Eric Lin 941202007
May 31, 2010
Prof. Yi Peng
Thesis Proposal
Psychoanalysis, Haunting and Critique of Modernity in Gradiva
G
radiva becomes a focus of attention among critics (Jacques Derrida,
Geoffrey Hartman, Mary Jacobus, Sarah Kofman, Ranjana Khanna, Sander
Gilman…, to name just a few more noted ones1) for a simple reason: Freud
liked it and wrote a lengthy discussion on it; otherwise it will probably
remain buried in the bookshelves in libraries. Freud’s liking of the work stems
not from any particular literary merit in its own right but from its full
potential/evidentiality in fully (and coincidentally?) demonstrating his own
1
Sabine Hake, Saxa Ioquuntur: Freud's Archaeology of the Text. boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 1. (Spring,
1993), pp. 146-173; The Horizons of Psychocriticism; Neal Oxenhandler. New Literary History, Vol.
14, No. 1, Problems of Literary Theory. (Autumn, 1982), pp. 89-103.; Joan Copjec. Transference:
Letters and The Unknown Woman. October, Vol. 28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis.
(Spring, 1984), pp. 60-90.; Yael Levin. Conrad, Freud, and Derrida on Pompeii: A Paradigm of
Disappearance; Mary Bergstein, Gradiva Medica: Freud’s Model Female Analyst as Lizard-Slayer;
Hamilton, James W., Jensen's "Gradiva": A Further Interpretation , American Imago, 30:4
(1973:Winter) p.380; Whitney Chadwick. Masson's Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist Myth
The Art Bulletin, Vol. 52, No. 4. (Dec., 1970), pp. 415-422. Eric Downing, Lesley Chamberlain,
Laurence Simmons, Sarah Kofman, Jacques Derrida, Ranjana Khanna, Sander Gilman, Samuel Slipp,
Jonah Siegel
theorizations of dreams and the neurosis. And most of the commentators on
Gradiva discusses it either from a psychoanalytic perspective or in relation to
psychoanalysis. It is thus safe to say that Gradiva is a near-psychoanalytic tale
whose main contribution to the literary field is to show the intricate and
inseparable interrelations between psychoanalysis and literature2.
I intend to read Jensen’s Gradiva and Freud’s discussion thereof as one of
the many apparitions of psychoanalysis. The ghostly aspects of
psychoanalysis, have remained ubiquitous yet without due attention. A
‘ghostly reading’ of psychoanalysis, or a psychoanalytic reading of the
ghostly would be multivalent and may generate previously unthought
insights into psychoanalysis and its surroundings. The following paragraphs
will recount a few of its ghosts.
Obviously enough, psychoanalysis has been haunted since its very
inception by the Oedipus Rex, who is mistaken for being dead long ago by his
parents, by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, by the pleasant gait of Gradiva as
well as the Sandman who castrates by putting out the eyes, just to name a few
more prominent spectral figures among the others.
Long undervalued, Gradiva is in fact a highly polyvalent psychoanalytic
2
See Maud Ellmann as well as Andre Green’s fine correlative account of how quite a number of
psychoanalytic concepts owe their origination to the drama in Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. P1-55
feat/feet, in that it manifests far more than it looks capable of, in terms of the
biographical, the theoretical and the clinical.
Gradiva as Freud’s biographical ghost
During my search and research on Gradiva in the school library, it
turned out somewhat surprisingly how many authors of Freud’s biographies
and/or the biographical introductions to his theory make mentions of
Gradiva merely in passing as examples of his application of his theory to the
arts and literature, without recognizing its many faces, as if Gradiva were but
a shadowy presence of a sweet-looking lass, thus reducing Gradiva to a mere
ghostly flash of memory doomed to pass into oblivion. Among these titles
stands only one exception, The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at
the Fin de siècle by Sander L Gilman, who argues that Gradiva is in important
part of Freud’s own fetishistic fantasy surrounding the foot.
Gradiva as a theoretical ghost that keeps haunting psychoanalysis
Just like Project of a Scientific Psychology, which Freud had dreaded and
rejected but which both James Strachey and Wollheim argue as haunting
Freud’s oeuvre of theorization, here, by the hindsight of Freud’s and later
theorists’ Mladen Dolar’s Lacanian interpretation formulation of the Uncanny,
I intend to argue that Gradiva not only summarizes Freud’s major theory of
repression, which he developed in his first half of his writing years, but poses
as a ‘future perfect tense,’ prophesying, or rather, anticipating the Freud’s
later theory of death drive, narcissism and melancholia, etc. Just as Dolar
draws out the nearly all-encompassing implications of the Uncanny, which
Freud seems unaware of, here I come to argue that Gradiva is way more than
a light-hearted love story with the appearance of a semi-ghost, but rather an
extimate, as Lacan reinterprets and renames the idea of the Uncanny, account
of how the ‘household/home’ produces the unending loop of horror. A
perfect example of how the entire edifice of psychoanalysis revolves around
the extimate, namely a Lacanian reading of Gradiva.
Appearing purposely to mislead the readership to read it as a ghost story
in its first half, Gradiva is also an allegory of the analytic situation, which is
spectrally suggestive of the many aspects of the psychoanalytic clinic: reading
as transference, an ideal analyst as secretive, ghost-like presence, etc.
Chapter I will introduce Gradiva as a proto-text on psychoanalysis. On
the basis of the intimate relations between literature and psychoanalysis, I
will situate Freud’s discussion on the novella as Freud’s sixth classic case
histories, which, both similar to and unlike the preceding five, is a
magic-realist text with the potential to critique the positivist and empiricist
dreams of modernity.
Chapter II will focus on how the narcissistic identification between
Freud and the male protagonist of the novella—Nobert Hanold, comes to
as in the case of the Rat Man, haunts Freud and the bodies of knowledge
spawned by him that extends into various strands of psychoanalytic thinking.
In chapter III, Gradiva will be brought into view to re-examine the
intertwined and ambiguous relations between love and transference in the
analytic situation, in which the analyst takes on an absent presence of an
apparitional being as well as why the psychoanalytic cure is possible through
something (transference) or someone the (analyst) that simply isn’t there.
In closing my thesis, chapter IV present the novella as a future-prefect
tense of psychoanalytic prophecy which foretells the theory of the unheimlich
nearly thirteen years earlier than Freud’s the Uncanny is well-thought out and
published. With the hindsight of Lacan’s theorization of the extimate, this
chapter will largely be a Lacanian reading of the novella and also an attempt
to answer the question raised by Dolar: why do ghosts escape into the world
at the onset of the modernity—the Enlightenment, a period in history in
which the gothic genre appeared.
Working Bibliography
MAJOR REFERENCES
Bercovitch, Sacvan. Literature and the Repetition Compulsion College English,
Vol. 29, No. 8. (May, 1968), pp. 607-615.
Chadwick, Whitney. Masson's Gradiva: The Metamorphosis of a Surrealist
Myth The Art Bulletin, Vol. 52, No. 4. (Dec., 1970), pp. 415-422.
Chamberlain, Lesley. The Secret Artist: a Close Reading of Sigmund Freud.
London: Quartet, 2000.
Copjec, Joan. Transference: Letters and The Unknown Woman October, Vol.
28, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis. (Spring, 1984), pp.
60-90.
Downing, Eric. After Images: Photography, Archaeology,and Psychoanalysis and
the Tradition of Bildung (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2006), xii +
372 pp.
Gilman, Sander L. The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de
siècle. Baltimore and London: the Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
Hake, Sabine. Saxa Ioquuntur: Freud's Archaeology of the Text boundary 2,
Vol. 20, No. 1. (Spring, 1993), pp. 146-173.
Khanna, Ranjana. Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism.
Durham NC: Duke UP, 2003.
Kofman, Sarah. Freud and Fiction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Kofman, Sarah. The childhood of art: an interpretation of Freud's aesthetics;
translated by Winifred Woodhull. 1988.
Jacobus, Mary. Is There a Woman in this Text? New Literary History, Vol. 14,
No. 1, Problems of Literary Theory. (Autumn, 1982), pp. 117-141.
Oxenhandler, Neal. The Horizons of Psychocriticism New Literary History,
Vol. 14, No. 1, Problems of Literary Theory. (Autumn, 1982), pp. 89-103.
Quinodoz, Jean-Michel. Reading Freud: a chronological exploration of Freud's
writings: Routledge, 2005
Rand, Nicholas and Torok, Maria. Questions for Freud: The Secret History of
Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. xiv +
240 pp
Slipp, Samuel. The Freudian Mystique: Freud, Women, and Feminism. New York
Univ. Press, 1993.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses
of the Romantic Sublime Assemblage, No. 3. (Jul., 1987), pp. 6-29.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. London: Routledge,
1986.
陳傳興. 序 「翻譯的腳步 沒有翻譯」中外文學 八十八年 十二月號（總331）
◇精神分析、E-mail、翻譯（Vocabulaire, E-mail, Traduction）4-12
MINOR REFERENCES
Abramson, Jeffrey B. Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of
Freud. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Babin, Pierre 巴賓 科學時代的解夢師 黃發典 譯.--初版.--臺北市：時報, 民
84[1995]
Forrester, John: Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis. Columbia
University Press: New York, 1980.
Isbister, J. N. Freud: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1985.
Gay, Peter. Freud: A Life of Our Time. New York: Norton, 1988.
Gilman, Sander L. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
Jastrow, Joseph. The House That Freud Built, (New York: Greenburg Press, 1932
Rieff, Philip 1959, Freud: The Mind of The Moralist. New York: The Viking
Press.
SOURCES ON HAUNTING&THE GHOSTLY
Abraham, Nicolas. “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s
Metapsychology.” Trans. Nicholas Rand. The Trials of Psychoanalysis. Ed.
Francoise Meltzer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988. 75-80.
Bown, Burdett, and Thurschwell. Ed. The Victorian Supernatural. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2004.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Lockhust, Roger. “Something Tremendous, Something Elemental: On the
Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis” Buse, Peter and Scott, Andrew (Ed's).
Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. London: Macmillan, 1999.