Quote:
Originally Posted by Merope
I recently went to a couple of lectures on psychoanalysis in literature. The guy giving the lecture was a practising psychoanalyst and also a professor of literature. I don't remember his exact words, but he mentioned something about readers subconsciously projecting their own fantasies onto a given text, making reading subjective.
I really like the Adam Phillips quote...I personally tend to find "useful" anything that is moving, or meaningful or laden with something that intrigues me. I also think that the terms "useful" and "true" are subjective and malleable based on our inner thoughts and feelings. The human mind is like poetry...we often tend to dig deeply for meaning and in that sense, psychoanalysis can't be an exact science. You can't try to make sense of something fluid and oblique using sharp and rigid tools.
|
I read something similar but pertaining to the author not reader. It makes sense when you read some of the intense psychoanalytic stuff and feel like you are sort of inside the author's mind.
I've felt this way about Otto Kernberg, for example. He is very dark and pessimistic, but complicated, and when reading his material, I got a sense that his theories reflected his own inner world. Which seems quite cold and analytic.
At the same time, I am ok with this perspective in general because there is much art, symbolism, subjectivity involved. But mostly, I think, ways to describe very abstract concepts that perhaps cannot be explained effectively in other ways. Introjection that occurs in infanthood, which is aptly described in object relations theory, used to be explained as demonic possession. Maybe some day it will be explained using physics or biology; even spirituality...but we aren't there yet.
I'm very open to different ways of expressing or explaining things, and looking at things from many different angles.