Here's Looking at You, Peter Quint: “The Turn of the Screw,” Freud's “Dora,” and the Aesthetics of Hysteria

This discussion will extrapolate interpretations from a speculative alignment of two nearly contemporary texts, “The Turn of the Screw” by and “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (usually known as “Dora”) by Sigmund Freud (1905),1 but it will remain an essay because the furthest horizon of extrapolation remains beyond the reach of any reading—and especially speculative reading—of only two texts. I therefore feel free to convey a sense of that horizon, even before the appearance of supportive evidence, because I think it will contribute to the interest of the discussion, and because any reader who feels abused by my interpretations can easily check to see what influence it has exerted on them. In a discussion which today evokes psychoanalysis, it is anyway useless to try to preclude scepticism, and the best way forward (as in psychoanalytic practice itself) is sometimes to facilitate the way back to one's most fundamental motivations. In this case these have included a sense that the Freudian explanation of hysteria, which unfolded at the end of the nineteenth century (and which became the foundation of psychoanalysis) is very intimately related to a parallel evolution, to the same period-point, in aesthetics. My idea is not that aesthetics has so much to tell us about hysteria (I imagine not the “aestheticization” of hysteria) but rather that hysteria still has much to teach us about aesthetic practice and theorizing. The lesson is not that the latter are “neurotic”—or at least any more than any other comparable mental activity—but that certain of their