From Fiction to Psychoanalysis: Reimagining a Relationship

How can reading literary fiction shed light on the way we speak ourselves within psychoanalysis? Rather than offering psychoanalytic insights into literature, Rosemary Rizq, a practicing psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, explores what literary fiction can bring to psychoanalysis.

In this fascinating collection of essays, she draws on stories written by authors ranging from Henry James to Kazuo Ishiguro and Colm Tóibín. By investigating the possibilities for ‘fruitful encounter and dynamic exchange’ between psychoanalysis and literature, Rizq sets out to offer a fresh perspective on theoretical ideas that are often presented within the psychoanalytic literature in abstract, overly technical ways. In a remarkably fresh approach, this book explores how fiction can inform, illuminate and even transform our understanding of psychoanalysis.

Written for practicing clinicians, academics and students as well as for the wider public, this book offers an original and revealing perspective on the overlapping knowledge-claims and concerns of both literary fiction and psychoanalysis.

Rosemary Rizq is a psychologist chartered with the British Psychological Society, an HCPC-registered counselling psychologist and a UKCP-accredited psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked extensively in the NHS as a psychologist and psychotherapist, authoring numerous papers on organizational dynamics as well as on psychotherapeutic training and clinical practice. She is currently professor of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton, with a part-time private practice in West London. She is co-editor of The Industrialisation of Care, published by PCCS Books in 2019.