Speaking Desires can be Dangerous: The Poetics of the Unconscious

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

Part I Psychoanalysis and Literature: Freud 11

1 What is a psychoanalytic reading? 13

2 The uncanny and its poetics 18

3 The vagaries of fantasy: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side 31

4 Maladies of the soul: the poetics of Julia Kristeva 41

Part II Psychoanalysis and Language: Lacan 59

5 What is a discourse? 61

6 The indirections of desire: Hamlet 77

7 Inscribing the body politic: Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid 86

8 What does Woman want?: The Double Life of Véronique 104

Part III Patients and Analysts: Readers and Texts 115

9 What is a clinical ‘case’? 117

10 The rhetoric of clinical discourse: Dialogue with Sammy 132

11 The rhetoric of clinical management: Bion and Minuchin 140

12 Out of tune: Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher 154

Conclusion 165

Notes 169

Bibliography 186

Index 193