To understand better the nature of this textual empiricism, I propose to explore the opposition between the philosophical system and the literary text. I will try to show how through his rejection of the philosophical concept and his bond with the poetical text, Freud elucidates the difficulty of transcribing an analytic session into a text.
The Dichter against the Metaphysician
In his book Psychanalyse et Littérature, Jean Bellemin-Noël mentioned this anecdote: when asked who his masters were, Freud answered by pointing to the novels on his bookshelves where he kept the masterpieces of western literature (Bellemin-Noël, 1978, p. 11). Literary creation is not only a confirmation of psychoanalytic theories it also opens up new avenues of research. As suggested by Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud attributes a ‘primacy to the fact of creative writing, which searches an appropriate expression in the metapsychology and not to overcome literature with science’ (Assoun, 1997, p. 539, my translation).4 Indeed, in the invention of forms for writing the unconscious, Freud identifies the Dichter as an ally. This alliance between fictional writing and psychoanalysis seems to me a richer field of study than merely an application of psychoanalytic concepts to literature. The study of a common knowledge at work in fictional writing and in psychoanalysis raises an epistemological question that is absent from a direct psychoanalytic interpretation of literature. I would agree with Gomez Mango and Pontalis when they write: ‘in as much as one should be reserved towards psychoanalytic interpretations of literary texts, it seems necessary to enlighten the links that bind psychoanalysis to literature, links that are stronger and more intimate than with other types of artistic creations such as painting or music’5 (Gomez Mango and Pontalis, 2012, p. 9).
In addition to Freud’s papers specifically devoted to the analysis of fictional texts, there is, throughout his work, the understanding that he shares a common interest with the Dichter. Freud believed that literature created models of psychical life. It is because he held such a belief that he could transform characters of fiction into metapsychological concepts and that he frequently made reference to literary texts to support his demonstrations. More than their being an illustration of psychoanalytic concepts, Freud acknowledged an irreducible epistemological status to literary texts. As pointed out by Jacques Lacan about the writer Marguerite Duras: ‘the only advantage of the psychoanalyst’s position is to recall with Freud that in his field of knowledge the artist is always in advance and so the analyst should not play the psychologist precisely when the artist opens the path to him’ (Lacan, 2000, pp. 192–193, my translation).6