Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture (review)

BOOK NOTES HENRY SUSSMAN. Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture. Albany: SU of New York P, 1993. xiii + 233 pp. Psychoanalytic approaches to Uterature always threaten to confuse textual subjects with Uving ones, thereby dissolving into poor imitations of the relationship between the analyst and analysand. Thus, the critic assumes the role ofpurveyor of analytic truth-claims who shines her or his interpretative light upon the pitiable emotional disturbances of fictional characters. In his new book, Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture, Henry Sussman offers a corrective to the pitfaUs of approaching Uterature through depth psychology. In what ways, he asks, are the psychological states/disorders ofhuman subjects at any given period ofhistory consanguineous with Uterary characters? A cross between archetype and "person," Sussman's notion of Uterary character transcends the hitherto dichotomous positions: either the Uterary character is identical to a Uving subject or it is no more than the product ofnarrative devices. Sussman argues that there are indeed formal and substantive similarities between Uterary characters and various neuroses and personality disorders that we find in society. It is inevitable that our fictional output wAl reproduce a period's pathologies —not only through the representation ofsubjectivity but in the very relationship obtaining between reader and text. Drawing on the late twentieth-century object-relations theories of Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, and AUce Miller, Sussman shows that the kinds ofpersonaUty disturbances typical of twentieth-century Western society are evident as well in imaginative literature. Freely switching between psychoanalytic and fictional texts, Sussman underscores the indistinction in content between these two "genres" through which the twentieth century reveals itself. The book is broad in its scope, considering texts as disparate as Othello, Antigone, and both film and book versions of The Silence of the Lambs. Sussman concentrates at length on MusA's The Man Without Qualities (1930-43) in an effort to explore how a transitional twentieth-century society represents its emerging narcissistic and borderUne phenomena. Ultimately, Sussman turns bis gaze upon bis own critical embeddedness in an academic system that is itself conditioned by narcissistic impulses. "The economy ofnarcissistic disturbances," Sussman observes, "does have . . . Ught to shed on the atmosphere and mood ofinteUectual and academic institutions, on the production ofinteUectual work (intellectual transference and working through), and on the interplay between institutional ideals and regnant conditions." Not only in our relationships with students, who are expected to prove the professor's value through imitation (deriving value from the professor who now becomes the purveyor of value as such), but in our relationships with one another, Sussman finds a structuraUy inevitable grandiosity that acts itselfout in Vol. 19 (1995): 162 THE COMPAKATIST the form of the superiority of competing ideals in the inteUectual marketplace. This is a book that forces us—both psychoanalytic critics and psychoanalysts—to rethink our understanding not only of the vacAlations of the subject, and the relationship between the subject and the culture s/he occupies, but of the ways in which interpretation (of Uterature, of popular culture, of global poUtics, of an analysand) is yet another intersubjective strategy characterized by the very pathologies we analyze. Virginia L. Blum University ofKentucky Vol. 19 (1995): 163 ...