Get the latest tech news

The Analyst and the Bard

The Freudian stain upon the literary imagination cannot be rinsed away. What, then, is the proper relation between psychoanalysis and literature?

Phillips is a child psychologist in clinical practice, the author of many popular, bite-sized books on psychoanalysis, and the editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translation of Freud. (Freud famously wrote that a primary goal of psychoanalysis was to transform “hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness.”) One thinks of the dramatic effect of catharsis, the discharging of unbearable emotions through their aesthetic representation. One is left with the uneasy sense that second chances are a “wish-fulfillment fantasy akin to the longing for a loved one to return from the dead or for a statue to come alive.” Yet the implication need not engender pessimism: Though the play “represents this outcome as wildly implausible,” it “suggests at the same time that the hope for such an event is what makes existence bearable.” The authors continue: “Believing in the possibility of second chances makes us not merely clever animals but redemptive animals who can rescue themselves, and be rescued from, whatever is deemed to have gone wrong with their lives.”

Get the Android app