The music box; notes for a discussion on literature and psychoanalysis

Abstract

The image of a little musical box allows the present essay to question the relationship between Iiterature and psychoanalysis. The loss ofinnocence of pleasure in the individual is produced by the realization that an authoritative order rules the work of art.
This does not imply the disappearance of pleasure but its modification. A pleasure that can be experienced as much in surrender to the norm or to the rule as in transgressing it. How to understand the relationship between a scientific practice, a knowledge as
psychoanalysis and the literary criticism of a reading that at times itself aspires to be scientific? The relationship on the one hand between an artist and a literary critic and, on the other, between a psychoanalyst and his/her patient is the same? It is possible to
ínterchange roles, functions, knowledge, practices and arts or skills? Shoshana Felman’s ideas on the relationship between psychoanalysis and literatura are díscussed on the second part of this essay. As a derivation of those ideas the author
of the present essay proposes the function ofthe little musical box’s image as equivalent to that ofthe “interpretative community” (Stanley Fish). The notion of “interpretative community” 1S presentes, in this context, as an equivalent to the order, law and norm of
the little musical box. The remaining challenge is to consider if psychoanalysis and literature can establish a communication avoiding subordination. It means, avoiding the risk that the common code —the norm that allows the little musical box its chance to
exist becomes to be the subordination of literature to psychoanalysis. According to this line ofargumentation the discussion ofthe ways in which pleasure works is proposed. After all, pleasure, game, fiction and simulacrum are raw material/ primitiva material to
literature as much as they are to psychoanalysis.