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From the perspective of literary studies, the discovery of Lacan in the mid-1970s, initially by feminist and Marxist literary critics, revitalized the rather moribund practice of psychoanalytic criticism and reinstated psychoanalysis at the cutting edge of critical theory. After much initial enthusiasm for Freudian and post-Freudian readings of literature (see Wright (1998) for an account of classical Freudian readings), psychoanalytic criticism had degenerated into the reductive practice of identifying Oedipal scenarios within texts and spotting phallic symbolism. Lacan's conception of the unconscious as structured like a language (see Chapter 4) and the relationship between the symbolic order and the subject (see Chapter 2) opened up a whole new way of understanding the play of unconscious desire in the text. The object of psychoanalytic criticism was no longer to hunt for phallic symbols or to explain Hamlet's hesitation to revenge his father's death by his repressed sexual desire for his mother (see Jones 1949) but to analyse the way unconscious desires manifest themselves in the text, through language. The focus of Lacanian criticism, therefore, is not upon the unconscious of the character or the author but upon the text itself and the relationship between text and reader.
Psychoanalytically based approaches to literature and the other arts take a wide variety of forms.
