This essay argues that psychoanalytic literary criticism has largely failed because it has assumed that literature and psychoanalysis share common analytical ground. I contend that psychoanalytic approaches necessarily deform literature, that literary readings deform psychoanalytic theory, and that the assumption of commonality between poetics and psychoanalysis causes psychoanalytic literary criticism to go astray. I advocate the opposite approach: setting poetics against psychoanalysis, contending that where their mutual tension and disfigurement is recognized and investigated, psychoanalysis and literature can become genuinely available to one another.