12
PARTISAN REVIEW
analysis developed by modern criticism. In fact, psychoanalytic criti–
cism cannot be pursued as a different critical approach, one that is
autonomous and self-sufficient. When it is so employed, outside the
field of criticism and by people unaware of its history, psychoanalytic
literary analysis usually assumes the more banal critical ideas cur–
rent at the time, and is quite unsophisticated both in its approach
and in its conclusions .
It
might appear that deconstructionist critics who use psycho–
analysis are relating it to modern criticism, because they are con–
cerned with literary theory. But their method actually is quite nar–
row: it consists mainly of a mingling of psychoanalytic ideas with a
reconstruction of the text. Someone like Lacan, on the other hand,
though influenced by deconstruction and linguistics, interprets liter–
ary texts in much the same manner as earlier orthodox psychoana–
lytic critics.
What I am suggesting is that psychoanalytic critics should know
as much about literary criticism as they expect literary critics to know
about psychoanalysis. It might then be discovered that the role of
psychoanalysis is not to invent a new mode of criticism but to add to
the knowledge that is brought to the critical reading of literature.
W.p.
