The Literary Text as Talking Cure: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Restlessness

This essay relies on the psychoanalytic literary theories of Peter Brooks and Julia Kristeva to examine the transferential relationship between the analysand-narrator and the analyst-narratee in the novel Restlessness. Van Herk uses typical conventions of the psychoanalytic talking cure to unsettle the common reader's desire for linearity and final meaning.