Abstract
Herman Melville’s long short story ‘Bartleby, The Scrivener’ (1997/1853) aroused a great deal of interest and fascination both within psychoanalysis and philosophy, but had a markedly different reception within those two disciplines. It is my intention here to elaborate on this divergence in understanding not only in order to draw attention to the range of interpretations this famous story gave rise to, but to use it as a means to raise questions about the practice of psychoanalytic interpretation itself. Confronted with a character as patently unassimilable as Bartleby, what does psychoanalysis suggest? Linking Freud’s notion of the ‘foreign body’ with philosophical ideas about immunity, I intend to make the case for the kind of psychoanalysis which retains its original critical, and even provocative, potential. But let us first turn to ‘Bartleby’.
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Prall, W. (2017). To Be or Bartleby—Psychoanalysis and the Crisis of Immunity. In: Auestad, L., Treacher Kabesh, A. (eds) Traces of Violence and Freedom of Thought. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57502-9_4
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