Books
A short reading list, with one sentence on what each book is for.
Gustave Flaubert · 1856
A woman whose wanting is shaped entirely by what she has read. Desire arriving already borrowed from somewhere else.
Henrik Ibsen · 1886
A woman gets what she planned for and cannot then live inside it. Freud read Rebecca West as wrecked by success.
Marcel Proust · 1913
A life recovered through memory that arrives unbidden, and a jealousy that outlives the person it was about.
James Joyce · 1922
One Dublin day, and a man circling a home he cannot enter. Lacan spent a year of seminar on what held Joyce together.
James Joyce · 1916
A boy becomes a writer by refusing family, church and country. Lacan read the beating scene as the ego letting go.
Franz Kafka · 1925
A man is charged and never told with what. Guilt as something already in place before any act of his own.
Franz Kafka · 1915
A son wakes as an insect and the household adjusts around him. A body becoming unrecognisable, and the family's response.
Franz Kafka · 1952
Kafka setting out to his father exactly what the man did to him. The paternal function stated without a fictional cover.
Virginia Woolf · 1925
A day of party preparations, and a veteran the doctors cannot hear. The earliest sustained account of shell shock in fiction.
Virginia Woolf · 1927
A house, a mother, and the ten years after her death compressed into a few pages. Mourning that will not resolve.
Italo Svevo · 1923
A memoir written at an analyst's instruction by a patient who lies throughout. The form is the joke and also the point.
Thomas Mann · 1912
A disciplined writer undone by looking at a boy on a beach. Sublimation failing late, and in public.
Arthur Schnitzler · 1926
A marriage shaken by what each of them confesses to having wanted. Freud told Schnitzler he had got there on his own.
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1910
A young man in Paris watching himself come apart. Anxiety and depersonalisation written before either had its name.
Ken Kesey · 1962
A ward, a head nurse, and a man who will not be managed. The institution seen from the bed rather than the office.
Oliver Sacks · 1973
Patients frozen for decades briefly returned by a drug, and what it cost them. Case history written as literature.
Marguerite Duras · 1964
A woman watched her fiance leave with someone else and never quite came back. Lacan wrote Duras an open homage.
Sylvia Plath · Faber and Faber · 1963
A student on a magazine internship losing her hold, and the treatment that follows. Written very close to the life.
Oliver Sacks · Picador · 1985
Twenty four neurological cases written as portraits rather than reports. The book that made the case history readable.
Clive Staples Lewis · Faber and Faber · 1961
Notebooks kept after his wife died, published as they stood. Mourning recorded while it happens rather than recalled.