Psychoanalysis and literature

The author placed in this book the first brick for the concept of textual analysis as a critical evaluative reading in the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. The textual analyst, unlike the traditional psycho critic, makes the literary text and not the author the subject of analysis, and the analysis is based on the premise that every literary text has a "subconscious," meaning it is a work resulting from an unconscious discourse. Therefore, textual analysis readings begin from the unconscious and end with the text. Bailman-Noël believes that psychoanalysis and literature work in the same way, as they read the human being in his daily life and within his historical destiny, seeking to reach truths by talking about the human being as he speaks. He says, "Psychoanalysis is not only a science, but it is better than science because it is an art of dismantling the truth in all the enigmatic sectors of human experience, as lived by the human being, meaning as he narrates it to himself or to others." Jean Bailman-Noël sees that Freud early on realized that dreams represent the path to the unconscious, considering that the dream is a narrated story produced by the dreamer when he regains consciousness, meaning it is a verbalized narrative. Likewise, the dream presents itself as a text woven by representations and emotions, but it is not a message from one to another, because dreams do not speak or think. Freud emphasizes that it is an act occurring between desire and narration. The literary text is composed of this act and within it; it is an original text that offers a discourse for reading without a title, prior intention, or specific level. The author concludes the necessity of investing in what Freud said about dreams in reading the literary text, given the strong resemblance between the two. Therefore, he admits that when a person reads a literary work, he is reading himself within it, and through reading, an unconscious interaction occurs between the reader's unconscious and another unconscious. Here, Jean Bailman-Noël recalls an important article by Freud titled "The Poet and Imagination," in which Freud answers a fundamental question: why does the writer succeed where the awake dreamer, who narrates his dreams, fails? The book ends with a chapter on "Reading the Text," meaning that we should read the literary text away from its author. The text is that thing through which a person becomes different, and this difference is infinite because writing is otherness and at the same time subjectivity, starting from the self to the other. Jean Bailman-Noël based his idea on the fact that the literary text is something that does not conform to the self or the world, and therefore, the text must be read away from the author's unconscious.