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Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory; by Mathew R. Martin
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‘There are many classic books on literature and psychoanalysis, but they tend to have
been written twenty or thirty years ago. Mathew Martin’s Psychoanalysis and Literary
Theory: An Introduction is a timely and perceptive study of a subject that has changed
dramatically in the intervening years. In its depth and breadth of knowledge, its read­
ability, and its new insights, it will be valuable for anyone who wishes to learn more
about classical psychoanalytic literary theory, as formulated by Freud, Klein, Winnicott,
and Lacan, as well as psychoanalysis’ profound impact on feminism, queer theory, post-
colonialism, and trauma theory. Neither a Freud idealizer nor a Freud basher, Martin
presents an admirably balanced view of the founder of psychoanalysis. The book is not
only an excellent introduction but also a nuanced analysis that will be of interest to
students and teachers of literature and psychoanalysis. Martin’s new book will become, I
predict, the authoritative study for many years.’
Jeffrey Berman, Distinguished Teaching Professor at University at Albany, SUNY, USA
Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory; by Mathew R. Martin
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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND
LITERARY THEORY
An Introduction

Mathew R. Martin
Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory; by Mathew R. Martin
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Cover image: Detail of D4v of the 1603 Hamlet, 69304, The Huntington
Library, San Marino, California. Butterfly image: thawats/Getty Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Mathew R. Martin
The right of Mathew R. Martin to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to
infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-032-11313-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-11315-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21934-7 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003219347

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory; by Mathew R. Martin
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Petal
Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory; by Mathew R. Martin
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: Freud’s Ideas 1

1 Freud and Literary Criticism 45
2 Melanie Klein and Donald W. Winnicott 74
3 Lacan and Structuralism 89
4 Žižek and the Real 110
5 Psychoanalysis and Marxism 118
6 Deleuze and Guattari 131
7 Psychoanalysis and Feminism 148
8 Psychoanalysis and Queer Theory 170
9 Psychoanalysis and Postcolonialism 188
10 Psychoanalysis and Trauma Theory 209
Conclusion: Psychoanalysis and the Posthuman 223

Index 235
Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory; by Mathew R. Martin
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Olivia King read and discussed with me every word in this book. To her I owe an
immeasurable debt of gratitude. I would like to thank Taylor and Francis for per­
mission to reproduce portions from the introduction to my Tragedy and Trauma in
the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Routledge, 2016) in the chapter on trauma theory
and pages 307–311 of my article “Translatio and Trauma: Oedipus, Hamlet and
Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage” (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 23,
no. 4, 2012) in chapter two. I would also like to thank the Huntington Library,
San Marino, California, for the cover’s digital image of D4v of the 1603 edition of
Hamlet (69304).
Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory; by Mathew R. Martin
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INTRODUCTION
Freud’s Ideas

Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory

Psychoanalysis and literary theory are not unified or simple bodies of thought.
Rather, each is a complex and often internally riven field of discourse with a
complicated and contestatory developmental history shaped not only by ideas but
also by personalities, institutions, and larger historical events such as wars. For psy­
choanalysis, that history begins with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the Viennese
medical researcher and doctor who founded (arguably, co-founded) psychoanalysis
in theory and in practice at the turn of the nineteenth century, and extends into
the twenty-first century in the practices of large numbers of psychotherapists, in
scores of books and journals, in university teaching and research, and in popular
Western culture generally. Freud invented the term “psychoanalysis” specifically in
order to distinguish it from other varieties of psychology and psychotherapy cur­
rent in his day, but it is frequently used today, by people who are completely
unfamiliar with Freud’s ideas, as synonymous with psychology in general; some of
the major terms of psychoanalytic vocabulary, such as “unconscious” and “repres­
sion,” have become equally entrenched in popular cultural (un)consciousness, evi­
dence of how fundamental psychoanalysis has become to our ways of thinking.
Indeed, the distortions undergone by psychoanalytic ideas as they entered popular
culture early became the topic for humorous commentary and study. “The single
term repression,” Frederick Hoffman noted in his 1945 study of the diffusion of
psychoanalytic ideas in America,

suffered a variety of changes, which may be formulated as follows: Freud’s

definition of the term: Repression, minus what has been lost through hasty
generalization or inadequate knowledge of its source-meaning, plus cultural
ingredients which have been attached to the already altered concept, equals

DOI: 10.4324/9781003219347-1
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2 Introduction

repression as American convention imposed upon free sex expression, or neo-

Puritanism.
(Freudianism and the Literary Mind 86)

Literary theory’s history begins much earlier than Freud’s and our modern era, in
the ancient world of classical Athens with the dialogues of the classical Athenian
philosopher Plato (428–348 BCE) and the treatises of his student and successor
Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Arguably, the lines of thought these two thinkers inau­
gurated, comprising almost all of Western philosophy according to some modern
commentators, have been engraved so deeply upon Western consciousness that
they have become truly unconscious, structuring the ways we perceive and process
our world as if they were “natural” or biologically hardwired. As we shall see, one
of the self-appointed tasks of recent theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari has been to uproot these majoritarian lines of thought, expose their con­
structedness, and propose alternative modes of thought more responsive to the
exigencies of global postmodern life. Outside of university seminar rooms, the
technical vocabulary of philosophy generally and literary theory in particular trips
off the tongue less commonly and easily today than psychoanalytic jargon, to be
sure, but it is one of the aims of this book to show that the key concepts of literary
theory are deeply implicated in the ways of perceiving and representing the world
first articulated in classical Athens, ways of perceiving and representing the world
that we often take for granted but that may be limiting and oppressive.
Why bring these two discourses, psychoanalysis and literary theory, together
between the same covers? What is the meaning of the “and” in the book’s title?
Both discourses are of major importance in Western thought and culture, granted,
but that in no way necessarily entails a relationship between the two. The rest of
this book is an attempt to answer these questions, to introduce the key concepts,
thinkers, and movements of psychoanalysis and literary theory in a way that
demonstrates their essential and intimate interrelationship. “Psychoanalytic obser­
vation must concede priority to imaginative writers. It can only repeat what they
have said long ago” (271), Freud remarked in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
(1901); his case histories, he observed in Studies on Hysteria (1895), “read like short
stories” (231). Freud’s comments suggest that psychoanalysis is not only indebted to
literature but is itself a (perhaps peculiar) form of literature. Many of Freud’s
unkindest critics have agreed, dismissing psychoanalysis as bad (science) fiction or,
worse, pornography: “I am aware that—in this city, at least—there are many
physicians who (revolting though it may seem),” Freud complained in his 1905
case study of “Dora,” “choose to read a case history of this kind … as a roman à clef
designed for their private delectation” (“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of
Hysteria” 37). Unwittingly, Freud’s critics may be right: psychoanalysis is, like all
the theories we construct to explain our existence in the world, a fabrication, a
making—in short, to borrow the terms of Renaissance poet and literary theorist Sir
Philip Sidney, a poesis (The Defence of Poesy 215). This psychoanalytic poetics often
takes narrative form, and, as we shall see, its characters and themes are the
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Introduction 3

characters and themes of the stories that we tell about ourselves in relation to
ourselves, others and the world around us. Indeed, what psychoanalysis analyses are
precisely these texts of the self. Like literary theory, psychoanalysis is a mode of
textual analysis, starting from texts—the texts produced by free association, jokes,
slips of the tongue and, of course, dreams—and moving to interpretations that go
beyond the conscious hermeneutics of the cogito of classical and Enlightenment
philosophy. Arguably, psychoanalysis is literary theory at its most radical, and to
study literary theory through psychoanalysis is to study literary theory in its most
intellectually engaging, interrogative and open-ended forms.
This opening chapter provides a synopsis of Freud’s major ideas and is thus the
foundation for the subsequent chapters. The next chapter takes up Freud’s writings
on literature and art, and the following chapters are organized around later psy­
choanalysts and literary theory. While presenting a synthetic view of Freud’s the­
ories, this introduction to Freud’s ideas stresses their development over the course
of Freud’s life as well. As the above allusion to Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy
adumbrates, the introduction and the next chapter will also connect Freud’s ideas
to some of the major literary critical terms and concepts in the history of literary
criticism from Plato and Aristotle to T. S. Eliot and modern textual editing.

The Birth of Psychoanalysis

The birth of psychoanalysis is often dated to 1897, when Freud was 41. Freud
began his university studies at the University of Vienna in 1873, in medicine (Gay
25), and from 1876 to 1882 he did medical research in the lab of one of his pro­
fessors, Ernst Brücke. In 1882 he left the research lab to take up a position in
Vienna’s General Hospital (37). In 1884 he discovered the anaesthetic properties of
cocaine but didn’t publish his findings and therefore missed becoming the official
discoverer of local anaesthetic (43). Freud had concentrated on brain anatomy and
the nervous system during his years at medical school and in Brücke’s lab, but by
the 1880s he was beginning to move into psychiatry. Consequently, in 1885 Freud
went to Paris to study and work with Jean Charcot, the great nineteenth-century
French psychiatrist who ran a sanitorium for the mentally ill, the Saltpêtrière.
Freud’s time there (six months) was formative. The dominant model of mental
illness at this time consistently reduced mental illness to a physiological problem, a
problem with brain structure or body chemistry, capable of being passed from one
generation to the other through the mechanisms of heredity. Mentally ill people
were considered physiologically abnormal or degenerate. Charcot, in contrast,
attempted to distinguish mental illness from physical diseases. He sought psycho­
logical solutions to psychological problems. He felt that all neuroses or mental ill­
nesses were forms of hysteria, and he attempted to cure the hysterics in his care
through, among other things, hypnosis. When in 1886 he returned to Vienna,
Freud resigned his post at the hospital and set up an independent practice as a
psychiatrist (53), and he carried with him Charcot’s attitude towards mental illness
and, at least at first, his use of hypnosis, a therapeutic technique that he practiced in
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4 Introduction

collaboration with another physician colleague, Joseph Breuer. Freud was not very
good at hypnosis, though, and abandoned the use of it fairly quickly, soon simply
letting his patients talk. Psychoanalysis began, Freud states in his History of the Psy­
choanalytic Movement (1914), “with my discarding the hypnotic technique and
introducing free associations” (64). Two years later, in his Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis (1916), Freud describes the process as follows: “We instruct the
patient to put himself into a state of quiet, unreflecting self-observation, and to
report to us whatever internal perceptions he is able to make—feelings, thoughts,
memories—in the order in which they occur to him” (328); the patient “must not
hold back any idea from us, even if it gives rise to one of the four objections—of
being too unimportant or senseless or of being irrelevant or too distressing to
report” (145). Freud may have found inspiration for his free association technique
in the comments of one of Breuer’s patients, Anna O., who described her ther­
apeutic sessions with Breuer as a “talking cure” (Studies On Hysteria 83).
From 1886 on, then, Freud was committed to independent practice as a consulting
psychiatrist, and we must remember that Freud developed his psychoanalytic ideas in
conjunction with practice, indeed through clinical practice. In 1895 Freud published,
along with Breuer, some of the results of that practice in a volume of case studies
entitled Studies On Hysteria. These early case studies are extremely informative,
revealing the development of Freud’s psychoanalytic method and his belief that his
patients were suffering not from physiological problems but from psychological dis­
turbances, specifically from disturbances arising from their repressed memories of
childhood trauma, particularly sexual abuse from their fathers or other father-figures.
“[H]ysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences” (11), Freud stated. One must
add to that Freud’s assertion that all neuroses, such as hysteria, have a sexual etiology,
are rooted in the structure of the patient’s sexual development. When Freud presented
his views at various medical conferences he received a chilly reception. No one
wanted to believe that sexual abuse of children was as widespread as Freud was
implying, and no one wanted to believe that venerable head of the patriarchal family,
the father, could be so often so guilty of such a horrible crime.
Initially Freud persisted with his theory against all opposition, but by 1897 he
changed his mind. By 1897 he came to believe that the memories of sexual abuse
recovered by his patients during analysis were not factual but were, rather, fantasies.
“I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of neurosis]” (Complete Letters 264),
Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in September 1897, and “it seems once
again arguable that only later experiences give the impetus to fantasies, which
[then] harken back to childhood” (265). As one of the chief reasons for his new
disbelief in the reality of his patients’ memories of childhood sexual abuse Freud
gives that “in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of
being perverse … whereas surely such widespread perversions against children are
not very probable” (264). Freud maintained this position for the rest of his career.
“In the period in which the [Freud’s] main interest was directed to discovering
infantile sexual traumas,” Freud recounts in his 1933 lecture on femininity, “almost
all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father” (New
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Introduction 5

Introductory Lectures 154). After “many distressing hours,” however, “I was driven to
recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that
hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences”
(154). Some later twentieth-century scholars have condemned Freud for this
about-face as much as his contemporaries condemned him for his initial position.
Freud sold out, caved under pressure, and adopted a position that erases the reality
of sexual abuse suffered by many people during childhood, his critics contend, all
because he ultimately didn’t want to besmirch the mainstay of patriarchy, the father
(Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory
[1985] 190–192). According to Freud’s new theory, writes Kate Millett,

female children were not only sexually abused, they had to assent that they
imagined it. This process undermines sanity, since if what takes place isn’t real
but imaginary, then you are at fault: you are illogical, as well as naughty, to
have imagined an unimaginable act: incest. You ascribed guilt to your father,
and you are also a very guilty, sexy little creature yourself. So much for you.
(“Beyond Politics? Children and Sexuality” 222)

This is not entirely fair to Freud. Freud changed his position not because he was
denying the reality of child abuse but because, by 1897, he had come to believe
that fantasy not reality structures our psychic lives. “[T]here are no indications of
reality in the unconscious,” Freud explained to Fliess, “so that one cannot distin­
guish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect” (264). The
memories of childhood events in which neuroses are anchored are a mix of reality
and fantasy, Freud states in Introductory Lectures, and “possess psychical as contrasted
with material reality” such that “in the world of the neuroses it is the psychical reality
which is the decisive kind” (415). According to Freud, this shift from material to
psychic reality was a defining moment in psychoanalysis: “If hysterical subjects trace
back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emer­
ges is precisely that they create such scenes in fantasy” and “from behind the fan­
tasies, the whole range of a child’s sexual life came to light” (History 75).
While developing his own psychoanalytic therapeutic technique and revising his
theory of neurosis, Freud was also engaged in an exhausting self-analysis that would
become the foundation for all future psychoanalytic theory and practice. The key
moment of the self-analysis occurred in 1897 again, a month after the letter to
Fliess in which he expressed his doubts about the reality of his patients’ childhood
memories. In an October letter to Fliess, Freud recounts the memory of an inci­
dent from his mother’s confinement with his sister Anna:

My mother was nowhere to be found; I was crying in despair. My [half-]

brother Philipp (twenty years older than I) unlocked a wardrobe for me, and
when I did not find my mother inside it either, I cried even more until,
slender and beautiful, she came in through the door.
(Complete Letters 271)
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6 Introduction

The empty wardrobe signifies the mother’s absence and the father’s sexual potency,
and the anxiety it generates in Freud the child is the anxiety of castration. Freud
continues his letter by stating “I have found, in my case too, [the general phe­
nomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now
consider it a universal event in early childhood” (272). Freud then links this
conclusion to two major works of dramatic literature: classical Greek dramatist
Sophocles’s (497–405 BCE) tragedy Oedipus Rex and Shakespeare’s tragedy
Hamlet:

If this is so, we can understand the gripping power of Oedipus Rex … Every­
one in the audience was once a budding Oedipus in fantasy and each recoils
from the dream fulfilment here transplanted into reality, with the full quantity
of repression which separates his infantile state from his present one.
(272)

“[T]he same thing might be at the bottom of Hamlet as well,” Freud comments,
adding that “I am not thinking of Shakespeare’s conscious intention, but believe,
rather, that a real event stimulated the poet to his representation, in that his
unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero” (272). In Freud’s brief ana­
lysis of this childhood recollection are the seeds of the major metapsychological
concepts, such as repression, the unconscious, and the Oedipus complex, that
Freud later stated “constitute the principal subject-matter of psychoanalysis and the
foundation of its theory” (Two Encyclopedia Articles 145) and that he and his fol­
lowers would elaborate over the subsequent decades into the theoretical frame­
work of psychoanalysis. As we shall see, the literary nature of Freud’s analysis also
intimately links it to the central concepts and theories of Western literary criticism
and theory from Plato and Aristotle onward.

The Stages of Childhood Sexual Development

Freud’s childhood recollection provided the basis for his formulation of what he
would call the Oedipus complex, a universal and transhistorical paradigm of
childhood sexual dynamics. Although Freud would expand and complicate this
paradigm, his schematic expositions of it remain consistent, at least for the male
child, from his first publication of it in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) to its last
summary description in his unfinished and posthumously published Outline of Psy­
choanalysis (1940). The Oedipus complex, however, names only one stage in a
child’s early sexual development, development that begins with birth (if not before)
and ends at around the age of five or six. For boys, it is the penultimate stage of
this early developmental sequence, followed by the castration complex. Sig­
nificantly, in Freud’s theorization it is the other way around for little girls, for
whom the castration complex precedes the Oedipus complex. Freud’s major work
on sexual development is his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). The
work was first published in 1905, and Freud continued to revise and add to it