status: Published

Embodying Words: An Analysand’s Journal, 1941–1945 Katherine Jenness (bio) I. The Journal In May of 1941, a 41-year-old woman residing in Los Angeles sought out psychiatric treatment to address lethargy and hopelessness related to recent professional disappointments. She and her psychiatrist promptly began psychoanalytic treatment, and her analyst made an unusual recommendation: in addition to their sessions, each day she would set aside time to write a journal about whatever came to mind. Perhaps this was a recommendation he gave all his patients, or perhaps only to her, a professional writer by trade. But write she did, prodigiously so, and we are left with a text comprising over 200,000 words (as a comparison, the story of Jane Eyre is told in 186,418). The journal offers an intimate and tremendously moving portrait of a life and a treatment. The analysand was Gladys Tilden. She hailed from a California family of some prominence. Upon her death she left her personal papers to the University of California at Berkeley and it was in the university archives that I stumbled upon her journal while completing research on an unrelated project. Titled “Autobiography for psychoanalysis, 1941–45,” it belongs to the Gladys Tilden Papers in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Tilden wrote her journal on a typewriter, without page numbers, occasionally adding a handwritten marginal [End Page 213] note. All material quoted from the journal comes from this source and is available courtesy of the Bancroft Library. Although Gladys Tilden allowed the public to have full access to her papers, including her journal, to my knowledge her journal has not yet been discussed in print. Why then do I choose to write on it? I do so in part because I respect her choice to permit the public access to her journal, despite the highly personal details it contains.1 Even more importantly, I am strongly impressed by the sheer power of Tilden’s authorial voice. To read her journal is to become acquainted with a remarkable, tenacious woman with an inspired way of seeing the world and a lyrical way of expressing it. She can, in other words, speak for herself, and in what follows I have made an effort to quote her frequently. Such a rich document invites exploration on many fronts, but in this essay I focus on one dimension of the analysand’s journal in particular: her relationship with language. Gladys is irrepressibly verbal. She describes herself as a “pathological bookworm” and she is compelled not only to read but also to write and speak as well. Trying to stop writing is “like wringing the neck of a chicken.” With some interlocutors, she “can put in conversation for ten hours straight.” It is no surprise that she takes so readily to psychoanalysis, the talking cure, and to the task of journaling her free associations. This essay, therefore, gives close consideration to what words mean to the analysand. What does her volubility express and what does it obscure? How did her early experiences, which include being raised by deaf parents, shape the particular meanings language possesses for her? But the essay’s main concern, beyond the subjective experience of language, is how Gladys makes use of language in her journal. How does she write? And how does her writing change over the course of her treatment? Because we have so few written records of psychoanalytic treatments, her journal offers us a rare opportunity to track a patient’s written language over the course of an analytic process. Finally, this essay offers an application of Hans W. Loewald’s theories on language and psychoanalysis. As Loewald describes, language is a unique human capacity in that it “partakes” of both secondary and primary mental processes (1978/1980, p. [End Page 214] 179). We use words to name, refer, categorize, and conceptually link, but also to evoke, depict, and bring to life. Even though language is conscious and verbal by definition, it has the power to evoke experiences that lie well beyond the verbal. Psychoanalysis exploits this function of language at every turn: it is through speech that we beckon the pictorial landscapes of the unconscious, and...

“That self was gone!” The Transformations of Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter: A Psychoanalytic Perspective David B. Diamond (bio) After his fateful encounter with Hester in the forest and nightmarish walk through town, Arthur Dimmesdale finally reaches his study where he experiences relief and refuge amongst his familiar surroundings. At the same time, he becomes aware of a momentous internal change that has decisively transformed him since he left his dwelling two days earlier: Here he had studied and written; here, gone though fast and vigil, and had come forth half alive; here, striven to pray; here, borne a hundred thousand agonies! […] He knew it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written thus far into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this former self with scornful, pitying, but half-envious curiosity. That self was gone! Another man had returned out of the forest; a wiser one; with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge that! (Hawthorne, 1850/1962, pp. 222–223, emphasis added) The reader’s curiosity is aroused by these remarkable assertions: what is the knowledge, which hidden mysteries and what is the wisdom that Dimmesdale has acquired? What of himself, viewed as he is “standing apart” does he see? Who is this new man? The narrator, who has spared the reader no detail of Dimmesdale’s mental deterioration, is silent as to the mental processes involved in this transformation. Although this change is not expressed in words, it is revealed in The Reverend’s subsequent actions: the dismissal of Chillingworth as his physician, the delivery of an inspired and authentic Election [End Page 647] Sermon, a confession of guilt on the scaffold and the public acknowledgment of Pearl as his daughter. None of these actions, which are all contrary to the reader’s expectations, is possible under the aegis of his former passive and paralyzed self. That self is now truly gone. It is no secret that The Scarlet Letter is a psychological novel: word for word, chapter after chapter, scarcely a serious work of literature devotes itself more to the inner life and its conflicts than Hawthorne’s first romance. The small, claustrophobic Puritan colony, with its stark rules of conduct and abundant opportunity for voyeuristic zeal, provides a narrow, shallow, and brilliantly lit stage against which the inner lives of the intensely entangled, conflicted and tormented characters play out. Their secrets, always under pressure of exposure, set them apart from their community, from each other, and from themselves. Under the burden of psychic strain, each character is prone to forms of psychological deterioration. Although it is true of all the protagonists, Arthur Dimmesdale best exemplifies the judgment expressed in The House of the Seven Gables, “For, what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!” (1851/1965, p. 169). Indeed, The Scarlet Letter details the exacting trials of a man who “above all things else […] loathed his miserable self!” (1850/1962, p. 144) but who ultimately finds release in his final scene where he “stood with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory” (p. 255). What is the psychology of this momentous transformation? It is a question that comes naturally to the mind of a psychoanalyst to whom psychological change is not only of interest but a desideratum of psychoanalytic treatment. Athough an analysand is not a fictional character, and Dimmesdale is not an analysand, a bridge between the wide differences in their species is created by the “truth of the human heart,” valorized in the Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, which is encoded in their respective psyches. A cross-disciplinary study which applies a psychoanalytic perspective to a literary work is only possible because Hawthorne provides an abundance of data for psychoanalytic inquiry, namely, the intricate interweaving of the character’s conscious and unconscious motivations and their vicissitudes. These data can be organized and sequenced [End Page 648] into a...

The essay examines the concept of boredom in religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In the English language, the French word ennui, as well as boredom, covers a spectrum of indifference. Ennui, however, refers to a more or less chronic state of mind, while boredom has, in most cases, both a cause and a boring object. This essay is most concerned with ennui, or profound boredom, which it explores through a range of phenomena from denial and melancholia to disillusionment and waiting.

The essay examines how the memory of exile is represented in the subject matter and literary technique of the writer Anna Seghers, who escaped Germany in 1933 and finally found refuge in Mexico during the Second World War. It emphasizes how the significance of transit or transition in Seghers's work resonates with the meaning of memory as studied by psychoanalysis and with the concept of analysis interminable as Freud described it in his well-known essay published the year before he too was forced into exile.

In a sketch of the seven-text cycle Orkus, the Austrian author Gerhard Roth likened the realm of silence—often a guilty silence—he explored in his works to the underworld, an "invisible 'other world' that is probed, and not really understood or 'explained'…in psychoanalysis." Examining the cycle's inaugural novel, The Lake, this essay argues that a multi-theoretical psychoanalysis is indeed able to help readers craft a nuanced understanding of the counter-world of Roth's characters, and that in turn the novel illuminates aspects of psychoanalytic thinking. Its fractal structure engages with chaos not by trying to master it, but by allowing its order to emerge; its temporal unfolding is only comprehensible after the fact; and the subjectivity that emerges from its traumatic core is in touch, precariously, with a truth that defies simple explanation.

The essay explores the different forms and effects of mise en abyme, or the use of mirroring techniques and alter egos, in the works of Philip Roth. In Roth's texts, mise en abyme enables the novelist to avoid rigid limitations of pure autobiography and to express aspects of his personality in a kaleidoscopic multitude of characters.

Reviewed by: Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity by John Zilcosky Maria Koundoura (bio) Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity. John Zilcosky. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. 264 pp. In the opening pages of Uncanny Encounters, John Zilcosky's study of the preconditions that led to the birth of the uncanny, the elements that shaped it, and its current life, there is a story about maps: the author's fascination with them as a young boy, his preference for the "wondrous" kind, before modernity's insistence on a great divide between fiction and reality, maps like that of Odysseus's travels, Babylonian maps, medieval maps that depicted the Garden of Eden far to the East, past the Ganges delta. This ongoing fascination is what led him to discover later, as a teenager, that he did not have to go too far back in history to find the inviting incompletion that so drew him; that even in the nineteenth century there were "white spots in maps" all the more to encourage new scientific expeditions and intrepid travellers (p. 6). What he also discovered at this time, however, was that in a period of twenty years in the late nineteenth century all these spaces were "filled in" as "abruptly and irrevocably, the earth came into relief" (p. 8). "This unique historical moment," he writes, linking a childhood fascination with his academic work, "led to the pressing question of my book: How did this apparently final mapping of the earth affect the European imagination? How did Europeans' fantasies about themselves and their world change when these apparently virgin territories disappeared?" (p. 9). Zilcosky's answer to these questions becomes the premise which informs all his readings in the book: "As I discovered while reading travel writing from around 1900, Europeans experienced this new global world as a shocking series of 'uncanny encounters.'" "At the ends of the earth," he explains, "they found not primitive savages but 'civilized' natives or, even worse, European dopplegängers…as a frightening surprise" (p. 9). "[F]in de siècle European, especially German, travelers," he continues, also specifying his book's area of study, "were…always discovering Europe everywhere, resulting in a new kind of fear, not of difference but of similarity, and also a new way of talking about this fear—years before Freud published his The [End Page 258] Uncanny in 1919" (p. 12). With this realization, Zilcosky proceeds to delineate the subject matter, and uniqueness, of his book. By examining "popular texts [such as travel narratives] as well as so-called high literature and Freud's psychoanalytic works," he writes, "I aim to show how these three types of writing expressed a related anxiety and how, in the age of the apparent end of alterity, they pointed toward a new source of modern violence: not in the oft-cited fear of difference, but in the dread of uncanny recognition" (pp. 12–13). This is a dread that the last lines of the book attempt to exorcize from our collective unconscious by naming it as the thing that haunts us still. After citing a series of contemporary examples of modern violence in the figure of the "terrorist" whose similarity, not difference, to "us" "demonstrates how today's uncanny moment resembles the one around 1900, except with an even tighter concentric circle," Zilcosky concludes: "when we are not undone by it, we are reminded of the continued imperative to grapple with it" (p. 182). Understanding this move at the end of the book as the actual occasion of its beginning, that is, as the cause of its interrogation into the end of alterity and not, as narrative convention of the ends of books would have it, as the effect of its interrogation of that end documented in the body of the book, is important to its argument that alterity is always already within. This pre-posterous structure, in itself an example of uncanniness, as well as all of the examples of familiar unfamiliarity that make up the body of the book, are all part of the "imperative to grapple" with today's uncanny moment. Uncanny Encounters traces that interior other...