tel arbre tel fruit), thought otherwise.

I also reject psychocritique itself, as conceived and propagated by Charles Mauron, though I feel inestimably grateful for his work. Many of his interpretations have remained very stimulating. My resistance to his approach has several causes, the first being his way of using “superpositions,” however seductive and illuminating that may be. It leads to a practice that from a Freudian point of view does not seem to be admissible: superposing different texts, one ends up with a kind of “architext,” which one pretends to interpret afterwards. The image of the sun, for instance, united with those of fire and of redness, can evoke blood. Though it may be easy to look for unconscious correspondents for blood and to find them, we should not forget that the elementary rules of psychoanalytical listening require that the effects of meaning associated with such listening start with the words “sun,” “fire,” or “red” and connect to these actual words, not to the meaning of the text, especially if the latter is an abstract one. For this technique of superpositions constitutes a prior intervention, hence a kind of prejudice, and needs also to be translated as a symbol, if not as a Jungian archetype, in any case without the help of free associations.

There are two other reasons for the uneasiness I felt with psychocriticism. First of all, to take into account a writer’s total oeuvre entails the risk of being caught in the trap of psychobiography, since one always tends to identify the writer with the common denominator of his entire work. If I subject all the tragedies of Racine to an attentive examination, how could I not assign its results to the person of Jean Racine, how could I not confer to him the unconscious configurations I detected? To make matters worse, the idea of examining an author’s complete output corresponds in Mauron’s view to another requirement, the reference to the author’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, to what we know about the life of the author, in order to confirm Mauron’s hypothetical interpretations. This doesn’t fit in very well with the practice of psychoanalysis, which is not the...