A RETURN TO LITERATURE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS? IT'S TIME
BY VERA J. CAMDEN AND VALENTINO L. ZULLO 
Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis
Earlier this year, colleges and universities began to report a surprising trend about their 2023 applicants: declared humanities majors for the first time in years are on the rise. Most notably, UC Berkley reported more than a 100 percent increase in first-year students declaring majors in the arts and humanities. Informal surveys of our own local colleges speak to a similar trend. While these numbers may not make up for the years of decline in the humanities, they do tell us something these students recognize: we need the humanities—and the critical context in which they flourish—to help us understand our increasingly complex and divided world. As young people return to the humanities to help them navigate their world, it is time psychoanalysis likewise reclaims its relationship with art and literature as it navigates its own future. Thus, when Austin Ratner asked us to contribute a piece on psychoanalysis and the humanities to highlight the publication of the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis for readers of TAP, we felt hopeful that this volume forecasted not only a growing trend toward the humanities in society but in psychoanalysis as well. That encountering literature is a sustaining, healing, revelatory experience is already known to us as readers and as psychoanalysts. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum proclaimed in her 2010 book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, literature and the arts offer “searching critical thought, daring imagination, empathetic understanding of human experience of many different kinds and understanding of the complexity of the world we live in.” We can only agree, for with the rise of AI and other technologies that will redefine the human, we return to those works that reveal to us our humanity. Literature has long informed psychoanalysis, and it must continue to do so to sustain the latter’s transformative power as both clinical and cultural method.
“By hearing his own story out loud, Odysseus inhabits it in a new way.”
Works of literature can do more than offer us examples of characters who resemble the patients who come into our office or help patients to process their feelings. They can inform our psychoanalytic theories and our clinical practice as they did for Freud. Contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis return, thus, to Shakespeare and Austen, to Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Marquez, to listen to the ways they not only document life but also offer, each in their own way, fresh insight for psychoanalysts. Freud’s debt to culture is most famously recognizable in his formulation of the Oedipus complex: today’s psychoanalysts, following the spirit (if not always the letter) of his discoveries will find within the creative arts and human sciences the inspiration and, indeed, instruction they need to keep their practices vibrant.
How might this be exemplified? In what follows, we offer one example inspired by the Companion volume, bridging the applied and clinical divide, in what we here are calling a return to what Freud dubs—in a distinctly modernist and surprisingly industrialist metaphor—the rich “oil wells” of human culture, wells which “have only just been sampled.” As he tells poet Hilda Doolittle, “There is oil enough, material enough for research and exploitation to last fifty years, to last one hundred years, or longer.” We thus draw from these wells to recount one story that resonates for our troubled times—from Homer’s Odyssey.
When we meet our hero, Odysseus, he is already “experienced in loss.” A wandering veteran, he is a stranger in a strange land: strange even to himself, lost on his journey home. Among the many ways his story may speak to us—and the patients who are coming to see us now—is in his loneliness. While it is true that patients who feel lost and are experiencing loss have always walked into analysts’ offices, we now recognize, along with myriad sociologists, that loneliness is on the rise today. Can such a thing as an ancient tale of searching and woe and recognition offer even us a way back to such things as home, family, friendship and … collegiality?
On his circuitous route back to Ithaca, Odysseus meets the Phaeacians who live on the island of Scheria. Odysseus and the other Phaeacians spend time listening to stories from the blind poet Demodocus, who has been endowed with his gifts by the muse. Demodocus tells the story of Achilles and Odysseus. Upon hearing his own story, the hero begins to weep, as Homer describes:
Each time the singer paused, Odysseus wiped tears, drew down the cloak and poured a splash of wine out of his goblet, for the gods. But each time, the Phaeacian nobles urged the bard to sing again—they loved his songs. So he would start again; Odysseus would moan and hide his head beneath his cloak. Only Alcinous could see his tears, since he was sitting next to him, and heard his sobbing.
After ten long years, Odysseus “wiped tears” and “poured a splash of wine” for the gods, who looked upon him fondly during the war. But Odysseus is not moved by just any story. When the poet tells the story of the affair of Aphrodite and Ares, he does not cry. Rather, like the Phaeacians he enjoys the story but is not touched by it. What Aristotle calls recognition occurs when the poet speaks Odysseus’s story back to him and he can see himself. Odysseus recognizes the power of the poet’s language when he asks for one more story. He asks a “house boy,”
Ulysses at the Court of Alcinous, Francesco Hayez, 1814–15
Go take
This meat and give it to Demodocus. Despite my grief, I would be glad to meet him. Poets are honored by all those who live on earth. The muse has taught them how to sing: she loves the race of poets.
Thus the “complicated man” returns to his story only when he hears the story of Troy. What is particularly revealing, though, is not just the return to that moment but how the poet’s words lead Odysseus to inhabit his story anew:
Odysseus was melting into tears;his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a womanweeps, as she falls to wrap her arms aroundher husband, fallen fighting for his homeand children. She is watching as he gaspsand dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsingupon his corpse. The men are right behind.They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead herto slavery, hard labor, and a lifeof pain. Her face is marked with her despair.In that same desperate way, Odysseuswas crying. No one noticed that his eyeswere wet with tears, except Alcinous,who sat right next to him and heard his sobs.
Odysseus finds himself living the story of Troy once again—both as himself and as another. He feels current despair, as well as empathy for the self that suffered for so many years. Alcinous who sits next to him bears witness to this pain.
Wall painting of Aphrodite and Ares, Pompeii, first century CE
We remember that the Homeric poem was sung to the listeners who would learn these lessons as we might again learn them today. Thus, when Odysseus hears his own story told back to him in the song of the poet, it mirrors the listener’s own experience of hearing the poet sing this story to the Phaeacians and Odysseus. This mirrored experience teaches the listener to remember what happened, in the presence of another. By hearing his own story out loud, Odysseus inhabits it in a new way. The Odyssey depicts a reintegration of the traumatic history without “cathecting the wound.” The story itself allows Odysseus to inhabit the space in a new way so that it is both familiar and separate.
Demodocus as poet and Alcinous as witness embody elements of the psychoanalytic process. Psychoanalysis is first a method of witness as analyst and analysand construct a story together. However, what the Odyssey tells us is that it is not enough to bear witness and to contain. Analysis puts into a new language a shared experience. Odysseus does not tell his own story: he needs one who can speak it back to him, which allows him to relive it. The story of Homer’s hero invites us to think about our own clinical method to reflect on what our process entails. What’s more, such a moving story might allow us to consider what other places poets have trodden, offering us as clinicians (as Freud was the first to admit) an endless repository of energy—in a tired time.
It is time we psychoanalysts—like undergraduates—turn back to the humanities. To this end, the contributors to the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis recognize that literary language is not the same as everyday language. This volume does not pretend to be comprehensive but rather aspires to be suggestive. Listening to literary voices as venerated as Shakespeare and Austen on unhappy families; as searingly urgent as Morrison and James Baldwin on maternity and sexuality; as revelatory as Sa’adat Hasan Manto and Emmanuel Levinas on political partition and what it means to be human—to name just a few of the topics within its covers—the volume returns us to that happy companionate marriage of psychoanalysis and literature that initiated Freud’s discoveries and sustained him throughout his life. Even in his last work, he turned to that stranger in a strange land, the biblical Moses. Our calling, like Freud’s, is not only to listen to stories but to tell stories of our patients back to them. Even the unique literature of the case study which defines our field is narrative. While our profession may increasingly seem “impossible,” as Freud put it in a phrase for the ages, its challenges are lightened by the wisdom of the poets and painters. Thus, this volume out of Cambridge is meant not so much to provide answers as examples of ways forward. It aspires to remind us of what we already know, namely that the clinical method to which we have dedicated ourselves is fueled by the endless wellspring of human culture.
If we return to the creative and humanistic arts, we might once again find our way home, recognize our losses, and remember both who we are and who we hope to become as analysts and as human beings. ■
Vera J. Camden is Professor Emerita of English at Kent State University and supervising and training analyst at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center.
Valentino L. Zullo is the Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in English and the Public Humanities at Ursuline College and a candidate at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center.
Published in issue 57.3, Fall/Winter 2023