Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Lodger
- Chapter 2 Oedipus Express
- Chapter 3 Railway Reading
- Chapter 4 ‘From Autumn to Spring, Aesthetics Change’
- Chapter 5 ‘A Hymn to Movement’
- Chapter 6 Staging the ‘Private Theatre’
- Chapter 7 The Newness of the ‘New Biography’
- Chapter 8 European Witness
- Chapter 9 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness
- Chapter 10 Directed Dreaming
- Chapter 11 ‘In the Circle of the Lens’
- Chapter 12 Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel
- Index
- References
Chapter 6 - Staging the ‘Private Theatre’
Gender and the Auto-Erotics of Reverie
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 The Lodger
- Chapter 2 Oedipus Express
- Chapter 3 Railway Reading
- Chapter 4 ‘From Autumn to Spring, Aesthetics Change’
- Chapter 5 ‘A Hymn to Movement’
- Chapter 6 Staging the ‘Private Theatre’
- Chapter 7 The Newness of the ‘New Biography’
- Chapter 8 European Witness
- Chapter 9 Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness
- Chapter 10 Directed Dreaming
- Chapter 11 ‘In the Circle of the Lens’
- Chapter 12 Virginia Woolf and the Art of the Novel
- Index
- References
Summary
The young woman who writes and the young man who writes are alike dissatisfied; but the woman writes in order to have something, the young man in order to be relieved of something.
(Laura Marholm, The Psychology of Women)The phrase ‘private theatre’ comes from Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria (1895), in which it is used by one of Breuer’s women patients, Bertha Pappenheim, known as ‘Anna O’:
This girl, who was bubbling over with intellectual vitality, led an extremely monotonous existence in her puritanically-minded family. She embellished her life in a manner which probably influenced her decisively in the direction of her illness, by indulging in systematic day-dreaming, which she described as her ‘private theatre.’ While everyone thought she was attending, she was living through fairy-tales in her imagination, but she was always on the spot when she was spoken to, so that no one was aware of it. She pursued this activity almost continuously while she was engaged on her household duties, which she discharged unexceptionally … this habitual day-dreaming while she was well passed over into illness without a break.
One of the tasks Breuer and Freud set themselves in Studies on Hysteria was to demonstrate that the roots of hysteria lie ‘in an excess rather than a defect’. According to Breuer’s ‘energetic’ model of mental and ‘nervous’ life, affect or excitation liberated by active mental work is also used up by this work. In states of abstraction and dreaminess, on the other hand, ‘intercerebral excitation sinks below its clear waking level’, a state which passes over into sleep. If, in this ‘state of absorption’, ‘a group of affectively coloured ideas is active’, it is put at ‘the disposal of abnormal functioning, such as conversion [hysteria]’. While Anna O’s ‘private theatre’ is at one moment seen as an aspect of a creative and active imagination, in which ‘energetic mental work is carried on’, at the next it becomes identified with ‘habitual reverie’, the first step towards ‘pathogenic auto-hypnosis’. This double perspective indicates a more general uncertainty as to the normality or abnormality of creativity and imaginative life. This issue was explored in the numerous studies of genius, creativity and pathology at the turn of the century, as well as in psychoanalytic debates and writings, the best known of which is Freud’s essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1907).
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- Dreams of ModernityPsychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema, pp. 110 - 123Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014