Stade, G. (2000). An Indiscretion on Psychoanalytic Fiction. Changing Ideas In A Changing World: The Revolution in Psychoanalysis. Essays in Honour of Arnold Cooper, 223-226 An Indiscretion on Psychoanalytic Fiction I might as well confess from the outset that my interest in literature is a prurient interest and always has been. I began to read compulsively during my twelfth year, when I thought all women were as blank between the legs as the goddesses in the Classical wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I would spend hours mooning over those fine figures of women and then run home to read — as I now see it — in search of solutions to the problems posed by that uncanny blankness. If I had not discovered in Poe's stories a fascination in the verbal equivalent to my own state of mind — “… much of Madness and more of Sin, And Horror the Soul of the Plot” — to quote Poe (1843) himself; if I had not discovered in Huckleberry Finn the absorbing fable of innocent males escaping dreadful women only to become voyeurs; if I had not discovered in the jungle tales of Tarzan a model of manliness triumphant not by overcoming its animal nature but [This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.] |
