Why psychoanalysis?

This book is a self-conscious exercise in practical psychoanalysis, what might be called psychotextual criticism. It takes as its focus three poets who have been much on my mind over the last decade: Catullus, Virgil, and Ovid. Far from surveying psychoanalytic theory and critical practice, it constitutes my own idiosyncratic contribution, more Freudian than Lacanian and more literary than cultural, to the variegated tradition of psychoanalytically informed work within Classics. The challenge I have set myself is to engage with psychoanalysis in all its seductive and rebarbative specificity while refraining from making myself too much at home in it – to embrace the discourse without defensive irony, but also without the fortifying passion of certainty. Accordingly, instead of mounting an all-out defense of psychoanalysis, I have chosen to confront theoretical issues as they present themselves in the course of reading. This book could also be described, then, as it were from the other side, as a trio of essays on Latin poetry interlaced with an ongoing assessment of the value of psychoanalysis for literary studies. Naturally, I believe that it does have value. The short answer to the question, “Why psychoanalysis?,” an answer I hope subsequent chapters will substantiate, is: because I believe psychoanalysis still has something to give to the practice of reading poetry; because I believe that it can provide news about poems, that it can make poems read differently – and this is always, for me, what matters the most.