Psychoanalysis and depth therapy have had a profound effect on the world of literature; on the other hand, the world of literature has in many ways anticipated and elucidated the insights of psychoanalysis. I am the farthest thing from an expert in commenting on this relationship; all I do here is list books that have struck the literary-psychoanalytic chord with me in a way I’ve found helpful.
Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels.
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment.
Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
_____. The Underground Man.
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
_____. The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces.
I recognized…that others had already made some of Freud’s discoveries about unconscious motivation and that among these had been great novelists.
—Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious
Depth Therapy & Literature
