Introduction

In the summer of 1998 it was a century ago that a literary work of art was interpreted for the first time from a psychoanalytic point of view. In a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fließ on June 20 1898, Sigmund Freud wrote a short note with his psychoanalytic ideas about the Die Richterin (The Female Judge, ), a novel by the Swiss author Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. This psychoanalytic reading, which was written much earlier than the analysis of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, marked the birth of a new hermeneutical method. This method was initially rather controversial, but it developed eventually in a very fecund way, branching off in many different schools and directions, and widened its scope to all the fine arts. Freud's remarks on King Oedipus and Hamlet form, as we all know, an integral part of The Interpretation of Dreams.

Working together at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands in the fields of French and German literature and with a keen interest in the psychoanalytic study of literary works, we decided, for the occasion of this centennial, to invite colleagues from the German, English, and French speaking worlds where psychoanalysis has its strongest impact. Our aim was to make a survey of the past, to discuss the present and to explore the future of the psychoanalytic study of literature. This conference took place in March 1998 in Groningen. We started out with a workshop on the novel Die Richterin by , in which the participants compared their own approach to the text with Freud's. Which concepts can still be considered valuable and fruitful (for instance that of the family romance and the incest fantasy), in what aspects do we differ from Freud and can we speak of progress (for instance in stressing the formal aspects and avoiding psychopathography)? The papers read at this workshop will be published in one of the next issues of the Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik.