You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This invaluable study by the literary critic and professor of contemporary German literature at the Freie Universität, Berlin and formerly of Vienna, which addresses the reciprocal relationship between literature and psychoanalysis, formulating the thesis that ‘psychoanalysis is fundamentally an interpretive technique and a theory of art’ is—without any explicit reference to his 150th birthday—an unexpected, albeit critical, tribute to Sigmund Freud. The author begins with Umberto Eco's insight—indirectly portrayed in his novel Foucault's pendulum (1990)—that the admission of a missing key can open the door to a closed text and thereby safeguard against any superficial deciphering, thus an ironic message in the form of the failing detective (p. 9). Rohrwasser interprets Freud ‘as a modern author, acting as decipherer, detective, translator and archaeologist’, who ‘not only solves the enigma but also constructs it’ (pp. 15-6). Rather than examining Freud's private reading (for which see Brückner, 1975), Rohrwasser reviews the public lectures and his interpretations and commentaries on literature, including those sent exclusively to his friend in Berlin, Wilhelm Fliess, and he reveals the covert writing process by which Freud became the writer's rivalrous counterpart. This perspective sheds an unusual light on the ‘uncanny feeling of familiarity’ and ‘awe of meeting my “double”’ (Jones, 1957, p. 474) that Freud admitted to Arthur Schnitzler in a letter on his 60th birthday, to the extent that it is not only Schnitzler who emerges as an ‘explorer of the depths’ (p. 474) but also implicitly Freud as a writer. Psychoanalysis and literary modernity were united by the ‘deep grasp of the truths of the unconscious and of the biological nature of man’ (p. 474). Rohrwasser selects four of the dream narratives on which Freud commented—E. T. A. Hoffmann's uncanny tale ‘The sandman’, three novellas by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva: A Pompeian phantasy play and