A Literary Science
In Character in Fiction, a paper given in 1924 to the Cambridge Heretics Society, Virginia Woolf proposed a ‘scientific’ reason to explain the appearance of modern fiction and that reason was Freud: ‘If you read Freud you know in ten minutes some facts – or at least some possibilities which our parents could not have guessed for themselves: to read Freud was to come to know something that even scrupulous scrutiny could not divine’ (Woolf, 1991, p. 504).
The new knowledge that made of Freud a catalyst of modernity in literature was of course the explicit knowledge of the unconscious. However, even more than the unconscious as a concept, I wonder if Freud’s influence on literature might also have to do with the transcription of the unconscious in a practice of writing. This idea rests on the hypothesis that I have tried to explore in this paper: the psychoanalytic mechanism generates psychical phenomena, which in the here and now of the analytic situation replays a non-verbal mode of thinking that was at the origin of psychical reality.
If the invention of psychoanalysis was an event for the history of literature, it is not so much because it became a new method to interpret fictional texts but, more fundamentally, because the question of writing concerns psychoanalysis from within. Psychoanalysis from its origins has defined its epistemological status through the production of written texts. In her paper about the psychoanalyst as a writer, Geraldine Pederson- Krag stressed this literary aspect of psychoanalytic epistemology: ‘While workers in the physical sciences use models and diagrams to make plain the entities with which they are dealing, the psychoanalyst wishing to explain what he perceives of psychoanalytic structures and relationships can depend only on words’ (Pederson-Krag, 1956, p. 66).