Qualitative Literary and Media Interaction Research

Resources of psychology

In the face of the recurring prejudices which have been leveled against the application of psychological – and in particular psychoanalytic – resources in literary studies, Peter von Matt already in the 1970s reminded us of the indisputable fact that one cannot aim at understanding and interpreting literary texts "without using some kind of psychology" and employing "some kind of psychological concepts", unless one was to deny the psychological nature of human beings as such. This notwithstanding some kinds of applying psychoanalytic resources to literary texts have indeed been deficient and questionable.
["The trauma has to remain inaccessible" (2008q)]

Hence, literary studies’ unfamiliarity with psychological and psychodynamic concepts and even more so: their unwillingness to explore them or at least acknowledge the legitimacy of those approaches which do regard them as helpful resource of culture studies, still constitute a veritable hindrance of interdisciplinarity in the humanities. Moreover, representatives of this mainstream epistemological position often at the same time do use every day psychology in their text interpretations without accounting for them theoretically.

Any (inter-) action theoretical approach to literary, culture, and media studies will always naturally turn to scientific resources from fields of psychological research, once a textual phenomenon cannot be further illuminated by the standard procedures of literature exegesis and once crucial questions are still left unanswered with regard to "comprehend[ing] the work" and its implicate "dialogue".

One only needs to turn to the 'Duden', the German Webster's Dictionary, in order to be reminded that the "humanistic sciences" which are "occupied with studying the human being, such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology" are taken "to belong to the field of the humanities". However, this understanding is hardly reflected neither by the departmental structure of the academic humanities in today's universities nor by the pertaining methodological traditions.

The most important reason, however, which makes it indispensable to not only include some conceptual reference to cognition theory (for instance making general references to cognitive frames and scripts) but to systematically draw on more recent psychodynamic resources of clinical psycho-trauma studies, developmental psychology, and qualitative psycho-therapy research, is the undeniable fact that any literary "works" and their implied "dialogues" carry diverse emotional charges as well as associative and relational impulses. After all, literary interaction is a quite passionate phenomenon.