Search Results

This chapter analyzes rape in the context of fantasy, focusing on John Milton’s Comus that draws on Freudian seduction theory. It discusses John Leonard and William Kerrigan’s debate on whether “the Lady” in Comus fantasized about being raped or driven to defend sexual discipline against the deception of her attacker. The debate between Kerrigan and Leonard raises the hermeneutic problem called “the indeterminacy of the sexual”, which implies that no one can be entirely confident to know which bodily acts count as “sexual”, such as when to consider kissing an expression of sexual desire, affection, or social bond.

Chapter 3 begins with a tracing of the distinction between traumatic and auxiliary scenes in the cases of Katharina and Lucy R and its evolution into the concept of afterwardsness / deferred action in the case of Emma in the Project (1895). It examines the setting of the Emma case in the argument about the operation of pathological defense in hysterical repression and symbol formation. In particular it focuses on the paradox of a memory that has the capacity to release a sexual affect that the original experience did not have and the defensive repression and symptom formation it provokes. It seeks to extract the logic of afterwardsness from Freud’s assumption of infantile asexuality and indifference to adult seduction. The chapter pursues a contradiction in Freud’s argument between a simultaneous emphasis on a sexual experience that is said to be both premature and deferred. It traces this through the three seduction theory papers of 1896, in which afterwardsness and its companion thesis of overdetermination is both affirmed and put at risk by an aetiological model that privileges a single specific cause, located in early infantile sexual abuse as the underlying precondition for psychopathology.

This chapter talks about homosexuality and bisexuality. It states that the study of homosexuality is one of the most troubled examples of the impact of ideology on scholarly inquiry, and that any complications within the study of homosexuality and bisexuality are due to no less than four main components. It studies a definition of bisexuality, the controversy surrounding it, and ends with its clinical aspects. With regards to homosexuality, the chapter looks at the traditional psychoanalytic viewpoint of homosexuality, dominant psychodynamics, categories of male homosexuality, and the “general seduction” theory, which involves the concept of penis envy.

This preface deals with the contradictory impression that Veit Harlan left on people who knew him personally and people who have merely watched his films. As the director of the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss (Jew Suss, 1940), he appeared to be a fanatical anti-Semite assisting in the murder of 6 million Jews. Former Jewish friends who had gone into exile couldn’t reconcile this image with the man they had known before 1933. To the scholar, the life and work of Veit Harlan raises a large number of questions, such as the responsibility of the artist, the seduction theory, and the relationship between form and content. Harlan’s preference for melodrama, a term he himself never used, invites comparison with Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; stylistic elements in his films that are also found in Alfred Hitchcock can be traced back to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau; and as a filmmaker obsessed with his wife, he invites comparison to David O. Selznick and Roberto Rossellini. The chapter further deals with Harlan’s treatment of women and strangers; his interest in social issues; his nationalism; and his use of actors, color, and music.

This chapter deals with the world premiere of Jud Süss at the Venice Film Festival in 1940, where it is praised by the young critic Michelangelo Antonioni, and its subsequent box-office success in Nazi-occupied Europe. Several factors behind its success are analyzed, such as an ingenious publicity campaign aimed separately at men and women and Harlan’s use of genre motifs such as illicit love between a curious virgin and a seductive villain. Jud Süss raises questions about the seductive quality of films because various SS members would later claim, when put on trial, that the film influenced them negatively. Harlan follows Jud Süss with another historical epic, Der grosse König (The great king, 1942), and has to endure the mutilation and limited release of a more personal project, the Western comedy-drama Pedro soll hängen (Pedro must hang, 1941).