Coetzee and Psychoanalysis

In this chapter, Jean-Michel Rabaté complicates the opposition between literature and philosophy by exploring Coetzee’s transactions with psychoanalysis, particularly through Lacanian or Derridian ways of thinking about Freudian theories. In his wide-ranging exploration of the literature of psychoanalysis in relation to Coetzee’s oeuvre, and the traditions and backgrounds which resonate with his work, Rabaté emphasizes the porous boundaries between the literary and the psychoanalytical. And yet, in exploring the approach taken by other critics working with psychoanalysis, like the reduction of the Lacanian ‘Other’ to the concept of ‘allegory’, Rabaté questions the way in which psychoanalysis has been ‘applied’ to Coetzee’s fiction, arguing for a more complex relationship between the literary and the psychoanalytical.

Allegory · Art · Freudian slip · Literature · Opposition (politics) · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database) · African cultural and philosophical studies · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Philosophy · Psychology · South African History and Culture · j. m. Coetzee (1940-)