Speaking Desires can be Dangerous: The Poetics of the Unconscious

Part I: Psychoanalysis and Literature: Freud.

1. What is a psychoanalytic reading?.

2. The uncanny and its poetics.

3. The vagaries of fantasy: Kubin's The Other Side. .

4. Maladies of the soul: the poetics of Julia Kristeva.

Part II: Psychoanalysis and Language: Lacan.

5. What is discourse?.

6. The indirections of desire: Hamlet. .

7. Inscribing the body politic: Robert Coover's Spanking the Maid. .

8. What does Woman want?: The Double Life of Véronique.

Part III Patients and Analysts: Readers and texts.

9. What is a clinical 'case'?.

10. The rhetoric of clinical discourse: Dialogue with Sammy. .

11. The rhetoric of clinical management: Bion and Minuchin.

12. Out of tune: Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher.

Conclusion.

Notes.

Bibliography.

Index.