Module Directory

Ever since Freud named the Oedipus complex after a Greek tragedy by Sophocles, psychoanalysis has had a strong and enduring relationship with literature. This has developed in many ways over the last century: Psychoanalysis has been employed as an interpretive schema through which to diagnoise both texts and authors; concepts like ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ take their names from the erotic fiction of authors like the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch; and various works of fiction are still routinely used as case studies to elaborate psychoanalytic concepts. As the literary critic Shoshana Felman writes, “literature is the language which psychoanalysis uses in order to speak of itself, in order to name itself.”

Taking Felman’s description as our point of departure, this module considers the complex and intertwined relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. It draws on a broad range or literature from across the 19^th and 20^th centuries—from autobiography and the classics, to gothic tales and pulp fiction—to explore how writers across this period have often been working implicitly or explicitly with different psychoanalytic ideas. Throughout the term, we discuss topics including: the concept of melancholia and its relationship to Irish Nationalism in James Joyce’s The Dead; the similarities between Freud’s psychoanalytic case studies and the Sherlock Holmes detective cases; the question of “hauntings” and the trope of the haunted house in Freud and “The Fall of the House of Usher”; the relationship between sexuality and violence in Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales; and the unconscious life of internalized racism in Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison.

The aims of this module are:

• To introduce students to the rich field of writing addressing the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature


• To show how the problem of an ‘unconscious’ emerges culturally in the ways novelists and short story writers from the nineteenth century onwards seek to describe facets of their characters’ lives, memories, passions, and relations to other people.


• To help students understand psychoanalytic concepts through literature


• To improve students’ close-reading skills through a careful attention to the stylistics of psychoanalytic interpretation


• To enhance students’ ability to read psychoanalytic texts critically and creatively by applying narrative theory to psychoanalytic case studies


• To foster student awareness of the cross-pollination between psychoanalysis and literary theory

By the end of the module, students will be expected to be able to:

1.  Demonstrate comprehensive knowledge about the theme of ‘unconscious mind’ and ‘unconscious life’ in literary texts.


2. Develop a multi-concept understanding of key psychoanalytic theories, including the Oedipus concept, melancholia, narcissism, the unconscious, internalized racism, and femininity.


3. Enhance their skills in literary ‘close-reading’ and distinguish how psychoanalysis has contributed methodologically to literary studies.


4. Consider the literary and narrative basis of psychoanalysis, both as a theoretical system and as a clinical practice.

Throughout the term, we discuss topics including: the concept of melancholia and its relationship to Irish Nationalism in James Joyce’s The Dead; the similarities between Freud’s psychoanalytic case studies and the Sherlock Holmes detective cases; the question of “hauntings” and the trope of the haunted house in Freud and “The Fall of the House of Usher”; the relationship between sexuality and violence in Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales; and the unconscious life of internalized racism in Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison.

Texts will be used in part to illustrate different aspects of the unconscious (repression, seduction, melancholia, the Oedipus complex and other themes) and will be read alongside extracts from psychoanalytic works. But throughout the course students will also be encouraged to interrogate what it means to think about psychoanalysis itself in literary terms. How does psychoanalysis build its knowledges and techniques on and through narrative? To what extent does (modern) literature—especially in genres like the bildung novel or the gothic romance—provide the condition of possibility for the emergence of psychoanalysis in the first place? And what effects does our recognition of this literary grounding have on the way we are able to read, think, and practice psychoanalysis?

This module will be delivered via:

1. One 1-hour lecture each week by Dr. Carolyn Laubender.
2. One 1-hour seminar each week led by Graduate Teaching Assistants from the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies.

Students are expected to have done all the required reading for each week before the relevant lecture/seminar, and to engage actively in seminar discussions.