Theory -- Writing Through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis by Michael G. Levine

Writing Through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis Michael G. Levine. Writing Through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 220 pp.

The absence of conjunctions in the subtitle of Levine's book announces what is at stake in his reading of psychoanalytic, literary, and critical texts: a rethinking of the relationship between theory and literature, a relationship in which psychoanalytic theory is characteristically used as a key to unlocking the hidden meaning of literature. Through readings of works by Heine, Freud, Benjamin, Baudelaire, Ovid, and Kafka, Levine proposes an alternative understanding of the relation between literature and psychoanalysis. When brought into dialogue with one another, psychoanalytic and literary texts, according to Levine, mutually displace the terms and structure of their relationship. Shoshana Felman's writing about this issue serves as a point of departure for Levine's thinking about the concept of displacement, as does the work of Samuel Weber.

Levine's first step in reconceptualizing the relation between psychoanalysis and literature is to examine Freud's discussions of censorship. Focusing on The Interpretation of Dreams, Levine demonstrates how the concept of censorship, in many ways...