Literature and Psychoanalysis: Whose Madness is it anyway?

<dl><dt>Examiner/examined, analyst/analysand, subject/object, sane/mad, science/art: the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature appears to conform to this binary logic, with the first term in each set clearly privileged over the second. The realm of the literary is populated with an impressive assortment of mad characters and mad authors: killers, junkies, drunkards, the paranoid, the depressed, the suicidal, the abandoned or the simply alienated. Literature inhabits and is inhabited by the pathological, or so it must have seemed to the armies of psychoanalytic critics who repeatedly turned to it. We seek to deconstruct this particular binary view of literature-as-madness, psychoanalysis-as-saneness by showing how a critic’s preoccupation with the pathology of an author can sometimes expose his/her own unconscious complexes, desires or fears. With this in mind, we thus momentarily turn the examiner into the examined.</dt>