Psychoanalysis and Literature

A psychoanalyst in private practice, Charles provides an adroit exploration of the ways in which literature and clinical work often function as mappings of the same terrain—terrain that is at once intellectual, emotional, and behavioral. By bringing her work with patients in sync with her readings of literary texts—by writers from Herman Melville to Virginia Woolf to John Fowles—the author is able to look at the human condition, and the lived lives of her patients, from a vantage point outside the individual therapeutic case. Literature and literary metaphor afford Charles a mode of inquiry that has the special capacity to highlight the structures and patterns that underlie the particulars of a person's life. Charles's investigations of texts and lives crosses the territory of sensory experience, trauma, dreams, relatedness, and identity issues related to the collision of culture, aging, and death. One strength of the book is the author's refusal to pathologize the individual dilemmas playing out in her consulting room; she always sees her patients' lives as part of the larger human condition that literature has mapped independent of the healing arts and sciences. This book will have great appeal to those whose interests are humanistic, clinical, and philosophical, whatever the level of preparation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. -- Michael Uebel, University of Texas * CHOICE *
One of my graduate school professors was fond of telling us that our role as therapists was to be the keepers of others’ stories. Psychoanalysis is a perspective keenly centered on the stories we tell ourselves, both about our own lives and in the realm of fictions. Charles’ Psychoanalysis and Literature is a great contribution to this ever-fruitful conversation. * Psychology Today *
"Marilyn Charles unites the dimensions of literature and clinical encounters, creating a fresh perspective of their mutually illuminating interplay. Exploring the value of the unconscious, dreams, myths and metaphors, this precious volume brims with transformative wisdom. Charles conveys the poetry of life’s journey, directing us to live fully, in the experience of mind, body and world and to open deeply to pain and pleasure, trauma and insight––from birth to death." -- Danielle Knafo, Ph.D., Long Island University, author of Dancing with the Unconscious
“Marilyn Charles has given us a profound work, a writing clearly destined to become a classic in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. Her powerful, deeply creative, moving, and accessible prose carries us from literature to dreams to the clinical experience, with an unparalleled intellectual grace and spacious depth of feeling. She succeeds in her effort ‘to understand some essential patterns at the core of the dilemma of being human.’ This is truly a remarkable book that will leave a deep and lasting impression on our field and beyond.” -- Paul Lippmann, Ph.D., William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Institute
“Readers from many fields—clinical, academic, and  non-professional—will be enriched by this book. With her emphasis upon metaphor, creativity, and the discovery of human experience, Marilyn Charles explores literary and psychoanalytic relations with fresh, sensitive, and smartly subtle intelligence.” -- Marshall Alcorn, PhD, George Washington University
From the narratives of The Stories We Live, one cannot fail to appreciate Marilyn Charles’s devotion to psychoanalysis….This book shows exquisite breadth in its choices and illuminations of psychoanalytic foundations and directions. Her case studies shadowed by literary tales, bring analysis very close to the reader.… [who] is necessarily engaged with Charles’s love of psychoanalysis, her love of literature, and her fidelity to her patients. -- Kareen Malone, PhD, University of West Georgia