Psychoanalysis and Fiction: An Exploration of Literary and Psychoanalytic Borders

Daniel Gunn’s aim is to investigate ways in which psychoanalytic writing and certain kinds of creative fiction can be seen to have common concerns, objectives and procedures. He examines the work of various psychoanalysts from Freud through to Lacan, as well as more recent practitioners/writers such as Maud Mannoni and Serge Leclaire, together with the work of creative writers like Proust, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Marguerite Duras. His conclusion is that such questions as origins, ambivalence, and repetition, are presented and worked out in both types of discourse; and that the similarities and differences between the ways in which they are presented shed light on those discourses themselves, when it comes to understanding, for example, the relationship between an author and his reader, or a psychoanalyst and his patient.