Chapter 2 - Literature and fantasy, toward a grammar of the subject

Summary

Following Hamlet’s structural indecision and strategic postponing, a psychoanalytic reading usually takes into account the time one needs to understand the riddle, a mystery postulated at the core of the text. As we have seen, Hamlet was more impatient than hesitant. So was Freud, especially when he seems to be going too fast in his reading of the famous play. This haste is inevitable for one main reason: literature implies a deferred temporality. This idea was first adumbrated by Freud when discussing short stories by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, a prominent Swiss writer who also happened to be Wilhelm Fliess’s favorite author. Freud wanted to prove to his friend Fliess that one could analyze the “unconscious” not only of people but also of literary characters, thus, he would find illustrations of psychoanalytical concepts in popular fiction. He wrote to Fliess: “I am reading C. F. Meyer with great pleasure. In Gustav Adolf’s Page I found the idea of deferred action twice: in the famous passage you discovered, the one with the slumbering kiss, and in the episode involving the Jesuit, who insinuates himself as little Christine’s teacher” (LWF, p. 316). This very letter was to introduce a key concept for psychoanalysis.