Psychoanalytic Models and Literary Theory

JOSEPH C. SITTERSON, JR Psychoanalytic Models and Literary Theory The lack of current consensus among literary critics on the nature of literature is reflected in our tendency to adopt theories from other disciplines as interpretive models. One advantage of such models is their practicality: we do not have to worry about their truth, only their usefulness. Unfortunately such usefulness is itself difficult to define, and too often we tacitly equate it with whatever seems 'new' and 'exciting.' Such adjectives, however applicable in particular cases, are neither clear nor sufficient criteria of interpretive usefulness. Worse, our quest for the new and exciting has led both to the wholly uncritical adoption of theories from other disciplines as models and to the virtual abandonment of other theories because they were once the sources of models now either discredited or no longer providing new and eXciting interpretations. I believe this quest detennines our use of psychoanalytic theory today. We adopt Jacques Lacan, for example, without considering his relationship to the mainstream of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, presumably because we hold that thought responsible for models now discarded as reductive - art as neurotic symptom, for example. This adoption of Lacan is in its uncritical spirit no different from the earlier adoption of the art-neurosis model, and when we tire of Lacan, we shall once again regard the use of 'psychoanalysis' in literary criticism as non-'literary.' Indeed both attitudes, uncritical total rejection and uncritical selective adoption, coexist along with others in literary study today. The one rejects all psychoanalytic theory on the supposed grounds that, whatever its truth, the models it provides for literary study are inevitably reductive. The other agrees with this judgment except for its own speCial theory, supposedly immune to such a charge. A third believes in classical psychoanalytic theory and finds nothing reductive in its application to art - equating art with phantasy, for example. A fourth believes, uneasily or joyously, in pluralistic tolerance: any interpretive model is potentially as useful as any other. These attitudes may nurture the art of interpretation , but none is healthy for literary theory because none is based upon a I sufficiently careful examination of psychoanalytic thought itself. This thought has undertaken a re-examination of its own bases in the past decade or so, one which has Significant implications for its relevance to literary theory. Accordingly this essay is in part a presentation of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 51, NUMBER 1, FALL 1981 0042-02471 8111000- 0078-0092$01 .5010 CI UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY THEORY 79 work of important psychoanalytic theorists whose work remains mostly unknown outside psychoanalysis itself. This presentation necessitates some consideration of classical Freudian theory as well. Such a consideration will show that psychoanalytic models for literary study generally have been reductive, but only because the particular psychoanalytic theories used for such models are themselves founded on misconceived physiological models, reductive even within psychoanalysis, not because psychoanalytic theory is inevitably reductive. It should then be possible, I believe, to see contemporary psychoanalytic and formalist literary theory, where their concerns meet, as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. By no means am I arguing against the use of models. I agree with Max Black that 'models are sometimes not epiphenomena of research' and that such models are like the sort of metaphOrical thought which can be 'a distinctive mode of achieving insight, not to be construed as an ornamental substitute for plain thought: The problem lies not in the nature of models but in their uncritical use and transformation into explanatory theories. For psychoanalytic theory specifically, or some part of it, to qualify as a model for literary theory it should be, as Black puts it for all models, 'relatively unproblematic, more familiar, or betterorganized ' than literary theory.' This is not the case today. The concepts of psychoanalytic theory which have appeared to be least problematicand bestorganized are now regarded by important psychoanalytic theorists as inessential or even irrelevant to psychoanalysis. These concepts comprise Freudian 'metapsychology: and are grouped around three conceptual models of the mind: the economic, the dynamic, and the structural.2 Central examples of such concepts include, respectively: psychic energy, drive, and ego and id. Among...