Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Has psychoanalysis run out of steam?No longer central to medical psychiatry, the talking cure is also said to be 'withering away' in literary studies, its once-revolutionary insights reduced to tired interpretive routines.1 This essay presents a fresh perspective on analysis as a critical resource-but not by retracing the well-trodden paths of Freudian or Lacanian theory.Literary scholars have long overlooked less prominent analytic traditions-from ego psychology to self-psychology to cultural and humanistic approaches-which have nonetheless shaped three generations of recent writers.This piece begins to correct that gap, focusing on what has been dubbed 'the distinctive American contribution to the development of psychoanalytic theory'. 2 Between the 1930s and 1960s, Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Clara Thompson, and other figures collectively forged a new, 'interpersonal' psychoanalysis.Radically questioning Freudian tenets, these clinicians drew new attention to interaction, reconceiving the central exchange between analyst and patient.This interpersonal turn, I propose, remains richly instructive for literary critics.Recovering its intellectual history thickens our discipline's incomplete picture of psychoanalysis, not as a source of conceptual abstractions but as a concrete clinical practice.In turn, interpersonal clinical work suggests new directions for critical method.Both in the clinic and on the page, interpersonal psychoanalysis resists the impulse to diagnose symptoms, dwelling instead in the tensions between immersive closeness and critical distance.In this framework, writing, reading and healing acquire meaning only through mutual human relationships.One such relationship serves as my case study.Critics to date have paid surprisingly little attention to 'the most famous couple in contemporary psychoanalysis': not Freud and Dora, nor Breuer and Anna O., but the American writer Joanne Greenberg (1932-) and the pioneering interpersonal analyst Frieda Fromm-
Source: Critical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/criq.70020
Author: Joshua Pugh
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,900
OpenAlex ID: W7106539166
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