Emma Lieber

Eugene Lang College, The New School, Literary Studies, Faculty Member

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Emma Lieber is a licensed psychoanalyst in New York City and part-time faculty in Literary Studies at the New School. She is the author of The Writing Cure (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cabinet, The Point Magazine, LitHub, New England Review, The Massachusetts Review, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, among others. She completed her Ph.D in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University.
Supervisors: Liza Knapp, Cathy Popkin, and Cathy Nepomnyashchy

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Andrea Peto

Central European University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Ani Kokobobo

University of Kansas

Giulia Sissa

Ucla

Fjodor Uspenskij

Vinogradov Russian Language Institute

Mercè Oliva

Pompeu Fabra University

Julia Hell

University of Michigan

Fausto Fraisopi

Aix-Marseille University

Didier COSTE

Université Bordeaux-Montaigne

Anna A Berman

University of Cambridge

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Papers by Emma Lieber

Having Faith in Nabokov's Pale Fire

Nabokov Studies, 2007

Generations of readers have studied the hermeneutic riddles of Pale Fire, questioning both their ... more Generations of readers have studied the hermeneutic riddles of Pale Fire, questioning both their meaning and their susceptibility to interpretation. This critical dialogue is part of a broader debate regarding Nabokov's narrative persona: whether it unforgivingly mocks exegetical pretension and dismisses the very notion of intersubjectivity, or whether a more generous authorial vision is discernable. This article proposes a shift

Parenting the Atemporal Child

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2022

The Politics of the Navel: Psychoanalysis and Affiliation

American Imago

: This article examines psychoanalysis’s relationship to collective affiliation and group identit... more : This article examines psychoanalysis’s relationship to collective affiliation and group identity via its association with two foundational figures, that of the Woman and the Jew. It begins by exploring reportage on the war in Ukraine as it has touched on these figures (often with conflicting and self-contradictory messaging), and it argues that we need psychoanalysis to approach these problematics. It then goes on to explore psychoanalysis’s historical relationship to both femininity and Jewishness, and it suggests that reexamining psychoanalysis both as a Jewish science and as a discourse that takes femininity distinctively seriously, via the frame of the conflict in Ukraine, might do something for our vantage on psychoanalysis itself as a historical, political, and ethical development. Ultimately, its claim is that the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis, Jewishness, and femininity suggests a model of affiliation and relation based on the critical category of the navel, whose mechanics might offer new ways of imagining the collective life of psychoanalysis itself.

Introduction: The Queer Child and the Childish Queer

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2022

The Politics of the Navel: Psychoanalysis and Affiliation

American Imago, 2023

This article examines psychoanalysis’s relation- ship to collective affiliation and group identit... more This article examines psychoanalysis’s relation- ship to collective affiliation and group identity via its asso- ciation with two foundational figures, that of the Woman and the Jew. It begins by exploring reportage on the war in Ukraine as it has touched on these figures (often with conflicting and self-contradictory messaging), and it argues that we need psychoanalysis to approach these problematics. It then goes on to explore psychoanalysis’s historical relationship to both femininity and Jewishness, and it suggests that reexamining psychoanalysis both as a Jewish science and as a discourse that takes feminin- ity distinctively seriously, via the frame of the conflict in Ukraine, might do something for our vantage on psychoanalysis itself as a historical, political, and ethical development. Ultimately, its claim is that the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis, Jewishness, and feminin- ity suggests a model of affiliation and relation based on the critical category of the navel, whose mechanics might offer new ways of imagining the collective life of psychoanalysis itself.

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Lacan on depression and melancholia

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Smerdyakov and Parricide

Dostoevsky Studies, Feb 15, 2016

EMMA LIEBERSmerdyakov and Parricid

Smerdyakov and Parricide

EMMA LIEBERSmerdyakov and Parricid

Where is the Sweet Revolution? : A Reconsideration of Gogol and Babel

Slavic and East European Journal, 2009

Investigations into the Unpoliced Novel: Moll Flanders and The Comely Cook

Slavic Review, 2015

Taking its cue from Lev Tolstoi's claim, in “A Few Words Apropos of the Book War and Peace,” ... more

On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel: The Brothers Karamazov and the English Tradition

On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel: The Brothers Karamazov and the English Tradition Emm... more On the Distinctiveness of the Russian Novel: The Brothers Karamazov and the English Tradition Emma K. Lieber This dissertation takes as its starting point Leo Tolstoy's famous contention that the works of the Russian literary canon represent "deviation[s] from European forms." It is envisioned as a response to (or an elaboration upon) critical works that address the unique rise, formation, and poetics of the Russian novel, many of which are themselves responses (or Russian corollaries) to Ian Watt's study of the rise of the novel in England; and it functions similarly under the assumption that the singularity of the Russian novel is a product of various idiosyncrasies in the Russian cultural milieu. The project is structured as a comparative examination of two pairs of eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury novels from Russia and England, and as such it approaches the question of the Russian novel's distinctiveness in the form of a literary experiment. By engaging in close readings of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) alongside Mikhail Chulkov's The Comely Cook (Prigozhaia povarikha, 1770), and Charles Dickens's Bleak House alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), concentrating particularly on matters of formal design, corporeal integrity and vulnerability, and communal harmony and discord-and by understanding the English texts as a "control group" for an examination of the Russian deviation-it attempts to identify some of the distinctive features of the Russian realist novel. The largest portion of the dissertation is dedicated to The Brothers Karamazov, which I take as an emblematic work in a literary canon that is distinguished by intimations that healing and recovery-as well as the coexistence of both personal freedom and communal rapport-are possible in the real world and in realist narrative.

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“Mister Russian Beast”: Civilization's discontents in Turgenev

The Twilight of Realism, 2015

The Writing Cure

Bloomsbury, 2020

In The Writing Cure, Emma Lieber tells the story of her decade-long analysis, and her becoming a ... more In The Writing Cure, Emma Lieber tells the story of her decade-long analysis, and her becoming a psychoanalyst, by tracing dreams, scenes, and signifiers that emerged from her analysis while also undertaking critical explorations of works of psychoanalytic theory and literary texts. The Writing Cure thus articulates what psychoanalysis does for its patients by writing the moment of its termination in real time, performing the convergence of theory and life on which psychoanalysis itself balances.