Preface

Throughout the history of Imago and American Imago, authors have explored the boundaries between literature and psychoanalysis, advancing investigations going back to the earliest years of analytic theory and practice. Sigmund Freud, of course, drew attention across his career to the distinctive psychological insights of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Schnitzler. In some contexts he employed their creations as confirmations of clinical observations, in others he took them as starting points for theorizing. Freud furthermore recognized in the writer's craft the use of analytic and cathartic tools familiar in psychoanalytic technique. In these ways the combined study of literature and psychology marked for Freud, as for scholars and scientists who followed him, a crucial beginning to modern interdisciplinary research.

It can be argued that the founding moment in psychoanalytic interdisciplinary scholarship came before the First World War in 1907 with the publication of “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva,” Freud's study of Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 novella, “Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy.” According to Freud, in the depiction of the key turning point in the life of the story's central character Jensen gave a psychoanalytically valid account of the process of psychological crisis and recovery. Freud's essay recapitulated in detail the background and progress of the fictional crisis and then identified the markers along the character's path toward recovery. After the Second World War, as part of the rapid expansion of interest in psychoanalysis as both a mental and cultural science, scholars and readers revisited Freud's essay in a 1956 volume edited and introduced by Philip Rieff. This volume included not only Harry Zohn's translation of Freud's essay—the first full version published in English—but also Helen M. Downey's original English translation of Jensen's novella.