Psychoanalysis and Literature

Marilyn Charles is staff psychologist at the Austen Riggs Center and psychoanalyst in private practice in Stockbridge, MA.

A psychoanalyst in private practice, Charles provides an adroit exploration of the ways in which literature and clinical work often function as mappings of the same terrain—terrain that is at once intellectual, emotional, and behavioral. By bringing her work with patients in sync with her readings of literary texts—by writers from Herman Melville to Virginia Woolf to John Fowles—the author is able to look at the human condition, and the lived lives of her patients, from a vantage point outside the individual therapeutic case. Literature and literary metaphor afford Charles a mode of inquiry that has the special capacity to highlight the structures and patterns that underlie the particulars of a person's life. Charles's investigations of texts and lives crosses the territory of sensory experience, trauma, dreams, relatedness, and identity issues related to the collision of culture, aging, and death. One strength of the book is the author's refusal to pathologize the individual dilemmas playing out in her consulting room; she always sees her patients' lives as part of the larger human condition that literature has mapped independent of the healing arts and sciences. This book will have great appeal to those whose interests are humanistic, clinical, and philosophical, whatever the level of preparation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.

• Part I: LITERATURE, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND SENSORY EXPERIENCEIntroductionEpiphany: The Poet’s Art, The Analyst’s Instrument: Formal Structure as a Vehicle for the Expression of Primary Experience: To the LighthouseThe Waves: Tensions between Creativity and Containment in the Life and Writings of Virginia WoolfPart II: TRAUMAFalling Man: Encounters with Catastrophic ChangeTelling Trauma: The Wind-Up Bird ChroniclePart III: DREAMSThe Book of Intimate Grammar: Transgenerational TraumaDreamscapes: Rectangular Spaces in Memoirs of a Survivor and in DreamsPictures at an Exhibition: Reparation and Redemption, Nightmare and MemoryPart IV: CULTURAL COLLISIONSCollisions Between Conscious and Unconscious; East and West; Enigma and Transparency: Kafka on the ShoreCultural Chasms: Catastrophic Change and the Excluded Other: Mulberry and PeachPart V: THE HERO’S QUEST: IDENTITY AND RELATEDNESSThe Labyrinth, Part I: The MagusJourneys into the Labyrinth, Part II: Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate: The Glass Bead GameStanding Outside the Gates: Pierre, or the AmbiguitiesIdentity Derailed: The Echo MakerPart VI: RELATEDNESS, AGING, AND GENERATIVITYIdentity, Community, and Object Choice, Part I: Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids SingingIdentity, Community, and Object Choice, Part II: Possession16. Aging and Death: The Map and the Territory, The Sense of an Ending, and All Passion