rüyalar ve hatıralar âleminden sokaklara: üç orhan pamuk romanı*

This paper focuses on how Orhan Pamuk's three novels, The Black Book, The Museum of Innocence and A Strangeness in My Mind are constructed and function in different ways as a medium for both personal and collective memory recording, remembering and experiencing. Freud, in his paper “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”, states that what comes to light in the analysis room are not only repressed and forgotten memories, but also great deal of psychic information that the analysand has always known but has not thought much about. Psychoanalytical work is therefore much more than a process of remembering. Following Winnicott, psychoanalysts such as Roussillon conceive of analytic work, rather, as a shared intersubjective process in which the analysand can find and create his/her own psychic experiences, fantasies, and thoughts, a work of symbolization and, ultimately, an expansion of the capacity to be a subject. In such a way of understanding, the analyst's main role is to establish an analyzing situation, to open a space of play and creation in which the analysand can unfold and make sense of her/his psychic processes. When we consider his novels both as a medium of remembering and as a “brand new realm” created by him, can it be said that, for Orhan Pamuk, the space of literature aspires to function in a similar way? The author first argues that the psychoanalytic process, which can be defined as the work of creating one's own, connects us to the question that The Black Book pursues: Is it possible to be oneself, and what does it mean to be oneself? The novel is like a dream work that will deal with issues of personal and common history that have not been undertaken, made sense of or overcome. In The Museum of Innocence, both as a novel and as a museum, there is a melancholic realm where the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, as Freud wrote in “Mourning and Melancholia”. In such a psychic world, while memorial objects/things function as a “psychic envelope”, this function is essentially limited to clinging to the loss and preserving the lost as it is. In the novel A Strangeness in My Mind, on the other hand, there is a narrative that opens towards processing what is left behind, lost and lacking, towards mourning, and thus towards a process of transformation. Therefore, the novel constructs a world in which the present is lived and experienced. Through these three novels, the paper explores how time is experienced in different ways in different psychical processes.