‘Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’: On the Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist novel or document Nadja opens with the following statement:

Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’ …. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part.³

Breton plays on the double meaning in the proverb, shifting the emphasis from ‘tell me whom you frequent (or: what your haunts are), and I will tell you who you are’ to literalize the effect of that haunting. Discomfort attends this becoming-ghostly, for the haunting Breton has to suffer the ghost’s ‘blind submission to certain contingencies of time and place’ and is ‘doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring,… learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten’.⁴ His own subjectivity, now ghosted, far from masters the spatio-temporal world from a place outside it, but is constructed contingently and through a sequential forgetting; it must shadow itself, ceaselessly failing to conjure self-proximity. Nadja will pursue how Breton’s subjectivity is constructed disjointedly through chance, accident and the uncanny encounter. As Margaret Cohen reads this opening passage: ‘Breton posits … identity as a sequence of temporally differentiated moments.

I know of a doctor who had once lost one of his women patients suffering from Graves’ disease…. One day, several years later, a girl entered his consulting room, who, in spite of all efforts, he could not help recognizing as the dead one. He could frame only a single thought: ‘So, after all it’s true that the dead can come back to life’…. The doctor to whom this occurred was … none other than myself.¹

There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave/To tell us this²