What does psychoanalysis have to do with literary theory?
The psychoanalytic relation to literary analysis is maintained in the modern Structuralist movement of the 1960s when literature, using Saussure and Jakobson, developed a theory within a linguistic meta-language. Although the development of this literary relation to psychoanalysis, largely due to Lacan, never found a home in the French university (as there was already a Lacaninan psychoanalytic department in the university), it received a welcome in America, and to a lesser extent in Germany and England (the authors of this page are unfamiliar with other countries). Today, Lacanian psychoanalysis in the American university is mainly found either in comparative literature departments in relation with critical studies, cultural studies, interdisciplinary studies, continental philosophy, or marketing communications; or sometimes taught in psychology departments along with Freud in the History of Psychology. Most would agree, however — at least the most honest professors among us — that ps
