Speaking Desires can be Dangerous The Poetics of the Unconscious [Paperback]

This new book is a lively and original study of psychoanalysis and its relations to the arts.

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

Part I Psychoanalysis and Literature: Freud 11

1 What is a psychoanalytic reading? 13

2 The uncanny and its poetics 18

3 The vagaries of fantasy: Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side 31

4 Maladies of the soul: the poetics of Julia Kristeva 41

Part II Psychoanalysis and Language: Lacan 59

5 What is a discourse? 61

6 The indirections of desire: Hamlet 77

7 Inscribing the body politic: Robert Coover’s Spanking the Maid 86

8 What does Woman want?: The Double Life of Véronique 104

Part III Patients and Analysts: Readers and Texts 115

9 What is a clinical ‘case’? 117

10 The rhetoric of clinical discourse: Dialogue with Sammy 132

11 The rhetoric of clinical management: Bion and Minuchin 140

12 Out of tune: Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher 154

Conclusion 165

Notes 169

Bibliography 186

Index 193

The extraordinary achievement of Wright's book is that it inverts the standard psychoanalytic approach to art, which consists in bringing to light the unconscious pathological complexes that underlie the work of art - for Wright, and in the best Lacanian tradition, it is the poetics, the rhetorical strategies of language itself, that provide the key to the formations of the unconscious. The consequent deployment of this insight makes the book an instant classic that will stay around for decades. Slavoj Zizek

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