大象传媒

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss role of Freudian analysis in understanding the great works of literature. Freud said, 鈥淭he poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied鈥�. Psychoanalysis has always been more than a 鈥榯alking cure鈥� and it has strong ties to literature, but one hundred years after the publication of the first great work of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, critics are putting the scientific basis of Freud鈥檚 work in grave doubt and he is in danger of being pitched in with poets. The great American critic Harold Bloom has said 鈥淔reud, the writer will survive the death of psychoanalysis鈥�, and the analyst and writer Adam Phillips seems to go further in his new book Promises Promises where he writes, 鈥淚 think of Freud as a romantic writer, and I read psychoanalysis as poetry, so I don鈥檛 have to worry whether it is true or even useful鈥�.So what is the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature, and if it is to be reclassified as literature itself can it still be practised as a talking cure?With Adam Phillips, author of Promises Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature; Malcolm Bowie, Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature, Oxford University; Lisa Appignanesi novelist and co-author of Freud鈥檚 Women.