白色旅馆与弗洛伊德
Thesis: In Thomas’s book The White Hotel, the female protagonist Lisa Erdmann suffers from hysterical symptoms. Her hysteria is not caused by reminiscences, but from anticipations. In The White Hotel the “unconscious” of Freudian psychoanalysis is Jewish historical pain- the traumatic and unbearable affect that constitutes the forgotten or occluded of Freud’s interpretation of Lisa.
1. The image of the Jew, itself feminized, becomes the projected image of the woman, and the Jew is displaced onto the hysteric. Lisa Erdman meshes the figure of the hysterical woman with the figure of the suffering Jew—suggesting how for Thomas history and hysteria occupy the same space.
2. The White Hotel performs a task of anamnesis on Freudian theory, then, by working through what psychoanalysis forgets—Jewish suffering—and by bearing witness to the historical terror that it cannot anticipate: the Shoah.
3. Lisa’s analysis in The White Hotel is in fact only completed at Babi Yar—it reveals the meaning of her symptoms— but Babi Yar doesn’t just explain her symptoms: it is also the primal scene of their cause, both the end and the traumatic origin of Lisa’s analysis, occupying an unapproachable time that exists both before and after her case history.
The White Hotel is a fiction of anamnesis. It draws on the spirit of psychoanalysis to articulate Shoah suffering through what we might call a “sublime” hysteria. The temporality suggests that history and hysteria occupies the same space. Not only “the memory of the past” is a part of unconsciousness, but also the memory of future that has not yet been presented. Lisa Erdman-Berenstein identifies herself with the historically repressed “jews” both in her hysteria (her hallucinations encode the sufferings of others) and her death. Lisa’s hysteria in the novel, that is, presents not the Shoah but the obliteration and silence that it imposes on its victims. It is the anamnesis of the forgotten. Joining herself to the traumatic-sublime fate of the repressed and forgotten, she enlists with the silenced.
1. The image of the Jew, itself feminized, becomes the projected image of the woman, and the Jew is displaced onto the hysteric. Lisa Erdman meshes the figure of the hysterical woman with the figure of the suffering Jew—suggesting how for Thomas history and hysteria occupy the same space.
2. The White Hotel performs a task of anamnesis on Freudian theory, then, by working through what psychoanalysis forgets—Jewish suffering—and by bearing witness to the historical terror that it cannot anticipate: the Shoah.
3. Lisa’s analysis in The White Hotel is in fact only completed at Babi Yar—it reveals the meaning of her symptoms— but Babi Yar doesn’t just explain her symptoms: it is also the primal scene of their cause, both the end and the traumatic origin of Lisa’s analysis, occupying an unapproachable time that exists both before and after her case history.
The White Hotel is a fiction of anamnesis. It draws on the spirit of psychoanalysis to articulate Shoah suffering through what we might call a “sublime” hysteria. The temporality suggests that history and hysteria occupies the same space. Not only “the memory of the past” is a part of unconsciousness, but also the memory of future that has not yet been presented. Lisa Erdman-Berenstein identifies herself with the historically repressed “jews” both in her hysteria (her hallucinations encode the sufferings of others) and her death. Lisa’s hysteria in the novel, that is, presents not the Shoah but the obliteration and silence that it imposes on its victims. It is the anamnesis of the forgotten. Joining herself to the traumatic-sublime fate of the repressed and forgotten, she enlists with the silenced.
有关键情节透露
- 作者: D. M. Thomas
- 出版: Penguin (Non-Classics)
- 定价: USD 16.00
- 装帧: Paperback
- 页数: 288
- 时间: 1993-9-1