The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis ed. by Vera J. Camden (review)

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• The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis ed. by Vera J. Camden
• Murray M. Schwartz (bio)

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Vera J. Camden.

As readers of American Imago know, literature and psychoanalysis have been companions since Freud recognized that the strategies of the mind shared intrinsic features with forms and insights embodied in literature and art. From his earliest writing, Freud told and composed stories to show how apparent chance could be made meaningful. A master stylist himself, he recognized creative writers as his allies in the service of a new science that embraced all cultural forms, including "the science of literature." But, like the course of true love, the relationship has not always been smooth. Constant companions may be fellow travelers or, as etymology and an older meaning has it, "messmates," sharing sustenance, but Freud's valorization of Shakespeare and other writers contained elements of rivalry and ambivalence as well as identification. The paratactical "and" doesn't specify a particular relation either of mutuality or hierarchy.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis offers contemporary examples of the "synergy" of the two fields, with almost uniform success. Camden recounts in her introduction how, particularly in the United States, the status of clinical psychoanalysis was diminished by the 1970s in favor of medical psychiatry, even as "high theory," mostly conveyed by the writings of celebrated French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, ascended in academia. This is true enough, but not the whole story, as the excellent chronology of important works at the beginning of this volume attests. In the academic world, by the 1970s much-maligned ego psychology (in Lacan's rewriting of Freud's concept of the ego) was already yielding spaces for other French analysts, British [End Page 279] object relations, self psychology, and D. W. Winnicott's central concepts, as the academy provided humanities education for future psychoanalysts like Christopher Bollas and Adam Phillips, whose influence is prominent in these essays. At the same time, it was not accidental that the theoretical assault on the ego as a "bounded" defensive structure coincided with the emergence of the Holocaust, trauma studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, as the American and British academies sought theories that mirrored these concerns and innovations.

Overdetermined forces were at work in both fields, including economic pressures on both humanists and psychoanalysts. Within psychoanalysis, the proliferation of new theories challenged orthodoxies and fostered competing group affiliations as well as complex dialogues and debates among clinicians about central concepts, making interdisciplinary teaching extraordinarily challenging, at least at the undergraduate level. In the late 1970s, the prominent Yale critic Geoffrey Hartman exclaimed, "Psychoanalysis is getting harder and harder to do, yet more and more people are doing it."¹ As I see it, a central problem in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s—even before the "Freud Wars" of the 1990s—was not lack of diverse psychoanalytic approaches but insufficiently flexible use of and productive dialogue among them. There was an excess of preaching over teaching—especially among academic Lacanians—and a dearth of negative capability in some quarters. Writing in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Alfred Margulies observed that Lacanian theory "became a movement, a whole new cult and culture of psychoanalytic understanding and practice, scandalizing the establishment" (Marguiles, 2014, p. 1330). At the same time, analytic candidates within American training institutes were becoming less likely to have substantial literary educations, especially after the doors to psychoanalysis were open to clinical psychologists. It is most welcome, then, to have a twenty-first-century collection of finely edited, well-written essays that display the contemporary vitality and interplay of these companion fields, and "places literature before psychoanalysis" (p. xv), like a gift placed before students, scholars, and clinicians alike. [End Page 280]

Contributors to The Cambridge Companion include British, American, South American, Spanish, and Indian academic scholars and psychoanalysts. Of the 18 essays, 16 are written by women. They explore an impressively diverse range of authors and topics: Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Bruce Chatwin, Sigmund Freud, Sa'adat Hasan Manto, Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, writers of children's literature, comic...