Is Psychoanalysis a Poetics of the Body?

This essay locates writing and literary experience on a spectrum of human activities that engage not only language and text, but also unconscious fantasies of the body. It explores possible contexts in psychoanalytic and literary theory for understanding a reader's experience of textuality in relation to experiences and fantasies of the infantile body. Using Freud's own dream analyses and his work with hysteria, in relation to the theory of infantile sexuality, the essay examines the fluid interchanges between subject and object, text and body that form part of both analytic and literary experience. To illustrate more fully the intersection between psychoanalytic and literary experience, the essay concludes with some thoughts as to the place of the body in the diaries of Alice James and in the late fiction of her novelist brother, Henry James.