The 1907 essay "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva" is Freud's first foray into the field of applied psychoanalysis. With another essay written that same year, "Creative Writers and Daydreaming," Freud also laid bare the essential affinity between psychoanalysis and literature as representational and interpretive disciplines.

Freud applies his literary and psychoanalytic imagination to enter the inner world and the outer events from the life of the imaginary protagonist of Jensen's novella. With this Freud gives us both a literary and a psychoanalytic understanding of the hero's state of mind and its enactments. Freud also suggests the essential affinity between the two phenomena of dream and delusion: the construction of a dream, the Traumbildung, or of a delusion, the Wahnbildung, determined by the unconscious dynamics of dream work and delusion work. Traumarbeit and Wahnarbeit, are solved by the reverse process of Analysenarbeit: by dream interpretation and delusion interpretation, or Traumdeutung and Wahndeutung. With this he takes the sting out of delusions and places them within the realm of creative imagination. This roundtable will explore these and other connections between psychoanalytic theory and the process of literary creation.

Maurice Charney is a Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. He is a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Academy of Literary Studies. He has written widely on Shakespeare, the theory and practice of comedy, and psychoanalytic approaches to literature and film. His most recent book is The Comic World of the Marx Brothers. A former Fulbright Professor at the universities of Bordeaux and Nancy, he is also a recipient of the medal of the city of Tours in France.

Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature and Senior Research Scholar at Yale. He has held distinguished visiting appointments at many universities in the U.S. and abroad, and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and a Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et Lettres, of the French Ministry of Culture. Among his other awards are the Christian Gauss Prize for Wordsworth's Poetry, the René Wellek Prize for The Fateful Question of Culture, and the 2006 Truman Capote Prize for The Geoffrey Hartman Reader. His latest book is A Scholar's Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe. He is a Co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and continues as its Project Director.

Zvi Lothane, M. D., is Professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sainai School of Medicine, as well as a psychoanalyst and member of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations. He is known for his ground-breaking book In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry, his research into the life of Sabina Spielrein, and papers on the psychoanalytic method.

Paul Schwaber is Professor of Letters at Wesleyan University and former Director of the College of Letters, Wesleyan's undergraduate major in Western literature, philosophy and history. He is the author of The Cast of Characters: A Reading of Ulysses. He and his wife, Rosemary Balsam, M.D., edit the JAPA Review of Books. He is a past Editorial Board member of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and currently serves on the Editorial Board of the James Joyce Quarterly and the Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.

Meredith Anne Skura is Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English at Rice University and author of The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process, Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing, and Tudor Autobiography: Listening for inwardness.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

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