Return to Delphi: on the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis

Abstract

Starting from an analysis of Oedipus’s oracle, this essay explores the essence of psychoanalytic theory, involving a critique of the paradigms of modern science. These paradigms, it argues, make modern science incapable of thinking the subject (including the subject of science itself). Because of this incapacity, another field of knowledge has emerged in modern times: the field of literature. This is why, as Freud already noted, psychoanalysis as a “science of the subject” and literature as “knowledge of the subject” share deep affinities. It is in the subject’s idiosyncratic engagement with reading or writing - and there alone - that the connection between literature and psychoanalysis is to be found. It is also there that we see why any attempt to apply psychoanalysis to literature is doomed to fail. Both psychoanalysis and literature must confront their affirmation of fiction in the face of its complete denial within the human sciences. At a time when the civilization of the image is replacing reality, this shared stance of literature and psychoanalysis is more necessary than ever.