문학작품 읽기를 통한 주체의 형성

The Construction of the Subject through Reading Literary Texts: A Psychoanalytic Approach

The Freudian classical psychoanalytical literary theory holds that the unconscious fantasy in a scene of psychoanalysis and dream can be regarded as the textual unconscious screened through such linguistic mechanisms as condensation, displacement and representability. The linguistic foundation in literature and psychoanalysis, especially a narrative framework, gives a basic common ground in which literature and psychoanalysis work together and contribute mutually. For another analogue, literature is seen to portray vividly, in the imaginary world, the same mental motifs as fantasy, trauma, sublimation, etc. being treated crucially in a psychoanalytic scene. In this sense, this thesis tries to show that a literary text also explicates the complicated mental mechanism through an imagined literary world and can be a good medium to heal the split subject by constituting the subject ever anew as psychoanalytic therapy. I think Freudian reading of “Uncanny” is a good example to demonstrate that a literary text embodies the world of verisimilitude which looks like more plausible than the real world, transcending the bound between reality and fantasy. Lacan’s reading of “Purloined Letter” also, I argue, can be interpreted as an attempt to delineate the primacy of the signifer over the subject and the process of subject’s construction by the signifier. These cases of psychoanalytic literary criticism, I think, suggest the possibility that reading literary texts opens up a meaningful space in which a reader as the subject in a psychoanalytic sense confront himself and his world in a scene of fantasy which is, nevertheless, more real than the reality in a psychical sense, constitutes himself on the path to transformation, healing and growth.