The mother in the text: Metapsychology and phantasy in the work of interpretation

Abstract

In this paper the author discusses some characteristics of a psychoanalytic text on the basis of two pages of Freud's essay, Delusions and dreams in Jensen's 'Gradiva' (Freud, 1906), on the concept of the return of the repressed. Analysis of the text shows that the four references (Horace, Rops, Rousseau, and a clinical vignette) occurring in it present unexpected connections both with each other and with the phenomenon they illustrate. There thus emerges a hidden scenario that reveals a concealed level of the text, relating to the maternal imago. Particular attention is devoted to the importance of the figurative apparatus and images (examples in the form of narrations and visual images, metaphors, and similes) that accompany the metapsychological and conceptual construction of Freud's text. Representation in visual form is necessary for the description and construction of the psyche and for conferring life on its conceptual formulations. However, metapsychological definition also reveals a phantasy dimension underlying the text. In addition, the author shows how certain textual constraints limit the intrinsic intuitive and arbitrary nature of interpretation. Finally, the complexity of the psychoanalytic text (with its various planes and levels) is emphasized, as well as the network of possible connections fundamental to the work of interpretation. A diagram illustrates the spatio-temporal aspects of the interpretive process, as defined by the interaction between conceptual factors and specific flights of the imagination which also have to do with unconscious affects, whether in the text, the author, or the reader.

Psychoanalysis and The Arts: the Slippery Ground of Applied Analysis

“…Some of the shared preoccupations these papers deal with are: memory, history, and reconstruction; experiences of loss, mental growth, and creativity; facts linked with the passage of time-childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, as well as the inevitability of death; perception, desire, pleasure, and love; intimacy, identity, individuality, and difference; dialectics between inside/outside, language/action, individual/society, and reality/ illusion; the experience of listening, reading, or beholding; the value of thinking, relating, and helping; the consequences of new technologies for our ways of thinking and relating; and the complexities of violence, destructiveness, fundamentalism, and trauma. (See Abella 2008Abella , 2010Anderson 2009;Ashur 2009;Baudry 2001;Blum 2001;Civitarese 2010;Diena 2009;Frosch 2009;Goldstein 1975;Golinelli 2003;Jones 1999;Mandelbaum 2011;Minerbo 2008;Paul 2011;Petrella 2008;Poland 2003;Sabbadini 2009Sabbadini , 2011Schaub 2008;Schiller 2008;Schwartz 2009;Szajnberg 2010;Tylim 2010;and West-Leuer 2009. ) The style adopted by these papers comes nearer to what we usually call a dialogue: listening to the way others tackle the same questions with which we ourselves are dealing; confronting models and exploring different answers; receiving/learning instead of only giving/teaching; trying not to demonstrate but to listen to the way that others use our suggestions and their echoes on our own thinking; putting to work our constructs and questioning our ideas; accepting that we may be destabilized in our certainties and being willing to deconstruct our truths in order to allow them to grow and be enriched.…”

On: The mother in the text: Metapsychology and fantasy in the work of interpretation

“…I was delighted by Fausto Petrella’s text on the concept of the return of the repressed in Delusions and dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva ’ (Freud, 1906; Petrella, 2008). Petrella shows us that this concept can be understood both in a strict sense and in terms of possible associations emerging from Freud’s text.…”

“…I should, however, like to suggest one further idea based on Petrella’s text. Through the examples of Horace, the student, Rousseau and Rops, Petrella in fact reveals his own intuition, which is that Freud’s associations ultimately converge on the female body and “perhaps” (Petrella, 2008, p. 632) he says, on the maternal body, on matrem nudam (cf. Freud’s letter to Fliess, 3 October 1897).…”

“… Petrella (2008, p. 627) mentions that Rops – in what might be called a form of a posteriori free association – explains that his model was a waitress who had given him some eggs and tripe to eat. So we find here the model of the nurturing mother who bears life (the egg) or empties herself (spills her guts) for her child. In the biographical passage quoted by Petrella, Rousseau’s terror is tinged by his sight of a breast with no nipple on a prostitute, Zulietta.…”

“…The conjunction of these various elements makes it possible to suggest a schema other than that of Petrella (2008, p. 633) to represent the impulse underlying Gradiva and the passage from Freud’s text that is studied using the following graphic representation (which is not exhaustive, for there are other dead mother figures that appear in Jensen’s story) (see Figure 1).…”