Psychoanalysis and Literature

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss role of Freudian analysis in understanding the great works of literature. Freud said, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied”. Psychoanalysis has always been more than a ‘talking cure’ and it has strong ties to literature, but one hundred years after the publication of the first great work of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, critics are putting the scientific basis of Freud’s work in grave doubt and he is in danger of being pitched in with poets. The great American critic Harold Bloom has said “Freud, the writer will survive the death of psychoanalysis”, and the analyst and writer Adam Phillips seems to go further in his new book Promises Promises where he writes, “I think of Freud as a romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don’t have to worry whether it is true or even useful”.So what is the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature, and if it is to be reclassified as literature itself can it still be practised as a talking cure?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Adam Phillips 4 episodes
  Author of Promises Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature
• Malcolm Bowie 5 episodes
  Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, Oxford University
• Lisa Appignanesi No other episodes
  Novelist and co-author of Freud's Women

Related episodes

• Psychoanalysis and its Legacy
  
  4 Feb, 1999 150 Psychology
• Psychoanalysis and Democracy
  
  11 Jul, 2002 150 Psychology
• Dreams
  
  4 Mar, 2004 150 Psychology
• Jung
  
  2 Dec, 2004 150 Psychology
• Surrealism
  
  15 Nov, 2001 700 Arts
• Shakespeare and Literary Criticism
  
  4 Mar, 1999 820 English and Old English literatures
• Bohemianism
  
  9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts
• Aristotle’s Poetics
  
  27 Jan, 2011 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• The Continental-Analytic Split
  
  10 Nov, 2011 100 Philosophy
• Neuroscience
  
  13 Nov, 2008 610 Medicine and health

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p00546y5

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00546y5

Auto-category: 800 (Literature)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, Freud said, the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious.