Psychoanalysis and the Interpretation of Literature: A Correspondence with Erich Heller

Critical Inquiry 4 (3):433-450 (1978)
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Abstract

Dear Professor Heller . . . Your paper had started out superbly. It was a great aesthetic and cognitive pleasure to follow you as you guided us through the intellectual history of the main idea of Kleist's essay, from Plato through the biblical Fall of Man, to Schiller, and Kierkegaard, and Kafka. Indeed the perceptive listener's experience was so satisfying that his disappointment was doubled when he came to realize that all this erudition and beauty had been displayed only in order to serve as a contrast-providing background for the sharp delineation of a reductionistic explanation which you consider to be characteristic of psychoanalysis: the interpretation of the disturbance of man's naive, unselfconscious pre-Fall state as nothing more than a portrayal of sexual impotence—the reduction of a deep existential preoccupation to a case of phimosis. I am certain that the relief I felt when you then took up Freud's demonological-neurosis paper was not an idiosyncratic response on my part but an experience shared by many open-minded listeners in your psychoanalytic audience. Let us, therefore, disregard the "text" of your sermon and consider the substantial questions that you raised after you turned to Freud; these are to my mind the most central ones that you undertook to examine in your—despite its disappointing aspects—splendid address to us. Put into my own words, your most important question was this: What is the purpose of the psychoanalyst's efforts outside the clinical setting, in particular when his contributions take the form of a pathography? That is, To what end do analysts study the psychopathology of the creators of great works? I, too, have asked myself this question, and since you read my old essay "Beyond the Bounds of the Basic Rule" , you know some of my answers. But important basic questions are hardly ever answered once and for all; and I will, therefore, under the impact of your lecture, respond as if I had heard the question for the first time. Heinz Kohut, M.D., is Professorial Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Chicago and a teacher and training analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. His works include The Restoration of the Self, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders—which has appeared in German, French, and Italian translations—, The Restoration of the Self and collection of his essays, Scientific Empathy and Empathic Science. His "A Reply to Margret Schaefer"" was published in the Spring 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. See also: "Psychoanalysis and the Marionette Theater: Interpretation is Not Depreciation" by Margret Schaefer in Vol. 5, No. 1

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