Post-Jungian Criticism: Theory and Practice

Theorizing Writerly Creativity: Jung with Lacan?

This chapter compares the place of literature—the creative use of the written word—in Jungian and Lacanian theory. I shall analyze and argue against a tendency in recent Jungian scholarship to overemphasize the similarities between the two thinkers. Whereas Jung is primarily concerned , in the literary work as in the consulting room, with images— symbols and archetypes—the focus of Lacan’s psychoanalytic interest is on language. I shall argue that this basic and familiar difference has farreaching implications for the relevance of the two thinkers to the literary scholar, although my intention in what follows is primarily to offer a theoretical survey of the question, rather than a recipe for future work in the field. A SHARED AMBIVALENCE But perhaps the pairing of Jung with Lacan, even for the purposes of discussion , is merely arbitrary. In this section I shall endeavor to show that this is not the case by pointing to a shared ambivalence about the value and significance of the literary work. In his paper entitled “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” Jung takes a rather cautious view of the ground of this relation: “the practice of art is a psychological activity and, as such, can be approached from a psychological angle” 55 Theorizing Writerly Creativity Jung with Lacan? ������ OLIVER DAVIS (CW 15: 65). Literature is a “psychological activity,” but this does not distinguish it in principle from any other activity: on this rather conservative estimate, works of literature are no more or less interesting to the analytical psychologist than the products of any other field of human endeavor. Thus it would seem that art, literature included, has no special privileges for Jung the analytical psychologist: its value and interest are not intrinsically greater than those of any other human artifact or phenomenon. The analytical psychologist may very well place a work of literature and the rise of fascism on the same plane, viewing both as “compensatory” reactions to social imbalance. This is not, however, the end of the matter, for Jung also displays a very different writing persona: that of the cultural critic. In this mode, by contrast, he is keen to pay due deference to art; he recognizes and even inflates its prestige, railing against the alleged Freudian “reduction” of great art “to personal factors” (see “Psychology and Literature” and “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,” CW 15) and waxing lyrical about the “golden gleam of artistic creation” (CW 15: 69). There is a tension, or split, between the extreme caution of the analytical psychologist and the sheer exuberance of the cultural critic: one never goes quite far enough while the other usually goes much too far. The former is radically indifferent to the claims of art to value, while the latter incessantly talks these up in a way that may seem both precious and dated to an unsympathetic reader. Lacan’s attitude to literature is similarly ambivalent. Lacan’s own writing displays a concentration of wide-ranging allusions, demonstrating a mastery of both the elliptical and the utterly direct; in short, Lacan’s writing evinces a concern for style and language that has prompted many to describe it as “literary” and recommend that it be treated accordingly.1 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most vocal advocates of a literary Lacan have tended to be those already engaged in the study of literature; practicing Lacanian analysts have quite rightly resisted the limitation of Lacan’s clinical potential that such moves have often implied. Yet Lacan himself is perhaps to blame here: he seems at times to suggest provocatively that psychoanalysis has learned all it knows from literature. Thus he famously suggested that Freud’s key notions from The Interpretation of Dreams—condensation and displacement— may be understood as metaphor and metonymy; he described the unconscious as “the censored chapter” (Ecrits 50), and in the “Seminar on the Purloined Letter,” he seemed to suggest that Poe’s story was an allegorical anticipation, or early formalization, of the psychoanalytic encounter. Yet closer attention to this latter paper suggests that many of those gestures of deference, both explicit and allusive, to the prescience 56 Oliver Davis and penetrative insights of literary works that crowd Lacan’s pages, do in fact conceal a no less forceful reassertion of the ultimate primacy of psychoanalytic interpretation. As Malcolm Bowie has observed: The epistemic claims of imaginative literature are thus asserted, denied, forcibly re-asserted and equally...