The reader in analysis

Elizabeth Wright

pp. 158-168

in: James Donald (ed), Psychoanalysis and cultural theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Abstract

My title is a pun. On the one hand it can mean the Reader subjected to analysis as a key element in literary theory, on the other the Reader as equivalent to the analysand in a psychoanalysis, making discoveries as a result of her or his analytic text. This chapter has two emphases corresponding to these two aspects — the first being reader-response in general, the second a particular species of the first, namely psychoanalytic reader-theory.¹