Freud Gradiva

I have added German and English versions of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva and Freud's essay to poets.aule-browser.com. It is a companion to the Luther Bibel: the connection is dreams. The new web page requires the Curl RTE browser plugin.

In Freud's Traumdeutung text there are passages which must be read in the original in order to reflect Freud's own tendentious readings onto his own writings.  The parallel with the Luther Bibel might seem mistaken: Freud's family did not originate in Catholic Vienna: they were Jews in Galicia, where the few Protestants were Augsburg Confession, Confessio Augustana. But Freud earnestly sought the Lutheran-minded Jung (Binswanger, for example, while Swiss, was from a Jewish family of Augsburg) as has often been noted. In the wider world, the Germans were Lutherans (see the struggle of the Lutheran convert Husserl in the Freiburg university and the long standing issue of Catholic influence intruding into Protestant "instances".)

In some ways you might see Freud's later "metapsychology" essays as his struggle to post his "theses". Sigismund Schlomo Freud certainly saw his psychoanalytic movement as comparable to that of a Moses or a Luther or a Galileo (but in the city of Ignaz Semmelweis and Ludwig Boltzmann.)

Central Freudian terminology such as “Traumentstellung” have a subtle ambiguity - this one more easily noted in French - but even further, the use of “Entstellung” in chemistry in Freud's day is not that of morgue notes: defaced, disfigured, distorted, Tatschen entstellen, Tatsachen verdrehen, Wirklichkeit entstellen, irren, Irma.

Freud: «Aus dem im Träume [Trauma] mitspielenden Gedankenkries [Benzinring] möchte ich nachträglich den Ausdruck für diese flüchtige Empfindung einsetzen [einstellen]. Es ist, als ob er mir gesagt hätte: Du nimmst deine ärztlichen» (my insertions in square brackets)


The page ends with Freud's essay Der Dichter und das Phantasieren.