To Be or Bartleby—Psychoanalysis and the Crisis of Immunity

Abstract

I would like to turn to the reception of Melville's story first within psychoanalytic and then philosophical literature; I will leave aside the extensive commentary within literature criticism and American studies. Christopher Bollas interprets Bartleby in terms of autism; the protagonist's 'breakdown into negativity is a mimetic representation of a need to find a nurturing space where he can regress towards the healing of a "basic fault" in the self.' The one psychoanalytic contribution which does not locate Bartleby on the side of the patient is by the German psychoanalyst Schneider who uses Bartleby's stance to illustrate what he calls an atopic analytic position. It is important to bear in mind that these are not just different ways of understanding the 'clinical material', but that they stem from a different position in relation to socially dominant discourses and might therefore lead to a very different kind of praxis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)