Psychoanalysis and Creative Writing
Autumn 2015
Nicholas Royle
tel. (01273) 877396
n.w.o.royle@sussex.ac.uk
Office hours: Tuesday 2-3 and Wednesday 9.30-10.30 (Arts B338)
Psychoanalysis has exciting and major implications for all kinds of writing, not least
that sort called ‘creative’. This module will focus on some of the ways in which a
close reading of psychoanalytic texts, especially those of Sigmund Freud himself, can
be linked to the theory and practice of creative writing. Our primary concern will be
Freud as a writer and reader, rather than as a clinician. We will seek to explore
various concepts and topics that are arguably subtler and more enduring than more
formulaic ones such as Oedipus complex, the super ego and id, and so on. In
particular, seminar discussion is expected to shift around concepts and topics such as:
substitution, displacement, condensation, deferral or deferred sense, play on words (or
the ‘play of the letter’), verbal bridges, antithetical meanings, nodal points, chance
and ‘association of ideas’, the unconscious as ‘timeless’, the uncanny, telepathy and
magic, the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, the death drive, the polymorphously perverse,
the repetition compulsion, disavowal, negation, déjà vu, humour, taboo, impossible
mourning, impossible desire, the unsettling of distinctions between figurative and
non-figurative language, the relations (correspondence, resemblance, interplay, even
substitutability) between the literary and non-literary, literary texts and jokes, and
literature and dreaming.
Seminars will comprise mini-lectures and group discussion focusing on specific
psychoanalytic and/or literary texts, as well as an opportunity for workshop and/or inclass writing exercises. Students will be able to give written or improvised
presentations on particular psychoanalytic texts and/or literary works, and also present
creative or critical writing of their own. There will be regular opportunities
throughout the term to work singly, as well as in pairs or small groups.
In due course, students will submit a term-paper that may include a creative writing as
well as a critical component. If a student elects to include some creative writing, the
critical component (which will be at least 2,500 words in length) will be required to
provide a critical and theoretical contextualization to accompany this. If the student
elects not to include a creative writing component, the term-paper will be of the
standard 5,000-word length. It is also possible to submit a paper (a ‘hybrid’ or
‘meddler’) that combines creative and critical writing in the same text.
The aims and objectives of the module are to enable students to develop a greater
understanding and appreciation of psychoanalytic and literary writing, as well as to
develop a greater understanding and appreciation of the practice of creative writing.
Students taking the module will develop skills in psychoanalytically-inflected
approaches to reading literary texts and in the analysis of both creative and critical
writing. They will acquire enhanced capacities for interpreting, questioning and
rethinking the nature and quality of their own (as well as others’) writing and use of
language.
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The core texts for seminars will be:
(1) The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006)
(2) The Module Reader (MR) available through Study Direct
Three brief points of guidance:
(a) It is crucial that you print out a hard copy of material in the MR and bring
it along to the relevant seminar.
(b) You are advised to read Freud’s texts rather than texts about Freud. Read as
much as you can of the Phillips volume, as well as the material in the Module
Reader. There is a ‘new’ Penguin Freud (under Phillips’ editorship), as well as
the Standard Edition (ed. James Strachey). The new Penguin volumes contain
excellent critical introductions and are worth consulting for this reason alone.
In other respects the Standard Edition is often to be preferred. (We will
discuss questions of editions and translations more fully in class.)
(c) Among the most accessible introductory books on Freud are Richard
Wollheim’s and Pamela Thurschwell’s. Also warmly recommended (and in
some respects more detailed in their engagements with the literary and
creative writing) are Jeremy Tambling’s Literature and Psychoanalysis and
Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Cambridge Introduction to Psychoanalysis and
Literature. Maud Ellmann’s Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism is an invaluable
collection of essays, and includes an excellent introduction. provides a very
helpful overview. See, too, the recent wide-ranging collection, A Concise
Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature and Culture, ed. Marcus and
Mukherjee. Laplanche and Pontalis (The Language of Psychoanalysis) is an
indispensable ‘dictionary’ of psychoanalysis.
In preparation for this module you will be expected to have read either Wollheim or
Thurschwell, together with at least a couple of the pieces by Freud in The Penguin
Freud Reader. Before the first seminar, you need to read the material for that
occasion. And please don’t forget to bring the texts along to class! (We all know
about Freudian slips or lapses, or would like to pretend we do.)
MODULE OUTLINE
Week 1
Maud Ellmann, Introduction, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, ed. Maud Ellmann
(London: Longman, 1994), 1-35 (in MR)
Hélène Cixous, ‘Forewarnings’, in Dream I Tell You, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic
(Edinburgh: EUP, 2006), 1-11 (in MR)
Adam Phillips, Introduction to The Penguin Freud Reader, vii-xv
Week 2
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, trans. Alix Strachey, in Pelican Freud Library, vol.
14 (Art and Literature) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 339-76 (in MR)
E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’, in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R.J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 85-125 (in MR)
Week 3
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Patrick Mahony, ‘Proportions of Certainty’, in Freud as a Writer, Expanded Edition
(New Haven: Yale U.P., 1987), 75-96 (in MR)
Nicholas Royle, ‘Reading a Poem’, in Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh:
EUP, 2011), 34-53 (in MR)
W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’ (in MR)
Week 4
Freud, ‘Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition – Some Points of View’,
trans. Alan Tyson, in Pelican Freud Library, vol. 5 (The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 300-44 (in MR)
D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, in The Collected Short Stories of D.H.
Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1974), 734-47 (in MR)
Royle, ‘Literature, Teaching, Psychoanalysis’, in The Uncanny (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003), 51-74 (in MR)
EXAM
Week 5
Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, in Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14 (Art
and Literature) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 130-41 (in MR)
Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, in Poetical Works 1833-1864, ed. Ian Jack
(Oxford: OUP, 1975) (in MR)
Wallace Stevens, ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’ and ‘Mountains Covered with
Cats’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954)
(in MR)
Week 6
Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (in The Penguin Freud Reader)
Peter Brooks, ‘Freud’s Masterplot’, in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in
Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp.90-112 (in MR)
Franz Kafka, ‘A Hunger Artist’, in The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer
(London: Minerva, 1992) (in MR)
Week 7
Writing week
Week 8
Presentations of writing session
Week 9
Freud, ‘Letter to Romain Rolland (A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis)’ (in
The Penguin Freud Reader)
Freud, extract from ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Erotic Life’ (in The Penguin
Freud Reader)
Thomas Hardy, ‘An Imaginative Woman’, in The Distracted Preacher and Other
Tales, ed. Susan Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 305-30 (in MR)
Week 10
Freud, ‘Humour’ and ‘Negation’ (in The Penguin Freud Reader)
Irvine Welsh, ‘The Granton Star Cause’ in The Acid-House (London: Vintage, 1995)
(in MR)
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Nicholas Royle, ‘Hotel Psychoanalysis: Some Remarks on Mark Twain and Sigmund
Freud’, in Angelaki, 9:1 (2004), 3-14 (in MR)
Week 11
Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (in The Penguin Freud Reader)
Tennyson, ‘Mariana’ (in MR)
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, in Selected Stories ed. D. M.
Davin (Oxford: O.U.P., 1981), 252-72 (in MR)
Hélène Cixous, ‘Quick Fiction: Death Fiction’ (in MR)
Week 12
Module overview and discussion of term papers
Module Reader
Contents (in rough order of appearance)
Maud Ellmann, Introduction, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, ed. Maud Ellmann
(London: Longman, 1994), 1-35
Hélène Cixous, ‘Forewarnings’, in Dream I Tell You, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic
(Edinburgh: EUP, 2006), 1-11
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, trans. Alix Strachey, in Pelican Freud Library, vol.
14 (Art and Literature) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 339-76
E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’, in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R.J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 85-125
Patrick Mahony, ‘Proportions of Certainty’, in Freud as a Writer, Expanded Edition
(New Haven: Yale U.P., 1987), 75-96
Nicholas Royle, ‘Reading a Poem’, in Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh:
EUP, 2011), 34-53
W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’, in Selected Poems, ed. Edward
Mendelson (London: Faber, 1979)
Sigmund Freud, ‘Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition – Some Points of
View’, trans. Alan Tyson, in Pelican Freud Library, vol. 5 (The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 300-44
D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, in The Collected Short Stories of D.H.
Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1974), 734-47
Nicholas Royle, ‘Literature, Teaching, Psychoanalysis’, in The Uncanny (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2003), 51-74
Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, in Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14 (Art
and Literature) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 130-41
Peter Brooks, ‘Freud’s Masterplot’, in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in
Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 90-112
Franz Kafka, ‘A Hunger Artist’, in The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer
(London: Minerva, 1992)
Thomas Hardy, ‘An Imaginative Woman’, in The Distracted Preacher and Other
Tales, ed. Susan Hill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 305-30
Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’, in Poetical Works 1833-1864, ed. Ian Jack
(Oxford: OUP, 1975)
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Wallace Stevens, ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’ and ‘Mountains Covered with
Cats’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1954)
Irvine Welsh, ‘The Granton Star Cause’ in The Acid-House (London: Vintage, 1995)
Nicholas Royle, ‘Hotel Psychoanalysis: Some Remarks on Mark Twain and Sigmund
Freud’, in Angelaki, 9:1 (2004), 3-14
Alfred Tennyson, ‘Mariana’
Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, in Selected Stories ed. D. M.
Davin (Oxford: O.U.P., 1981), 252-72
Hélène Cixous, ‘Quick Fiction: Death Fiction’ (available on the ‘Quick Fictions’ app)
Suggested Further Reading
Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus
Incorporation’, in their The Shell and the Kernel, vol.1, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 125-38.
Apter, Emily. Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in
Turn-of-the-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. and
with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969).
Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. London:
Marion Boyars, 1974.
Bersani, Leo. The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Columbia U.P.,
1986.
Bloom, Harold. ‘Freud and the Sublime: A Catastrophe Theory of Creativity’, in Agon:
Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. (Also in
Ellmann.)
Bowlby, Rachel. ‘The Other Day: The Interpretation of Day-dreams’, in Sigmund
Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, ed. Laura Marcus (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999), 160-82.
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.
Bronfen, Elizabeth. ‘Death drive (Freud)’, in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A
Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp.52-7
Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp.90-112.
Brooks, Peter. Psychoanalysis and Storytelling. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
Carter, Angela. Interview, in Novelists in Interview (London: Methuen, 1985), pp.7696.
Cixous, Hélène. ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche
(The “uncanny”)’, trans. Robert Dennomé, New Literary History, 7:3 (1976), 525-48.
Cixous, Hélène, ‘“A Kind of Magic”’, in Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis, ed. Mark
Dawson, Mairead Hanrahan and Eric Prenowitz, special issue of Paragraph, 36:2
(2013).
Clark, Timothy. The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in
Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.
Cohen, Josh. How to Read Freud. London: Granta, 2005.
Cohen, Josh. The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark. London: Granta, 2013.
6
Derrida, Jacques. ‘My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean
Stereophonies’, trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Taking Chances: Derrida,
Psychoanalysis, and Literature, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp.1-32.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’,
trans. Barbara Johnson, in Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A
Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
xi-xlviii.
Derrida, Jacques. ‘To Speculate – on “Freud”’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to
Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987),
pp.259-409.
Derrida, Jacques. Points... Interviews, 1974-1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy
Kamuf and others. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques, Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998.
Derrida, Jacques and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue, trans.
Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.
Ellmann, Maud, ed., Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. London: Longman, 1994.
Felman, Shoshana. Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in
Contemporary Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Freud, Sigmund, material from various volumes in the Standard Edition and/or Pelican
Freud Library, especially PFL vol. 14 (Art and Literature, Penguin, 1985) and/or the
new Penguin volumes (ed. Phillips).
Hoffmann, E.T.A., ‘The Sandman’, in Tales of Hoffmann, trans. R.J. Hollingdale.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982: pp.85-125.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.
Jones, Ernest. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 3 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-57.
Klein, Melanie. ‘Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’, in Love, Guilt
and Reparation and other works 1921-1945, ed. Hannah Segal. London: Vintage, 1998:
344-69.
Kofman, Sarah. ‘The Double is/and the Devil: The Uncanniness of The Sandman (Der
Sandmann)’, in her Freud and Fiction, trans. Sarah Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1991), pp.121-62.
Laplanche, Jean, and J.-B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973.
Mahony, Patrick. Freud as a Writer. Expanded Edition. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press,
1987.
Marcus, Laura and Ankhi Mukherjee, eds. A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis,
Literature and Culture. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014.
Marder, Elissa. The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis,
Photography, Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
Phillips, Adam. On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993.
Phillips, Adam. Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. London: Penguin, 2012.
Phillips, Adam. Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2014.
Rank, Otto. The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study (1914), trans. Harry Tucker, Jr. Chapel
Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1971.
Rashkin, Esther. Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
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Royle, Nicholas, Telepathy and Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
Royle, Nicholas. ‘Hotel Psychoanalysis: Some Remarks on Mark Twain and Sigmund
Freud’, in Angelaki, 9:1 (2004), 3-14.
Royle, Nicholas. ‘Fear of Freud (On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the
Sphere of Literature)’, Oxford Literary Review, 30:1 (2008), 85-121.
Royle, Nicholas. Veering: A Theory of Literature. Edinburgh: EUP, 2011.
Tambling, Jeremy. Literature and Psychoanalysis. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2012.
Thurschwell, Pamela. Sigmund Freud. 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2009.
Weber, Samuel. The Legend of Freud. Expanded edition. Stanford: Stanford U.P., 2000.
Williams, Linda Ruth, Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject.
London: Edward Arnold, 1995.
Wollheim, Richard. Freud. London: Fontana, 1971.
Wright, Elizabeth, ed. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1998.
Young, Robert, ‘Psychoanalytic Criticism: Has It Got Beyond a Joke?’, Paragraph 4
(1984), 87-114.