Psychoanalysis was famously termed “the talking cure” by one of Freud’s first patients. As a practice of putting the self to language in speech, psychoanalysis is intimately bound up with the action of the mouth. But what of the pen? What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and writing, and specifically between psychoanalysis and literature? Freud came up with many early psychoanalytic ideas by carrying out a self-analysis in a series of letters to his colleague, Wilhelm Fleiss; his texts have been taken as works of literature in their own right; the insights of psychoanalysis have often been arrived at with literature in mind. Proceeding from Shoshana Felman’s claim that “literature is the unconscious of psychoanalysis,” we will examine the idea of the written text in/and psychoanalysis, keeping always in mind its complex relation to the spoken word. Assignments will include both critical papers and written “self-analyses,” including the keeping of a dream journal. This course fulfills the Literature elective requirement in Literary Studies.