Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction

by Malcolm Bowie

The views of Freud, Proust and Lacan are depicted through this staging of a series of provocative dialogues between psychological science and imaginative literature of the twentieth century.

Genres: Theory

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Peter Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malcolm Bowie's book sets out to look at the interplay between theory and fiction in Freud, Proust, and Lacan. "'Theory' and 'fiction are, after all, alternative names for the verbal productions of those who indulge in an 'as if' thinking about the world," he reasons in the Introduction (pp.5-6).

The structure of the book is straightforward enough: Chapter 1 focuses on how Freud turns to fiction in order to think through his theory, a pattern that is reversed in Chapter 2, where Bowie examines how Proust's characters theorize and philosophize in the course of his fiction. Chapter 3 then brings together Freud and Proust to consider their shared interest in questions of language and sexuality.

The final two chapters on Lacan seem rather out of place here. Chapter 4 is largely an overview of Lacan's main theories, especially with regard to Lacan's formula that "the unconscious is structured like a language," while Chapter 5 examines how Lacan uses literature in talking about psychoanalysis. Bowie seems refreshingly suspicious of Lacan's use of literature - too often, he intimates, Lacan uses literature on the provision that it behaves as an obedient servant of the more important discourse of psychoanalysis. He also makes a fascinating contrast between the implicit way Hegel uses Karl Moor, the protagonist of Schiller's The Robbers, with the explicit way that Lacan replaces Moor with Alceste (from Molière's The Misanthrope) in order to make a similar point.

The epilogue is an extended meditation on how the varying dilemmas of Bowie's titular authors reflect the fate of Actaeon, the way the theory has a tendency to turn on the writer of fiction (Proust), or the fiction to turn on the writer of theory (Freud).

Bowie presents his ideas in an elegant and erudite package. Nonetheless, I never really felt as though this book, despite glimpses of brilliance, quite came together as a coherent and forceful argument.

[Sara Mahran · Rating 3 out of 5]

الكتاب حلو واستمتعت بأول فصوله جدا، لكن جزء لاكان وآخر جزء اللي بيناقش فيه الربط بين ال٣ شخصيات ونظرياتهم مكنش مفهوم بالنسبة ليا، ومحستش بربط قوي بالذات بين لاكان وفرويد، لكن عامة كتاب يستاهل يتقري.

[Benjamin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is pure shit. It appears to attempt to build a case of unraveling the mystery of what is a theory apart from what is a fiction and presumes the necessity of the relevance of the distinction-when the author's own befuddlement appears more to be the source of the difference in it's origin. The 80's in British literary critique must've been a weird time. Irrelevant book and thesis. I stopped reading on page 11.