Psychoanalysis
pp. 489-517
in: Barry Stocker, Michael Mack (eds), The Palgrave handbook of philosophy and literature, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
In this chapter I argue that Freud struggled to reconcile his commitment to mind-body nondualism with a scientific culture shaped by the dualism implied by Western rationalism. Psychoanalysis, therefore, acts as a bridge between attempts to define the self and underlying psychic processes in the abstract and explorations of the open-ended, transformational potential of experience. Although Freud attempted a universal theory, his writing increasingly explored the open-ended approach, an approach that the post-Freudian psychoanalytic tradition has embraced more fully. Some of Freud's earliest literary readers acknowledged this, and while discredited attempts at psychobiography or applied psychoanalysis have fallen out of fashion, theorists of both literature and psychoanalysis have increasingly established links between the ambiguity of literary meaning and an aesthetics of the self.
