Abstract

In 1908, Freud publishes “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”, an essay based on an informal speech he gave, that focuses on the psychoanalytical relationship between the literary author and his/her work and that establishes an analogy between the writing process and the writer’s unfulfilled dreams. Peter Brooks takes precisely this essay as the starting point for his work on the intersection of psychoanalysis and literature. What is then the relationship between narratology and psychoanalysis? How to study psychoanalysis with literature (or the other way around)? What have been the traditional approaches to their intersection? To answer these questions, I examine notions of the inside and outside of law, starting with Rinconete and Cortadillo, the exemplary novel [novela ejemplar] by Cervantes, about two characters who live outside of society’s laws. The exemplary novel contains a terrific theory on the trauma of deidentification -the splitting of the ego through nominalization and materialization. I analyze Cervantes’ construction of the narrative voice as a trickster, both inside and outside of narration, alongside Freudian theories – namely the splitting of the ego and its subsequent Verleugnung. Finally, I explore conventions in the intersection between literature and psychoanalysis offered by Freud and highlighted by Brooks, to see how the former is also escaping some of these apparent laws.