Reading the Mind, Reading the Text: Reflective Functioning, Trauma Literature, and the Task of the Psychoanalytic Critic

This essay considers whether the developmental concept of “reflective functioning”—which emerged from attachment research—is relevant for the study of literature and especially for examining narratives concerned with trauma. Since the ability to construct narrative and show an awareness of one’s own and others’ intrapsychic worlds is key to reflective functioning, can we legitimately think of fictional characters who reflect on their own inner states and intentions, as well as on those of other characters, as having reflective capacity? What about characters who show similar reflective capacity in literary works dealing with trauma in which narrative is invariably impeded in some way? The author argues that reflective functioning in such texts can only be illusory, but that the more convincing the illusion the more compelling the text for average readers who try to create narratives to explain inaccessible motivations for characters’ actions. Ultimately, it is the psychoanalytically oriented literary critic who has the trained capacity for reflective functioning and can guide ordinary readers to identify how authors misdirect them and how texts block understanding. The strained relations between critics and readers today may thus potentially be rehabilitated as critics help readers navigate complex narratives concerned with core human issues of love, loss, attachment, and separation.