The Lessons of a Classic Revisited: Freud on Jensen's Gradiva

Before the problem of the creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.

There is an affinity, romance, and rivalry between psychoanalysis and literature. Both deal with outer and inner lives of mankind, expressed in deeds and dialogues and experienced in dreams and desires, emotions and memories, perceptions and imaginings. Psychoanalysis and literature re-create lives in stories and dramas, in forms appropriate to storytelling (narratology), on the one hand, and dramaturgy and dramatology (Lothane, 2009), on the other. Both deal with interpersonal communication of meaning and purpose, in language spoken and written, with action and interaction. Both show and tell, both depict and interpret, that is, analyze. Both deal with conscious experiences and unconscious processes. But there is this difference: stories contain description and dialogue, drama is all diaologue. In everyday real life dramas there are interactions between persons with distinct physiognomies and characters, in scenes and situations of collaboration, conflict, or crisis. Fictional dramas represent life's dramatic situations in actions on stage, in film, on television. In stories the narrator's descriptions of dramatic scenes evoke those scenes in the