On: The Mother in the Text: Metapsychology and Fantasy in the Work of Interpretation

Dear Editors,

I was delighted by Fausto Petrella's text on the concept of the return of the repressed in Delusions and dreams in Jensen's ‘Gradiva' (Freud, 1906; Petrella, 2008). Petrella shows us that this concept can be understood both in a strict sense and in terms of possible associations emerging from Freud's text. I should, however, like to suggest one further idea based on Petrella's text. Through the examples of Horace, the student, Rousseau and Rops, Petrella in fact reveals his own intuition, which is that Freud's associations ultimately converge on the female body and “perhaps” (Petrella, 2008, p. 632) he says, on the maternal body, on matrem nudam (cf. Freud's letter to Fliess, 3 October 1897). Now it seems to me that Petrella might in fact have reached the same conclusion through a much denser associative network arising both from Freud's and from Jensen's text. This would have pointed the way towards the maternal body as an implicit theme of Freud's associations but also, more specifically, to the theme of the dead mother. In fact, if, as Petrella suggests (p. 632), we allow ourselves to associate starting from ‘smaller islands’ of a text to combine them into an ‘archipelago’ that discloses the coherence of their hidden meaning, we can discern the following elements, which seem to have a degree of internal coherence:

(a)‘Gradiva' is an anagram of ‘Gravida’: how many young analysts in training, certainly French analysts, make this verbal slip (or play on words)! So here we find ourselves immediately in the register of Gravid-ity just by inverting two letters. This new element might therefore constitute a series of variations on the theme of the pregnant woman. Or, at least, this hypothesis can be seriously proposed and we can examine whether other elements of this story tend to support it. This is the case…

(b)… and it leads clearly on to the question of the relationship between the pregnant woman and the dead mother. In fact, something that the heroine Gr