This panel examines the surprising and belated turn toward object relations psychoanalysis in literary studies and the humanities in the twenty-first century—a turn that has long been anticipated in clinical contexts, particularly in the British analytic tradition. While earlier waves of psychoanalytic literary criticism often drew on drive-based Freudian models operating within a “hermeneutics of suspicion”—focused on excavating repressed content or diagnosing the psychic architecture of characters—the work of Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, and their interlocutors reorients us toward a different set of concerns. What if psychoanalytic reading is not an act of deciphering buried truths, but an affectively charged and intersubjective encounter marked by containment, projection, and transformation?

Taking up this question, the panel investigates what new forms of reading emerge from an object relations framework, and how this lens can help make visible practices already latent within contemporary literature. More than a method of interpretation, object relations offers an epistemology—a way of understanding subjectivity, knowledge, and reading praxes. It prompts us to reconsider how ingrained habits of attention and interpretation might be reshaped when we take relationality, rather than depth or suspicion, as our starting point.

This shift in the humanities has broader implications. The forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity envisioned by object relations challenge both the neoliberal fantasy of the autonomous, optimizing self and the authoritarian pull toward totalizing collectivity, instead foreground permeability, ambivalence, dependency, and co-creation. The renewed attention to psychoanalysis within literary studies and the humanities more broadly has been widely observed across major cultural and intellectual platforms, from The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Dirt Magazine to The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian. These publications have variously documented what appears to be Freud’s surprising return to intellectual relevance. Yet the panel proposes that the Freud reappearing in this moment is not the suspicious diagnostician of repression and drive, but a relational Freud—one whose thought anticipates many of the central tenets of object relations theory.

Rather than equating reading with therapy or imagining literary texts as patients, this panel approaches the analytic encounter as a site of conceptual borrowing. We ask what literary reading might learn from the psychoanalytic emphasis on asymmetry, attunement, and mutual transformation—and, conversely, how literary texts might offer models of relationality that push psychoanalytic thought in new directions.

The panel brings together scholars and clinicians across disciplinary backgrounds—including literary studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, affect theory, sound studies, and neuropsychology—and at varying stages of their professional lives, including graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, practicing clinicians, and tenured faculty, representing institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Their talks span genres, historical periods, and intellectual traditions, modeling the heterogeneity and generativity of this psychoanalytic turn.

Valerio Amoretti (postdoctoral fellow, soon-to-be assistant professor at UCSB’s English Department and Program in Literature and Mind) opens the panel with “Toward a Bionian Theory of Reading.” Drawing on Bion’s notion of emotional processing and containment, Amoretti identifies two relational dynamics in reading: one in which the reader metabolizes the text’s affective overflow, and one in which the text contains and gives shape to the reader’s unrepresented feelings. His paper reframes literary reading as an asymmetrical, co-constitutive process of psychic transformation.

James Curley-Egan (psychoanalyst in private practice; faculty, Mount Sinai; PhD, CUNY) presents “Affective Affinities: Between ‘Ontological Clinic’ and Embodied Reading,” a meditation on how Bionian and Winnicottian models of change—centered on presence rather than insight—inform recent literary practices. Drawing on clinical experience and literary analysis, Curley-Egan explores the ethics and aesthetics of “withnessing,” where reading becomes a form of durational attunement.

Neta Kleine (PhD candidate, Yale University) brings a comparative modernist and affective lens in “The Sound of Relational Perception: Embodied Consciousness in Shelley, James, and Shklovsky.” Through an examination of auditory metaphors and disruptions of habitual perception, Kleine shows how embodied cognition and affective resonance were central to early conceptions of mind, perception, and language—anticipating relational models now reemerging in literary theory.

Yael Segalovitz (assistant professor, Ben-Gurion University; visiting professor, UC Berkeley) concludes with “Freud’s Epistemology: Reader, Text, and the Analytic Third.” Rereading Freud’s Gradiva, she traces a relational mode of interpretation grounded in attunement, affective resonance, and spectral presence. Drawing on Thomas Ogden’s concept of the “analytic third,” Segalovitz meditates on what this model can teach us about the intense cognitive and embodied reciprocity between reader and text.

Each speaker will present for 12–13 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes for open discussion. The panel structure encourages interdisciplinary dialogue and models a shared investment in literary interpretation as an intersubjective practice.