Eric Lin 941202007

May 31, 2010

Prof. Yi Peng
Thesis Proposal

Psychoanalysis, Haunting and Critique of Modernity in

Gradiva

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. Freuds 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 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 nearpsychoanalytic tale whose main contribution to the literary field is to
1

Sabine
Hake,
Ioquuntur:
Freud's
Archaeology
ofNeal
the
Text.
boundary
2,Issue
Vol.
20,
No.
1.of
(Spring,
1993),
146-173;
The
Horizons
ofOctober,
Psychocriticism;
Oxenhandler.
New
Literary
History,
Vol.
14,
No.pp.
1,1984),
Problems
of
Literary
Theory.
(Autumn,
1982),
pp.
89-103.;
Joan
Copjec.
Transference:
Letters
and
TheSaxa
Unknown
Woman.
Vol.Freud,
28,
Discipleship:
Special
on
Psychoanalysis.
(Spring,
pp.
Yael
Levin.
Conrad,
and
Derrida
on
Pompeii:
Aas
Paradigm
Disappearance;
Mary
Bergstein,
Gradiva
Medica:
Freuds
Model
Female
Analyst
Lizard-Slayer;
Hamilton,
James
W.,60-90.;
Jensen's
"Gradiva":
A
Further
Interpretation
,A
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

show the intricate and inseparable interrelations between

psychoanalysis and literature2.
I intend to read Jensens Gradiva and Freuds 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 Hamlets 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 feat/feet, in that it manifests far more than it looks
capable of, in terms of the biographical, the theoretical and the
2

See Maud Ellmann as well as Andre Greens fine correlative account of how quite a number of
psychoanalytic concepts owe their origination to the drama in Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. P1-55

clinical.

Gradiva as Freuds biographical ghost

During my search and research on Gradiva in the school library,
it turned out somewhat surprisingly how many authors of Freuds
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 sicle by Sander L Gilman, who
argues that Gradiva is in important part of Freuds 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 Freuds oeuvre of theorization, here, by the

hindsight of Freuds and later theorists Mladen Dolars Lacanian
interpretation formulation of the Uncanny, I intend to argue that
Gradiva not only summarizes Freuds 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
Freuds 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 Freuds discussion on the
novella as Freuds 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 novellaNobert
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 isnt there.

In closing my thesis, chapter IV present the novella as a futureprefect tense of psychoanalytic prophecy which foretells the theory
of the unheimlich nearly thirteen years earlier than Freuds the
Uncanny is well-thought out and published. With the hindsight of
Lacans 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 modernitythe 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 sicle. 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.
. 331
E-mailVocabulaire, E-mail, Traduction4-12
MINOR REFERENCES
Abramson, Jeffrey B. Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and
Political Thought of Freud. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Babin, Pierre .--.--,
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 Freuds
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.