The Dilemmas of Psychoanalytic Interpretation

Pawel Dybel

    To demonstrate the connection between psychoanalysis and literature seems at first glance to be a reasonably easy task. However, if one looks closer at Sigmund Freud's work and follows the history of the psychoanalytic movement, then this task appears far more difficult and complex. This complexity derives, first, from the fact that in the writings of the founder of psychoanalysis himself the connections between psychoanalysis and literature are very diverse and ambiguous. One can distinguish at least four such connections:

1. the literary character of Freud's writings;
   
   

2. Freud's numerous references to the literary tradition;
   
   

3. Freud's theoretical statements on literature and his interpretations of literary works; and
   
   

4. Freud's theory of the interpretation of dreams and of other psychological phenomena, some of whose aspects he applied to the interpretation of literary texts.

    However, there is a second reason why it is difficult to put into one formula the various relationships between psychoanalysis and literature. This difficulty results from Freud's claim that psychoanalytical theory should be scientific. As we know, Freud was obsessed with the idea of endowing psychoanalysis with the status of an empirical science where clinically observed phenomena are treated as the effects of universal laws underlying the human psyche and are experimentally verifiable. From this point of view, the possible links between psychoanalysis and literature have to be looked at as having secondary importance. They represent not only a kind of attractive surplus value but are just a hindrance which prevents psychoanalysis from acquiring the status of science. This is precisely the point where we encounter the first dilemma of psychoanalytic theory. It assumes the form of a question: To what extent can psychoanalysis, which pretends to be a scientific theory, treat seriously its connections with literature? Are they not simply a kind of ornament, deprived of any essential meaning for its clinical results? Or perhaps, quite the contrary, are examples taken from literature and art crucial to the analyst's understanding of the psyche of the patient, of society, and of culture?

    The problem is that in Freud's writings one can find as many arguments for the first position as for the second one. His attitude towards the literary element, acknowledged as an inherent part of psychoanalytic theory, is a very ambivalent one.

    Let me examine this discrepancy more closely. The various psychoanalytic connections with literature evolve from the obvious fact that one of the fundamental elements of the psychoanalytic process is narrative, the story of the patient's dreams. Since this narrative, as we know it, is fragmentary and ambiguous, the analyst has to prompt the patient, while using the method of free association, to fill in the gaps in his narrative of the dream. One could say, then, that the goal of this work is to create together the second narrative, that refers not so much to the dream itself, as to all the scenes recollected by the patient's memory. And this includes the repressed traumatic experiences from early childhood which the dream refers to in a disguised and perhaps distorted way.

    The first narrative of the patient has, according to Freud, to recognize itself, its own truth, in the second narrative in which its ultimate point of reference comes to light. However, one of the most astonishing of Freud's discoveries was that the second narrative does not have the character of the patient's account of real events which occurred in his past but is, like a dream, a fantasy. What is more, even the source of this fantasy, what affects it, is rooted in the patient's psyche (i.e., in his disturbed relations with significant people close to him.)

    One can say then that the traumatic experiences from the patient's past "exist" for him only insofar as they appear in his fantasy. The thing represented is thus constituted in the very act of its representation, besides which it has the status of pure nothingness--of the repressed. In other words, the patient's fantasies about his past are a kind of imaginary scenario of his primal traumatic experiences in which the latter are allowed to come into existence.

    Seen from this perspective, the psychoanalytic process appears as a circling around a narrative knot consisting of two narratives. The second narrative, referring to traumatic events from the patient's past, represents the transformation of the first narrative, which refers to the patient's dreams. Achieving this transformation is one of the fundamental conditions for progress during psychoanalytic therapy.

    At first glance, this seems to be an impossible condition to fulfill, since the analyst has to prompt the patient to narrate about traumatic events from the past which--as is often the case--never happened at all. However, contrary to the real events, they left lasting traces in his memory. Thus the only medium of narration which enables the patient to bring these never-happened events into light are his fantasies about them. But what makes the issue even more peculiar is that these fantasies in a way do not exist in the patient either, since they were repressed at the moment of their birth.

    One could say then that the analyst's task during the psychoanalytic process is to cope with two impossible things: to affect in the patient fantasies which never came into existence in him and which refer to the events which never happened. No doubt, this is a very peculiar if not absurd task.

    However, this is the point where psychoanalysis and literature meet. This is precisely the same impossibility which the novelist or the poet has to deal with when he tries to create out of nothing his worlds of fantasy. The writer's creations are also of non-existent worlds which find their legitimacy only in themselves. Nevertheless, once put into words, they strike one at the core of one's existence and deeply transform one's self-understanding. Moreover,the process of reviving these non-existent worlds of fantasy is in both cases, that of psychoanalysis and literature, a very painful one since it refers to what has already died in the subject at the moment of its traumatic appearance. It had been forgotten before it could be remembered at all.

    So far so good. But the matter becomes much more complicated if one takes into account an opposing tendency in Freud's writings. He includes the narrative of the patient (and, of course, its interpretations by the analyst) into a systematic explanatory procedure modeled on conceptual schemes borrowed from the natural sciences. The aim of this procedure is to demonstrate that the "meaning" of this narrative and of the analyst's interpretations represents a kind of effect or secondary manifestation of the universal mechanisms which determine the functioning of the "psychic apparatus." Thus each could be transformed and translated into the other's terms. Freud himself was strongly convinced that it is first of all due to this transformation of the psychoanalytic method of understanding (interpretation) in the explanatory procedures that the clinical observations and insights of the analysts assume real cognitive value and the psychoanalytic method itself could be called scientific. Within this perspective, all possible links between psychoanalysis and literature have secondary importance. They are degraded to the rank of a supplement to the psychoanalytic process or to a kind of ornament.

    However, if we take a closer look at the Freudian descriptions of clinical cases such as the Wolf Man or the Rat Man, it appears that this second explanatory procedure does not represent a harmonious transformation and does not follow the first procedure. Very often it simply puts the first into question and contradicts its results. In other words, contrary to what Freud himself maintains, it is not true that "hard" scientific explanations are built on the "soft" analyst's interpretations of the patient's dreams while representing a higher and deepened form of their understanding. On the contrary, what we have here are wholly abstract conclusions which mostly say nothing new about the real forces underlying the patient's psychic life.

    Consequently, the first dilemma of the psychoanalytic theory mentioned above assumes the form of a question: How can we relate to each other these two procedures, interpretation and explanation, within the psychoanalytic process? Is it possible to work out any coherent comprehension of this relationship at all?

    Within the post-Freudian psychoanalytic tradition one can differentiate three main theoretical tendencies whose representatives propose three different solutions to this dilemma. The representatives of the first tendency treat psychoanalysis as a kind of natural science. According to them (Adolf Grünbaum, Marshall Edelson, Henri F. Ellenberger, Richard Wollheim, Helmut Thomae, Horst Kächele, Paul Schilder, Karola Brede, and Georg Groddeck) the analyst should follow in his clinical work only the explanatory procedures. The representatives of the second tendency (Alfred Lorenzer, Paul Ricoeur, and Robert Heiss) treat explanation and interpretation as complementing each other and try to work out through a kind of dialectical synthesis. The representatives of the third tendency (Ludwig Binswanger, Jürgen Habermas, and H. Dahmer) maintain that the only valuable procedure within the psychoanalytic process is that of understanding and interpretation. They opt then for the purely hermeneutical character of psychoanalysis.

    Of course I do not assert here which of these positions I find the most convincing.¹ I would like only to stress that representatives of these three tendencies disregard the fact that the interpretive procedures of psychoanalysis--and, indirectly, the explanatory ones--are based on what I call the "narrative knot" of the psychoanalytic process. Consequently, discussion of the ways to relate these two types of procedures should be preceded by exploration of the more fundamental relationship between the narratives of the patient (precisely speaking, by the exploration of the transformation they undergo within the psychoanalytic process) and the procedures which are based on them. To put it in a nutshell: before one can ask the question: Is psychoanalysis a kind of natural science or hermeneutics (or perhaps, both)?, one should first show how its procedures are rooted in what could be called "the narrative element" of the psychoanalytic process.

II

    Another disputable issue and the source of deep divisions within the psychoanalytic tradition is how to relate the individual myth of the patient as it is reconstructed within the psychoanalytic process to the dimension of collective myths which underlie the understanding of the self in a given society. This is the second dilemma of psychoanalysis. It assumes the form of a question: Does the individual myth of the patient represent the necessary basis of his or her identity, which, once reconstructed and interpreted within the psychoanalytic process, should then be strengthened and played out against the collective myths? Or, perhaps, should the analyst assume the opposite position: that of teaching the patient some detachment from his individual myth and trying to reintegrate him into the dimension of collective social myths? In other words, should the analyst prompt the patient to transform his own individual mythology so that the latter could be adapted to the collective myths of a given society, as the school of ego-psychology (according to Lacan) proposes?

    But perhaps--and this is the third solution proposed by Lacan and his school--the very opposition of the individual myth to collective myths is false, since the notion of any collectivity, social group, class, or the society itself is illusory, according to the well-known Laclau and Zizek thesis that "society does not exist."² Consequently, what the analyst has to deal with during the psychoanalytic process is to confront the patient with his own unconscious fantasies underlying his symptoms and prompt him to traverse these fantasies while wholly ignoring the dimension of collective myths.

    The understanding of psychoanalytic process within the opposition of the individual myth to the collective myths of a given society appears in the Lévi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology.3 He compares the analyst's therapeutic procedure with that of a shaman in archaic societies and maintains that in the latter the dimension of individual myth does not exist, since there only the collective myths matter. Consequently, the therapeutic work of the shaman consists, first, in intercepting in himself the illness of the disturbed individual and then, second, in acting it out. Proceeding in such a way, the shaman delivers the individual from his illness and reintegrates him into the space of collective myths, outside of which he would have no chance to survive.

    The therapeutic work of the analyst, by contrast, consists, first, in reconstructing the individual myth of the patient, and, second, in reinterpreting it according to the general assumptions of psychoanalytic theory, thus prompting the patient himself to act out against the analyst his repressed aggressive impulses. The reintegrative function of collective myths in archaic societies is thus replaced by psychoanalytic interpretation, which claims to offer the solution to the patient's problems while restoring his identity with himself on a symbolic level.

    Lévi-Strauss is no doubt right when he points to the central role which the interpretation of the "problem" of the patient by the analyst plays in the psychoanalytic process and when he demonstrates the inherent dangers of this procedure. One of them is transformation of the individual myth or world of the patient into the derivative of psychoanalytic interpretation. Consequently, the patient is not able to reintegrate his individual myth into the sphere of collective myths since what the analyst offers him is only the abstract conceptual construction, without any reference to the "problem" he has with his own myth. This argument assumes that there are at least two fundamental conditions to be fulfilled if the psychoanalytic interpretation is to achieve its therapeutic effect. The first is that psychoanalytic interpretation has to reintegrate into itself the individual myth of the patient and not simply subordinate it to its a priori constructions. In other words, it has to represent a kind of synthesis of the "individual" with the "universal" while taking into account all the peculiar and unique moments of the patient's narrative about his dreams and traumatic events from the past - and not simply apply them to its own procedure. The second condition is that the analyst has to take into account the dimension of the collective myths as well; otherwise he will only repeat in his interpretations the "problem" of the patient without solving it-- i.e., without achieving a real therapeutic effect consisting in the reintegration of the patient into a given society. In other words, the psychoanalytic interpretation cannot claim wholly to take the place of tradition since this will lead the patient nowhere--into an empty world of abstract theoretical constructs imposed on him arbitrarily by the analyst.

    It seems that these remarks on psychoanalysis made by Lévi-Strauss in Structural Anthropology are valid today as well. Perhaps the best example of an attempt to preserve the complex relationship between the individual mythology of the patient, its psychoanalytic interpretation, and the dimension of tradition and collective myths are those famous parts of The Interpretation of Dreams where Freud formulates his concept of the Oedipus complex. Strictly speaking, I mean here the whole procedure which precedes the formulation of this concept by Freud in which he focuses on the dreams of his patients with incestuous and parricidal motives.4

    On the one hand, Freud argues that the narrated scenes from these dreams refer to some traumatic events from the patients' pasts in which the key role was usually played by persons near to them--usually the mother or the father. One of the main tasks of the analyst is, then, to reconstruct in dialogue with the patient these events, or precisely speaking, the patient's primal fantasies, and interpret the role played in them by the parents. In other words, his aim is to reconstruct and interpret the fantasies which underlie the individual mythology of the patient while underscoring some its unique aspects.

    At the same time Freud maintains that all these dreams are determined by the drives of sexuality and aggression, which, repressed from consciousness, find in dreams their direct unconscious representation. And here one sees the first danger of psychoanalytic interpretation to which Lévi-Strauss points. This is the danger of dissolving the individual mythology of the patient with all its significant details into general statements about the drives and their relationship to each other.

    On the other hand, and this is the crucial point, Freud goes in the opposite direction and tries to legitimate his theory on the level of collective myths while referring to well known examples from Greek mythology and literature: to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and to the myth of Uranos, Cronos, and Zeus with its obvious motifs of parricide and cannibalism. According to him, this myth and its literary counterparts reveal not only the most fundamental unconscious wishes of the human being determined by the sexual and aggressive drives, but they also form the indispensable symbolic horizon of the individual mythology of the subject.

    It seems that this is precisely the main reason for Freud's enormous interest in literature and ancient mythologies, since it was first of all in them where the fundamental human desires were symbolically articulated, preserved, and reinterpreted. His numerous examples and quotations from literary tradition are thus not simple ornaments (or supplements). They are essential to legitimize his psychoanalytic insights on the plane of history and tradition.

    We see clearly here the basic assumptions of Freud's theory. There is an orientation both to the individual mythology and to the collective myths of a given society or culture. Each is treated as equally important elements of psychoanalytic interpretation.

III

    The representatives of the second orientation try to find an intermediate solution. They maintain that Freudian concepts of consciousness and of the unconscious are complementary; thus, they should be dialectically mediated with each other (Alfred Lorenzer, Jürgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur). If one takes a closer look at these concepts, however, one has to admit that in the last resort it is consciousness which is the proper "measure" of this mediation. Lorenzer and Habermas maintain, for example, that the symptoms and dreams of the patient occur in an individual, quasi-symbolic language. One can understand this language only if one knows the context of the patient's past (specifically, the traumatic events from the patient's past). Consequently, all the patient's symptoms, dream, and slips of the tongue have, as Habermas puts it,a "systematic value" while revealing the truth about the "deep" psychic life of the patient.5

    This means the real drive forces underlying the patient's unconscious representations which have been repressed from consciousness. On the other hand, however, both Habermas and Lorenzer maintain that symptoms are quasi-linguistic phenomena which are determined by the drives and represent only a kind of distorted communication. The aim of the analyst is then to transform them into the universal symbolic forms which are the elements of our common language, and, as a result, to incorporate them into the process of social communication. The task of the analyst is then to recognize and to overcome the determination of symptoms by the drives so that they become available to reflection and self-reflection.

    One can recognize a similar metaphysical scheme underlying Ricoeur's concept of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, Ricoeur maintains that the Freudian discovery of an archeology of regressive figures of the self which makes up the unconscious puts into question the traditional metaphysical concept of consciousness. On the other hand, he tries to "mediate" this archeology of unconscious figures with a progressive Hegelian teleology of the figures of consciousness, and he treats the latter as the ultimate basis of this mediation. Consequently, the Freudian archeology of the unconscious becomes wholly incorporated into the Hegelian teleology of consciousness.6

    Only the representatives of the third orientation preserve the anti-metaphysical radicalism of the Freudian concept of the unconscious. This orientation consists mainly of the three psychoanalytic schools: that of Jungian depth psychology, of the British school of psychoanalysis of Melanie Klein, and of the French school of Jacques Lacan.7 What these three schools have in common, all the differences between them notwithstanding, is the firm conviction that the unconscious represents a wholly autonomous system or instance inside human psychic life and culture. It should first be explored and interpreted in its own context or in regard to its relationships with consciousness. In both these procedures, however, the unconscious should be regarded as an instance which by its essence cannot be brought down to consciousness.

    In Jung's psychoanalytic theory the unconscious consists of the archetypal symbolic forms which, because of their universal character, are recognizable in every culture. At the same time Jung speaks about the "individual unconscious," identifying it with the individual's symbols and experiences, which, if regarded in the context of individual biography, are on the top of the other, as it were. Melanie Klein conceives of the unconscious as the imaginary symbolic structure which undergoes deep transformations during the preoedipal stage and, in its essential features, is already organized in childhood. Jacques Lacan calls the unconscious "the discourse of the Other" and identifies it with the two fundamental linguistic rules, that of metonymy and metaphor, which follow the primal logic of the "free" addition and substitution of signifiers. The conscious discourse of the ego is then conceived of by him as a derivative of the unconscious "discourse of the Other" which in a way contradicts its own condition of possibility since its rules are directed against the more fundamental logic of the "free" addition and substitution of signifiers.

    There is no need here to present in more detail how each of these psychoanalytic schools conceives of the unconscious and its relationship to consciousness. Instead, let me point to the banal, but nevertheless significant fact that in each of them the interpretation of myths and literary works (or works of art) occupies a prominent position, which is not always the case amongst the representatives of the first (ego-psychological) and second (hermeneutic) orientation. This is not by chance. For Freud himself it was first of all not the psychological tradition (G. T. Fechner, H. von Helmholtz) or the philosophical tradition (Novalis, Ernst von Hartmann), but the domain of myth and literature where the unconscious has been experienced and recognized as the powerful force underlying the human psyche, its history, and its actions. According to Freud, it was first of all in the classic works of European literature - in the dramas of Sophocles and Shakespeare, in the poetry and novels of Goethe, Heine, or Dostoyevsky--that the unconscious was demonstrated in all its ambiguity and complexity. Classical literature showed both the powerful libidinal factors "unifying" interhuman relationships on the social level and the violent destructive force directed against them, breaking apart any art of interhuman connection, link, association. These classic works were so 'saturated" with the unconscious, so overwhelmed by it, that their imaginary worlds "created out of nothing" resembled what his patients narrated about their dreams.

    Let me now repeat my earlier question in a slightly different way: Does the psychoanalytic interpretation of a literary work which stresses the irreducibility of its unconscious aspect, recognized as an integral part of its formal structure and representations, change radically its former status and understanding--at least in the same way as is claimed by Freud in his interpretations of dreams and works of art? Does the psychoanalytic interpretation deprive a literary work of its deepest mystery so that afterwards one can say nothing essentially new about it?

    In many of Freud's essays on literary works and works of art, his claim of changing radically our former way of understanding them results in neglect of their stylistic aspects. His claim leads to reductionist and over-simplified interpretations of their content, regarded as the direct effect of some traumatic events which supposedly occurred in the respective authors' past. One can find in Freud's writings, however, examples of a quite different model of interpretation where biographical context does not play such an essential role. Instead the stress is put on the symbolic structure of the literary work and its stylistic means. The best example of this kind of interpretation is the short essay "The Theme of the Three Caskets," and the numerous interpretations of dreams and symptoms where Freud, to demonstrate their sophisticated and compact linguistic structure, compares them with the similarly structured fragments of literary works. The aim of psychoanalytic interpretation in these is not to reveal the latent meaning of the literary work on the basis of reconstruction of traumatic events from the author's past. On the contrary, it is to show how the unconscious is inherently inscribed into its very symbolic structure and topics. One of the neatest examples of this interpretive procedure is Freud's interpretation of the slip of the tongue of Octavio Piccolomini, the hero of Schiller's Wallenstein. Instead of saying, "Now then, we go to him " Octavio says "to her," and thus discloses his true intentions. Other such examples would be Freud's interpretations of the ambiguous language of the heroes of Shakespeare's dramas.8

    This model of interpretation is much more interesting and inspiring for the theory of literature than the first, biographical, one, predominant in Freud's writings. This model presupposes that the aesthetic value of a literary work depends on how it inscribes the unconscious both into its formal-stylistic structure and into its own world of symbols (how it "stages" it).

    Jung followed the latter aspect of this model, although of course his concept of the unconscious and consequently his understanding of the literary symbol have little in common with the Freudian one. The main difference consists in the stress which Jung puts on how the literary work transforms and reinterprets the universal archetypal motifs to be found in the mythologies of ancient cultures. Consequently, the analyst-interpreter should demonstrate first of all the various links, similarities and differences, between the key symbols of literary work, how they are "staged" in it, and the primal mythological motifs. In a way, then function as its ideal symbolic pattern and background. The interpreter does not have to resolve a riddle, to disclose a mysterious kernel hidden behind the symbolic representations of literary work to be found in traumatic events from the author's past. On the contrary, this kind of interpreter has to concentrate on the very symbolic structure and composition of literary work to demonstrate how its "riddle" is already there, in the way it transforms and reinterprets the archetypal motives to be found in mythologies of the past. Psychoanalytic interpretation of this kind does not claim to change radically the previous understanding of the literary work but merely tries to inscribe it into the universal horizon of the mythological tradition of given society and culture.

    In the British school of psychoanalysis the theoretical foundations of the concept of literary work are laid by Melanie Klein's writings, where she tries to apply to aesthetics her concept of "the depressive position". Her understanding of the creative process has been followed by her disciples Paula Heiman, John Rickman, John Fairbairn, and Hanna Segal. According to Klein, an unconscious wish to restore and recreate the lost love objects outside and within the ego forms the basis of any creative activity.

    This assumption provides the starting point for Hanna Segal's theory of art, one of the most elaborated within the post-Kleinian tradition. In her article "A Psycho-analytical Approach to Aesthetics," Segal points at the striking affinity between this thesis and the description of the creative process made by Marcel Proust where he maintains that the artist is compelled to create by his need to recover the lost past.9 Following this idea, Segal concludes that the creative process assumes the form of an "unconscious identification" in which the artist, confronted by a harsh and terrifying reality, revives (nach-erlebts) previous mental and emotional states and on the basis of this experience recreates in the work an ideal world full of harmony and beauty. This concept presupposes that the creative act consists of two opposing tendencies which imply and in a way enhance each other: a destructive force and a feeling of permanent loss; a thrust toward imaginary re-construction and revival. The self-contradictory nature of the creative process corresponds to the antinomous structure of the work of art itself where the gradual destruction of its whole world, as is the case in Oedipus Rex, is contradicted by its harmonious form, thus enabling the author and the public to revive their world as "whole, complete and unified":

    The external form of "classical" tragedy is in complete contrast with its content. The formal modes of speech, the unities of time, place and action, the strictness and rigidity of the rules are all, I believe, an unconscious demonstration of the fact that order can emerge out of chaos. Without this formal harmony the depression of the audience would be aroused but not resolved. There can be no aesthetic pleasure without perfect form (p. 501).

    The Lacanian model of interpretation, by contrast, focuses on the purely linguistic aspect of a literary work. In this respect Lacan follows the structuralist tradition; however, since his concept of language is very different from those of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, or Roman Jakobson, his interpretations and comments also differ in many points from that proposed by these authors. Let me outline here briefly what I take to be the main assumptions of his attitude towards literary texts.10

    Lacan treats the literary work as a specific combination of signifiers whose linguistic structure should be first of all recognized in its apparent incoherences, gaps, splits, and obsessively recurrent motifs since it is precisely here that the unconscious is to be traced. Consequently, the unconscious is not conceived by Lacan as a kind of container for repressed archetypal motives and symbols but is taken into account only insofar as it disorganizes, splits, and breaks the apparently coherent symbolic (linguistic) structure of literary work, thus endowing it with enormous drama and dynamism. In other words, it is precisely only insofar as the gaps and breaks appear as constitutive of the symbolic dimension of the literary work that the unconscious comes into effect. Lacan regards the unconscious as an inherent part of the unique configuration of signifiers which make up the literary work. It cannot be defined in positive terms as a kind of being, however, since it is nothing but the pure negativity of gaps and splits in the network of signifiers. Its status remains that of an open question not to be answered or it is simply pure nonsense, something senseless as such. It is precisely this nonsense that the whole configuration of signifiers of literary work circles around, producing the effect of the uncanny with which its ever word, phrase, sentence, or other meaningful element, is saturated.

    The concept of the literary work implied in Lacan's writings presupposes a new understanding of its "classicity." What makes the literary work "classic" is not only the way it inscribes itself into the tradition of given culture while transforming its fundamental archetypal motifs. It is even more the way the unconscious has been inscribed into the unique configuration of its signifiers, endowing it with powerful traumatic force. Strictly speaking, it is the close circular implication of both, of the unconscious archetypal motifs and the "disturbed," traumatic way they are articulated on the linguistic (symbolic) level. It opens up in the literary work an endless perspective of the unspoken not to be exhausted by any supposedly "correct" interpretation. In other words, the "classic" literary work does not conceal in itself, on its presumably deep level, a supposed "mystery" or "riddle" to be disclosed and resolved by an ideal addressee. On the contrary, its alleged "mystery" is already present on its surface since it is inherently inscribed in the configuration of its signifiers, in the peculiar, traumatic way they relate to each other. Consequently, it is precisely due to this inherently traumatic character of the "classic" works of literature and art that they affect the readers of each new epoch with the same powerful force of the uncanny, thus prompting them to "new" understanding and interpretation.

    If one agrees with Freud that the action in Oedipus Rex and in Hamlet is determined by the powerful forces of the unconscious, those of incest and parricide, then one should also add that these forces not only operate--as Freud presupposes--in the "inside" of the main characters of these dramas, but they influence their very language as well, the way the main characters articulate their growing distress and depression. One could say then in Freudian terms that a classic literary works not only stage and reinterpret traumatic events from the past in a new context but they are also traumatic in their very style and language. A classic literary work not only represents the trauma but it is the trauma while embodying it in its "letter"--in its whole material basis and in all its aspects and details. It is precisely due to this circular traumatic knot between the (symbolic) representations of the literary work and what they represent that,as Gadamer would say,it is permanently "confirmed" (bewahrt) in its classicity in each new historical context, new epoch, and new culture.11

    This concept of the literary work implies that everything that could be called its "unconscious" as it is experienced by its addressee, both on the level of its content (signifieds) and in its signifying structure (its configuration of signifiers), is already by its essence not to be brought to consciousness. Consequently, the most significant aspect of the experience of the literary work by its addressees is not how they "understands" it but precisely how they do not understand it. What counts here is first of all what its addressees--we--experience as the permanent resistance of the signifying structure of the literary work, which prevents us from enclosing its representations (signifieds) into our own individual coherent universes of meaning. This resistance consists of the way the literary work contradicts common paths of thinking and feeling, how it puts into question previous ways of ordering the world outside and inside us, how it destroys our confortable feeling of "being in the world" while confronting us directly with our own traumatic past and terrifying loneliness.

    At the same time, however, we experience the classic literary work in the whole dramaturgy of its powerful appeal to recognize ourselves in its representations and in its traumatic world permanently in danger of falling apart. And it is precisely because of this enormous tension underlying the experience of the classic literary work that each new encounter with it--the painful confrontation with its resistances and challenges--preserves the primal naivete and freshness of the first encounter. Consequently, the moment of recognition for us as addressees, when we miraculously overcome the trauma of its previous experience and retrieves the unity of his self-understanding, is accompanied by the powerful experience of catharsis.

    One could say that the aesthetic experience converges here with the therapeutic; they simply enhance each other. Everything could be brought down to the one simple truth very reminiscent of what the analyst has to say to the patient about a dream:

    "This is you. You have to change your life."

1  One could point of course today at the deep differences between Freud's understanding of of psychoanalysis as science and that proposed by such authors as Adolf Grünbaum, Robert Stolorow, Marshall Edelson, and Horst Kachele, among others. However, there are still some essential features they have in common, as for example a preference for the explanatory model and not that of interpretation in psychoanalytic theory and practice, and the postulate of the verification of clinical data by way of experimental methods. On the other hand, the concept of psychoanalytic interpretation has undergone deep transformations as well. One should mention in this context first of all the post-structuralist and post-modernist readings of Freud proposed by such authors as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Slavoj Zizek, among others. But I think, all these essential differences and transformations notwithstanding, the fundamental controversy between these different 'scientific" and "hermeneutic" concepts of psychoanalysis remains the same: should the analyst prefer in his/her theory and practice explanatory procedures similar to those applied in the natural sciences or those of interpretation and understanding? Return to main text

²  Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1991), pp. 126-127. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985). Return to main text

³  Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York, 1967), esp. Ch. 9, "The Sorcerer and his Magic." Return to main text

⁴  The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), V (D) (Beta), "Dreams of the Death of Persons of whom the Dreamer is Fond." Standard Edition 4: 248-271; Gesammelte Werke 2/3: 253-278; Studienausgabe 2: 253-275. Return to main text

⁵Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt am Main, 1981), pp. 270-281.Return to main text

⁶  Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, 1970), esp. "History and Dialectics".Return to main text

⁷  There are also some other authors, not constituting a "school," that one could mention as having this third orientation, for example, Bruno Bettelheim or Harold Bloom.Return to main text

⁸  Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), ch. V, Standard Edition 6: 56-57; Gesammelte Werke 4: 64-65. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1916-1917 [1915-1917]), Ch. II: Standard Edition 15: 36-37; Gesammelte Werke 11: 30-31; Studienausgabe 1: 60-61. There are many examples of this kind in works such as The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. For a survey of Freud's and other psychoanalysts' interpretations of Shakespeare, see Norman N. Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York: 1966, 1968).Return to main text

⁹  Hanna Segal, A Psycho-analytical Approach to Aesthetics, The Work of Hanna Segal: A Kleinian Approach to Clinical Practice (New York: 1981), p. 499.Return to main text

¹⁰  Lacan does not offer a systematic theory of reading or interpreting literary texts. Although interpretations of literary works play an important role in his writings, one can find there only the implications of such a theory. Nevertheless, he strongly influences the contemporary theory of literature.Return to main text

11  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen, 1975), esp. "Das Beispiel des Klassischen," pp. 269-275. Return to main text