Beyond Applied Psychoanalysis

A phrase came to mind as I was thinking about what I might say about being trained as both a literature scholar and a psychoanalyst. The phrase was "a warped coin," and it is my association to a letter John Donne wrote to his friend Sir Henry Goodyer, probably in 1615, about the effects of multiple religious conversions. Like re-stamping a coin, they leave a person's mind "awry and squint" (Gardner and Healy 1967, 147), according to Donne. That is, while one conversion may "stamp" or "type" a person for life, more than one has the effect, for better or worse, of undermining or exposing the workings of conversion itself, of destabilizing notions of absolute truth.

My dissertation, which I wrote at Bryn Mawr College, was about the role of seventeenth-century moral theology and casuistry in the evolution of psychoanalytic discourse and the modern psychoanalytic subject. Donne's work provided me with a focus for this exploration, which employed readings of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, among other psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners. Donne found himself in the position of having to convert from Catholicism in order to be able to have a career, or even a life, in Jacobean England. The metaphor of the "warped coin" captured his sense of no longer having a clear self-image or impress, of having been twice-stamped, as it were. Although it connotes deformation and ambiguity, the comparison also conveys the possibility of an ethics beyond absolutism, a skepticism that is deconstructive in the best sense of the word.

When I began my literary training, my first professor warned us about applying theory to literature. He felt that theorists commit a "rape" of literature in this way. So, although I was always the one in any graduate seminar who used psychoanalytic theory in my work, I was from the outset equally attuned to the misuses of theory and to the sin of reducing the complexities of literature to the procrustean bed of this or that theoretical concept. For me, then, it has always been a question of reading and of cultivating a spirit of restless inquiry that resists both interpretation and narrative closure either on the side of psychoanalysis or of literature.

Indeed, an awareness of the uses of literary conventions and genres has led me to be fascinated by what impels theory-making in psychoanalysis today. What wishes and fears might be expressed in particular kinds of theories and our preferences for them? In contemporary psychoanalysis, there are sharp divides over questions of theory, practice, and case writing. As an analyst and therapist, I am aware of multiple textualities in my work alongside the imperative to intervene in some way in order to promote healing. Being able to listen for both the words and the music, for the symbolic as well as the semiotic, for the uses of narrative along with the drive toward closure, has given me gifts in my work of listening for and analyzing—literally, untying or loosening—the textual knots of my patients' associations. I am interested also in using these skills to interrogate the psychoanalytic theories that underpin our clinical work.

Being both an analyst and a literary scholar and researcher has allowed me to think about the relations of literature and psychoanalysis beyond the traditional notion of "applied psychoanalysis." For the past two years, I have had the opportunity to design and teach a course at our institute here in Philadelphia on homosexuality and psychoanalysis, based on the Dean and Lane anthology (2001) of the same name. It is my proposition that studying the history of this topic provides an object lesson in how the reading and misreading of theory can result in a disastrous form of clinical practice. It is as well an excellent opportunity for analytic candidates to experience a different kind of textual practice from those they are accustomed to in the institute, one that seeks to trace the history of a particular theory and practice and to situate it in its broad cultural contexts. I hope that a conference I am organizing on psychoanalysis and children's literature will become a regular...