Freud’s Italian Journey

Abstract

This thesis takes the psychoanalytical texts of Sigmund Freud on art and literature as its objects for analysis. While the biographical figure of Freud appears throughout these pages, this is not simply a psychobiographical reading of Freud, his personal circumstances and their relationship to his texts. Rather the processes of interpretation begun by Freud are turned on Freud himself, thus eventually displacing and questioning his theoretical mastery. This exploration of Freud and his ideas draws on the recent post-structuralist re-reading of his works, in particular that of Jacques Derrida. The thesis also argues that Freud’s interest in, frequent journeys to, and obssession with Italy profoundly shaped and informed his elaboration of psychoanalysis. It organises its material around the major Italian cities which were the destinations of Freud’s travel and the sites of the artworks he examined. Freud’s many Italian holidays were crucial for the development of his self-analysis and methodology, but it is also argued here that his papers on Italian subjects must be read as texts marked by fascination and allurement, crossed with anxiety and resistance. Journeys to Italy may also have heightened Freud’s sense of the visual, and it is contended that the visual dimension of Freud’s writing is crucial to an understanding of his elaboration of the theory of psychoanalysis. The indissolvable, but fraught and problematic, relation between image and text is at the heart of Freud’s analysis of works of art as he founds a critical methodology in which the two are inter-related, image illustrating idea and idea needing to express itself in image, but neither finally resolvable into the other. Thus the argument of the thesis follows as its model the famous elaboration of the the fort:da game by Freud moving back and forth between Freud’s life and his texts, between Freud and his post-structuralist commentators, between psychoanalytical and philosophical systems, between the written and the visual. This leads to the broader conclusion that Freud might provide the key to a new practice of criticism, and a new way of ‘seeing’ visual images.