Lacan, Poe, and Narrative Repression

Recent thinking about psychoanalysis has led literary theory resolutely back to the concept of repression as one of the most important tropes in the Freudian interpretation of literature. This move runs clearly counter to the tradition of psychoanalytic criticism in America-based on ego psychology-which all but vanquished repression and the unconscious processes that attend it and has kept both from having any import in interpretation.3 In 1959 Norman 0. Brown does call for a return to the concept of repression, but he is little concerned with the implications for interpretation. In the Continental tradition newly influential in America, owing to Jacques Lacan and the French Freudians, repression is the principal figure without which psychoanalysis sinks into what Edmund Husserl called, pejoratively, psychologizing-the mere privileging of psychological concepts and terms without a corresponding development in analysis. The Lacanian claim to a legitimate psychoanalytic reading is based on Freud's ideas about transformation in language, in which repression is a functional principle within systems of discourse; those systems, taken together, constitute textuality. By functional principle, I mean that repression is not a simple event (as traditional Freudian