“Can you imagine if you presented Freud to Jane Austen?”: Josh Cohen on literature and psychoanalysis
The analyst and writer's latest work,
How to Live. What to Do., is a mix of case studies from his consulting room, personal reminiscence, and literary reference points.
How should we conceive the relationship between fiction and psychoanalytic thought? What is the largest area of overlap, or the most fruitful point of connection? There’s a boisterous history of literary interpretation with analytic leanings – one thinks of the American scholar Peter Brooks in
Reading for the Plot (1984) or Freud himself in his essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide”. The psychology of the literary artist has also been widely explored – by the psychiatrist Anthony Storr in his essays on Kafka and Balzac, for example, or Freud again in “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming.” And it’s often said that the best clinical case studies read like accomplished short stories, with elegant prose, well-timed revelations, and identifying details tweaked.