Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Transdisciplinary Humanities".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2023) | Viewed by 18723
Special Issue Editors
Interests: literature; philosophy; psychoanalysis
Interests: literature; philosophy; psychoanalysis
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Historically, the encounters between literature and psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and philosophy and psychoanalysis, on the other, have been fraught in different and yet mutually illuminating ways. In both cases, the limits of these encounters have been at once methodological and geopolitical.
From a methodological perspective, the confrontation between literature and psychoanalysis has often run the risk of devolving into a prescriptive application of one discipline to another. When psychoanalysis came into being in Freud’s theory, the world had not yet been marked by the concerns of globalization, decolonization, and climate change as ours is. If both psychoanalysis and literature reflect on and reimagine the conditions of the good life, the terms in which they work have all too often been framed within an exclusively Eurocentric perspective. In what ways can literature help psychoanalysis begin to address non-European forms of belonging as well? Conversely, can literature cease to regard psychoanalysis as an external discourse that ultimately represents a hermeneutic threat? How may psychoanalysis and literature enable each other to discover surprising and productive articulations of questions of philosophy, ethics, law, and politics?
The relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis has been no less vexed, with philosophy, especially in its analytic mode, seeking to evaluate its truth claims and possibilities of verification in its encounters with psychoanalysis. Freud always remained bracingly skeptical about metaphysical explanations, while Lacan conducted a sustained theoretical flirtation with linguistics and philosophy that in its claims was audacious and inspiring, yet over time seems largely to have been abandoned. The British school of psychoanalysis exemplifies differing and not always easily reconcilable impulses, apparently coalescing around Klein and Winnicott and their philosophical modesty while at the same time giving rise to Bion’s Wittgensteinian project of producing a sort of psychoanalytic Tractatus. Against the background of this complex theoretical itinerary, is it still possible today to triangulate between philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis in ways that may be productive and also unexpected? Can these encounters open up new areas of intervention that are reflective of richer and more diverse forms of life while also being respectful of, and attentive to, the ways in which they manifest their singularity? This is the challenge we have before us as critics, and one this Special Issue of Humanities, entitled “Literature, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy”, seeks to address.
Prof. Dr. Michael Levine
Prof. Dr. Isabelle Alfandary
Prof. Dr. Alessia Ricciardi
Guest Editors
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