In Lacan's scientific papers, works of literaturenam~ d, quoted, analysed, eulogised-perform
tasks of persuasion quite as complex as those they had performed for Freud. Simple tasks
too, of course: in his references to literature Lacan, like Freud, depicts himself as a person of
educated seriousness and large cultural ambition, and conjures up from the artistic legacy of
Europe prophetic evidence for the truths of the new psychological science. But for both of
them literature was too provocatively enviable to be used merely for purposes of …

Freud and Proust both wrote boldly about mental processes and human sexuality. Freud's
psychological theories became fiction as he invented them while Proust's fictional narrators
continually theorized about the human mind. Lacan believed science of the unconscious
mind to be a science of fictions as well. In these essays, Malcolm Bowie stages provocative
dialogues between psychological science and imaginative literature of the twentieth century.
He explores Freud and Lacan's procedure for rhetoric and fiction-making, and places radical …