In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis by Alicia Mireles Christoff
• Christine Maksimowicz (bio)

Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis by Alicia Mireles Christoff. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, 269 pages.

Editor's Note

At the end of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud reminds his readers that dreams link past, present and future through the representation of desire. By this measure, Alicia Christoff's Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis (2019) is a dream of a book, linking the past (Victorian Novels), the present (British Object Relations), and the future (conceptions of interpretive possibilities). In a boldly imaginative and brilliantly realized display of interdisciplinary psychoanalytic criticism, Novel Relations interweaves close reading of Victorian Novels by Thomas Hardy and George Eliot with masterful summaries and uses of major British Object Relations theorists to show how the novels can be understood through the theories that they often anticipate and helped to create.

Although the recognition of Winnicott's importance for literary interpretation began some half century ago, Christoff expands the theoretical field to include Balint, Bion, Betty Joseph, Paula Heimann, Masud Kahn and more contemporary writers such as Thomas Ogden, Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas. She presents her book as "at its base a work of literary theory and criticism" (2019, p. 16) and amply displays her engagement in and mastery of the trends and debates within Victorian Studies, but her phenomenology of the reading experience also teaches us how post-Kleinian theories can be illuminated by close listening to the voices and stylistic music of the novels. With equal emphasis on both words in her title, [End Page 185] the process of fluently working through variations of interrelations among novels, readers, critics and theorists, Novel Relations creates an original and very promising form of psychoanalytic interpretive writing, one which can be of lasting benefit to both literary scholars and psychoanalytic clinicians.

Alicia Christoff's book exemplifies the interdisciplinary aims of American Imago, and in the review essay that follows, Christine Maksimowicz captures the essence and unique value of Novel Relations.

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Some months back while searching the web for something that I now can't recall, I stumbled upon an interesting conversation between Paul Holdengräber and Adam Phillips about writing. Holdengräber, a generous and thoughtful reader, reminding me a bit of Michael Silverblatt of Bookworm fame, was taken by the particular ways in which Phillips uses quotations and epigraphs in his books, and asked Phillips about his relation to other writers. In response, Phillips entered into something of a reverie state, reflecting on a handful of writers with whom he described having an elective affinity—Emerson, Whitman and Melville, among them. Yet it was not the specificities of Phillips' affinity with these American writers that stuck so powerfully with me weeks after listening to this conversation. Rather the thing that took hold were Phillips' thoughts about the powerful feelings that may be engendered when encountering writing that strikes a resonant chord within us. Writing that does more than elicit our keenest interests, but also expresses things that we've thought or might have thought, but have never quite been able to articulate.

One's response to this kind of writing is often powerful…and complicated, sometimes conflictual. Drawing upon his psychoanalytic vocabulary, Phillips described the "happily dependent" part of ourselves as responding with gratitude for this other writer that we experience as "speaking," in a sense, on our own behalf. "How wonderful it is," and here I'm paraphrasing Phillips' sentiments, "to live in a world in which other people express thoughts and feelings in ways that we could not have done ourselves." But of course, our feelings are rarely so unequivocally felt. Phillips then went on to say that there also exists the "unhappily dependent" part of ourselves, the part that [End Page 186] in encountering a text that expresses something resonant with our deepest convictions feels something other than pleasure. The experience elicits envy and a sense of our own inadequacy for not being able to do what this other writer has accomplished with such eloquence and intelligence—or whatever qualities we most wish for our own writing. "Shit," Phillips described the...

中文翻译：

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小说的关系：维多利亚时代的小说和英国的心理分析，作者艾丽西亚·米勒莱斯·克里斯托夫（Alicia Mireles Christoff）（评论）

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

审核人：

• 小说的关系：维多利亚时代的小说和英国人的心理分析，艾丽西亚·米勒莱斯·克里斯托夫（Alicia Mireles Christoff）
• 克里斯汀·马克西莫维奇（Christine Maksimowicz）（生物）

小说的关系：维多利亚时代的小说和英国的精神分析，作者艾丽西亚·米雷莱斯·克里斯托夫（Alicia Mireles Christoff）。普林斯顿：普林斯顿大学出版社，2019年，269页。

编者注

在《梦的解释》（1899）的结尾处，弗洛伊德提醒他的读者，梦是通过欲望的表现将过去，现在和未来联系在一起的。通过这种方法，艾丽西娅·克里斯托夫（Alicia Christoff）的小说关系：维多利亚小说和英国精神分析（2019）是一本书的梦想，它将过去（维多利亚小说），现在（英国客体关系）和未来（解释可能性的概念）联系在一起。在跨学科的精神分析批评的大胆想象力和出色实现的展示中，小说关系与Thomas Hardy和George Eliot的维多利亚小说紧密结合，结合了精湛的摘要以及主要的英国对象关系理论家的使用，以展示如何通过他们经常预见并帮助创造的理论来理解小说。

尽管对温尼科特对文学解释的重要性的认识始于半个世纪前，但克里斯托夫扩大了理论领域，包括巴林特，比昂，贝蒂·约瑟夫，保拉·海曼，马苏德·卡恩，以及更多当代作家，如托马斯·奥格登，亚当·菲利普斯和克里斯托弗·博拉斯。她将她的书作为“文学理论和批评著作的基础”（2019，第16页）进行介绍，并充分展示了她对维多利亚时代研究趋势和辩论的参与和掌握，但她的阅读经验现象学也能教人我们通过密切聆听小说中的声音和风格音乐如何阐明后克莱因理论。[End Page 185]在标题中同时强调两个词通过流畅地通过小说，读者，评论家和理论家之间相互关系的变化而工作的过程，小说关系创造了一种新颖而很有前途的精神分析解释性写作形式，对文学学者和精神分析临床医生而言，这都是持久的益处。

艾丽西亚·克里斯托夫（Alicia Christoff）的书体现了《美国依玛歌》（American Imago）的跨学科目标，在随后的评论文章中，克里斯汀·马克西莫维奇（Christine Maksimowicz）抓住了小说关系的本质和独特价值。

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几个月前，当我在网上搜索我现在不记得的东西时，我偶然发现了PaulHoldengräber和Adam Phillips之间关于写作的有趣对话。慷慨周到的读者Holdengräber，让我想起了书呆子的迈克尔·西尔弗布拉特（Michael Silverblatt）菲利普斯在书中使用引文和题词的特殊方式使他声名me起，并询问菲利普斯与其他作家的关系。作为回应，菲利普斯进入了一种遐想的状态，反思了他描述与之具有选择性亲密关系的少数作家-艾默生，惠特曼和梅尔维尔。然而，在听完这场谈话几周​​后，并不是菲利普斯与这些美国作家的亲密关系的特殊之处对我如此坚定。真正引起关注的是菲利普斯（Phillips）的思想，即在遇到引起我们内心共鸣的写作时可能产生的强烈情感。写作不仅能引起我们最大的兴趣，而且还能表达我们已经想到或可能想到的东西，

一个人对这种写作的反应通常是有力的……复杂的，有时是矛盾的。菲利普斯利用他的心理分析词汇，形容自己的“快乐依赖”部分是对这位其他作家的感激之情，在某种意义上，我们是代表自己说话的。菲利普斯（Phillips）的观点是：“生活在这个世界上，其他人以我们无法做到的方式表达思想和情感，这真是太棒了”。但是，当然，很少有人会如此明确地感受到我们的感受。菲利普斯接着说，我们自己中还存在着“不幸的依赖”部分，[End Page 186]遇到文字表达了与我们最深切的信念共鸣的东西时，会感到愉悦之余。这种经历使人羡慕不已，并感到我们自己的不足之处，就是他们无法以这样的口才和才智来完成其他作家已经完成的工作-或者我们最希望自己的写作具有什么特质。“该死，”菲利普斯形容...