This thesis introduces and explores Jacques Lacan's controversial topologisation of psychoanalysis and attempts to establish whether or not it was necessary, successful or important by providing readings of texts that have been largely ignored by the Anglo-American reception of Lacan (such as ‘L'étourdit' and Seminar XXII). In Part I, Lacan's efforts to present the topological architecture of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary are introduced as inextricably linked with less hermetic topics such as his concerns regarding the future of (institutional) psychoanalysis and his own legacy. Two particular figures (the infinite straight line and the knot) are looked at as exemplifying some of the theoretical impasses that Lacan hoped the writing of topological structure would formalise rather than resolve. Part II explains the purpose of each of the figures of Lacan's ‘surface' topology (the Möbius strip, the torus and the cross-cap). In Part III, his ‘topological turn' is given context by being examined alongside some of the more well-known and well-regarded elements of the Lacanian bricolage such as linguistics and logic. The role topology played in the ‘return to Freud' is also examined and some key principles of topological reading and interpretation are established. The question of how the shift from an unconscious ‘structured like a language' to an unconscious that is structured topologically (and thus not entirely reducible to linguistic mechanisms) might affect psychoanalytic literary criticism is addressed in Part IV. The thesis concludes in Part V by returning to some of the issues and questions raised in Part I, concentrating particularly on the validity and consequences of Lacan's provocative contention that, with the Borromean knot, he produced writings that ‘support a real.' We will also see how it is that with these nodal writings Lacan finally distinguished psychoanalysis from science, philosophy and religion.

This thesis explores how we might think the relation between psychoanalysis and the cultural field through Donald Winnicott's concept of the environment, seeking to bring the concept into dialogue with more “classical” strands of psychoanalytic theorizing. A substantial introduction sets out the rationale behind the thesis by reading Freud and Winnicott in relation to the “classic” and the “romantic” (Strenger 1989), or the “negative” and “positive” (Rustin 2001), in psychoanalytic thought. It goes on to outline the value of bringing these tendencies together in order to think the relationship between psychoanalysis, culture and change. The chapters which follow move from psychoanalysis as a “cultural cure” – a method and discourse drawing on and feeding into a broad conception of cultural life – towards a notion of “culture as cure” informed by Winnicott's theory of the environment. Chapter one examines Freud's refusal of the “culture”/ “civilization” distinction and considers what it means for the idea of a cultural cure. Chapter two considers whether Winnicott's thinking about “culture” ultimately prioritises the aesthetic over the political. Chapter three uses Aldous Huxley's Brave New World ([1932] 1994) to explore an analogy between totalitarianism, technology and maternal care. Chapter four turns to the series In Treatment (HBO 2008-) to think about the intersections of therapy and technology in terms of reflection and recognition. Chapter five employs Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005) as a means to reflect on the capacity of culture to cure. Ultimately, I suggest that social “cure” may require more than “good-enough” cultural forms and objects, but Winnicott's “romantic” theorization of the aesthetic, coupled with a “classic” attention to structures of power and oppression may offer a means of thinking the relationship between psychoanalysis and culture in potentially transformative ways.

This thesis argues that the short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen is acutely preoccupied with reading emotion. Despite the growth of Bowen criticism, her stories remain understudied and this project proposes that their marginal status corresponds to this preoccupation. Through a close engagement with the literary representations of emotion at work in selected Bowen's stories, read alongside Bowen criticism, short story theory, and work on emotion, however, I show how her stories not only anticipate, but radically disrupt, current emotion theory. Recent theorisations of, and research on, emotion and affect across the disciplines tend to rely on the readability of emotion, emphasising the interpretation of specific emotions and reviving practices of affective criticism. Yet Bowen‟s short fiction foregrounds emotion‟s textuality: rather than allow us to read emotion „in‟ literature, I argue that her stories theorise the literariness of emotion. The project begins by suggesting a correspondence between her stories‟ engagement with emotion and their status, both within her literary oeuvre and in Bowen scholarship, to suggest that the complexity of her short fiction is often under-represented by occluding the deconstructions emotion mobilises. This enables us to map critical debates amongst Bowen scholars about the radicality of Bowen‟s fiction onto wider narratives about emotion and critical resistances to its textuality. I go on to undertake close readings of selected stories to show how Bowen‟s short fiction destabilises, rather than reinforces, the geographies of subjectivity, reality, time, and materiality to which emotion is presumed to belong. This project extends Bowen criticism that observes the ways her work anticipates psychoanalytical and Derridean readings, but through its focus on the short story it offers the second focused study of Bowen‟s short fiction, and the first study of her short fiction to be informed by critical emotion theory. Not only does this thesis carve out a new territory within Bowen scholarship, but it offers a timely contribution to problems in thinking emotion and affect in literary criticism and theory. More broadly, it is my hope that my reading of Bowen demonstrates the necessity of attending to the textuality of emotion in the reading and theorisation of emotion across the disciplines.