Psychoanalytic-ism

Ingrid Hotz-Davies, Anton Kirchhofer (Eds.)

Psychoanalytic-ism: Uses of Psychoanalyis in Novels, Poems, Plays and Films

ISBN 978-3-88476-414-5, ISBN 3-88476-414-4, 200 S., kt., € 23,50 (2000)

This volume offers a perspective on psychoanalysis which is not concerned with the validation or rejection of the psychoanalytic truth claim. It repositions this truth claim itself (its validation, its rejection) among the more varied set of options culturally available with reference to psychoanalysis. When novels, poems, plays, films – or, for that matter, critical essays – ,use psychoanalysis,' they do not implement or contest a unified body of doctrine. They are not so much contributions to what is here called the 'Can – Can't' debate about the viability and permissibility of psychoanalytic readings which has dominated so many critical controversies. Rather, they choose elements from a culturally available repertoire for the sake of particular, diverse, even contradictory uses. These uses are here analysed in terms of the particular medium in which they occur and of the specific situations and specific effects they permit to generale. This volume brings together essys investigating an exemplary range of diverse psychoanalytic references and utilizations in English and American novels, poems, plays and films as well as in criticism. On this basis, the introduction offers a sketch of the repertoire, the functionalizations and the historical shifts 'psychoanalyticism' in the psychoanalytic century just past. As a whole, the volume aims to provide both a novel context and an alternative to the continued puzzlement about whether, after all, Freud was right or wrong.