Psychoanalysis and depth therapy have had a profound effect on the world of literature; on the other hand, the world of literature has in many ways anticipated and elucidated the insights of psychoanalysis. I am the farthest thing from an expert in commenting on this relationship; all I do here is list books that have struck the literary-psychoanalytic chord with me in ways I’ve found illuminating and helpful.

  • Edward St. Aubyn, The Patrick Melrose Novels. 

  • Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment.

  • Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots.

  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

  • _____. Crime and Punishment.

  • _____. The Underground Man.

  • George Eliot, Middlemarch.

  • Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels.

  • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary.

  • Henry James, Portrait of a Lady.

  • Min Jin Lee, Pachinko.

  • Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

  • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.

  • _____. The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

  • C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces.  

I recognized…that others had already made some of Freud’s discoveries about unconscious motivation and that among these had been great novelists.

—Alasdair MacIntyre, The Unconscious

Depth Therapy & Literature