(MIS)ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE:

A BRIEF HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Abstract

Since its beginning, psychoanalysis has been interested in literary productions; however, its interfaces are permeated by divergences, primarily attributed to psychoanalysis's first appropriations of the literary object. The first psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, initially dedicated himself to the relationship between author and work, not only in literature but in art in general, privileging the investigation of the author's psychic life to the detriment of artistic production. However, in some works, he overcame this determinism, as is the case of the text Das Unheimliche (1919), when investigating the short story The Sandman, by E.T.A Hoffman, in which Freud highlights the aspects of the narrative and its characters and not the writer's Oedipal novel. Psychoanalysis inherits from Freud, and reaffirms with the Lacanian contribution, the recognition of the cultural aspect of literature as a fruitful material for studying language, social ties, and the highlights of each era, through fiction that is made up of the same material as an analysis: the word, considering the specificities of the literary field and privileging the interpretation of the layers of meaning of the text. In seeking to understand the post-Freudian mutations in the approach to literature, we examine the contributions of some contemporary psychoanalysts to understand the confluences between these two fields, such as Heloisa Caldas (2007), Shoshana Felman (2020), Lucia Castello Branco (2022) and Cleusa Rios P. Passos (2009), who follow in the Lacanian footsteps of breaking with other reductionist practices and pathologization of characters and the author.