Freud, Lacan, and Literature

I'm trying to get my head around the idea that one can psychoanalyze literature. Is there anybody that is familiar with the seminars of Jacque Lacan? I'd like to get some more opinions upon the bases of his opinions and work.

Most specifically, I've been studying His discourse on "The Purloined Letter". The high density of technical jargon makes it very difficult to understand. Maybe somebody knows of a list of definitions for his particular usage of these terms?

Before I get too involved in posting what I think I understand and what I'm trying to apply this knowledge to, I will see if there is any interest.

I've had teachers who used Lacan a lot, and not always with great results - sometimes you end up feeling that all books are saying the same thing about the "nom/non du père" (name/no of the father) or the "petit a" (small a). But sometimes it can be useful, even if you have to plod through the text to really understand. I got some nice results applying the "petit a" to Poe's Ligeia, for instance. If you can't manage to read it by yourself, I'm sure there's a Lacan for Dummies somewhere (beware of commentators - sometimes they're even more difficult to read than Lacan himself!).

Speaking about the Purloined Letter, it's Derrida who wrote an interesting "answer" to Lacan's analysis.

I'm not sure about "psychoanalysing literature" though - when I use Freud's or Lacan's or even Jung's theories, it's just to obtain a different reading of a text.

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Originally Posted by HopeSpeaker

I'm trying to get my head around the idea that one can psychoanalyze literature.

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It may seem strange but if you think about it literature merely reflects the world we live in, so analyzing characters (or even authors but that is sometimes dangerous ground) should be perfectly reasonable. The same is true of other forms of analysis, such as from a Marxist perspective.

Interestingly I know a politics tutor who writes mostly from the Marxist perspective and he seems quite puzzled or even aggressive about the idea of analysing literature though the Marxist lens, he sees his work purely as a political object.

I tend not to separate Freud and Lacan when and if I need to look at psychoanalysis, I just use the bigger picture of the overall method. If for example there is reference to mirrors I would maybe bring Lacan in at that point, he seems obsessed with mirrors, the child state and all that, and this seems to work for me or it has done in the past. :)

Lacan is ludicrously hard, but he has a now very prominent follower, Slavoj Zizek, who is relatively easy to read and has even written a book for Lacanian novices: How to Read Lacan. It's a good read - Zizek's always worth reading - but I'm not sure it's that helpful in understanding Lacan. You could also try Introducing Lacan, though even that, given that it's a picture book that's supposed to be for absolute beginners, is surprisingly difficult.