HYPNOS, AESTHETICS, LITERATURE AND UNCONSCIOUS IN EUROPE (1900-1968)

Fabrice FlahutezHenri BéharNicolas SurlapierreTania Collani

The colloquium entitled Hypnos, Aesthetics, literature and unconscious in Europe (1900-1968) and the exhibition Hypnos - Images and unconscious in Europe (1900-1949) were jointly organized between March and July 2009 by the Musée d'Art Moderne Lille Métropole. The proceedings of the colloquium, compiled and presented by Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre and Nicolas Surlapierre, were published by Éditions L'improviste in 2009, accompanied by a postface offering views of the exhibition. They are subdivided into five major chapters.

THEORIES OF THE UNCONSCIOUS IN EUROPE

The first chapter opens with a methodological proposition for studying the unconscious in literature by Sébastien Hubier. Anne Boissière then analyzes Theodor Adorno's reluctance toward Jung and Tanguy, Wuillème those of Ernst Bloch toward Freud. Michaela Niculescu finally highlights the theoretical ambivalences of psychoanalysis.

To study the unconscious in literature, S. Hubier ("Psychic realities, anthropological realities: the place of the unconscious in renewed comparatism") proposes to cross cultural and psychological approaches in the manner of ethnopsychoanalysis (Devereux). He judges sterile the study of literary sources and themes considered as such and makes a brilliant demonstration of this from some great figures of literature and cinema (Frankenstein, Dracula, Alien) which are analyzed neither from themes (the living dead, the artificial creature), images, motifs (cold or fog), nor artistic processes, but through unconscious structures that refer simultaneously to individual psyche, social conflicts and cultural representations.

A. Boissière ("The fallout from the Freud / Jung split: the dream image between Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin") notes the weak place occupied by Jung, unlike Freud, in reflections on art articulated to theories of the unconscious. By analyzing the dozen letters (1934-1937) in which Adorno questions Benjamin on the notion - underlying in The Arcades Project - of collective images bearing utopias, she highlights Adorno's mistrust of Jung. In view of the philosopher's strict Freudo-Marxism, the idea of utopia dangerously approached the Jungian conception of the dream and a supposed innateness of images in the psyche. Such a biological bias, detached from individual history, was for him a matter of reactionary romanticism betraying Freudian disenchantment. Benjamin however, even very interested in Jung, could not be suspected of having undergone his direct influence...

The unconscious is not universally accepted in Europe. T. Wuillème ("Subverting the unconscious: for a utopian aesthetic / Ernst Bloch") recalls that in the aftermath of the First World War certain philosophers heirs of the Enlightenment (Husserl, Croce or Cassirer) attempt to counteract the rise of irrationalisms and refound Reason. Ernst Bloch for his part proposes an original path (The Spirit of Utopia, 1918): judging theories of the unconscious regressive, he prefers to them the theory of "not yet being" defined as a tension nourished by daydream to conceive a better future. Expressionism is in his eyes the best response to this aspiration - superior to that of its heirs: surrealism and New Objectivity - because it knows how to extract a messianic energy from forces of decomposition. Music, freed from the illusion of images, is the art that best restores the vitality of the "not yet conscious." Faithful to Kant, "the polar star of all utopia," Bloch rejects negative visions of the world.

M. Niculescu ("Authority in hypnosis and the advent of performativity") synthesizes certain ambiguities of psychoanalysis: it claims to evacuate mechanisms of influence, starting with hypnosis, to institute new ones like transference, the site of all seductions between theorists of psychoanalysis, patients and psychoanalysts. Does not Ferenczi's very personal involvement in the family drama of his patients contradict the claim of psychoanalysis as science - in reaction against spiritism - and as a quest for a subject freed from all influence? And what to say of Lacan's vaticinating histrionics postulated both as truth and parodic staging of the impossibility of knowing?

EUROPEAN TOPICS

This chapter visits the variations of theories of neurosis in Europe, under the influence of new technologies (Jean-Christophe Valtat), contradictions between theories of the unconscious and scientistic or magical resistances to this new concept (Ruggero Campagnoli and Cécile Kovacshazy). Two authors, Éric Lysøe and Cécile Wolff speak to us more precisely about the impossible mastery of drives in some flagship works of the early century: L'Autre côté (A. Kubin), Le Château (Kafka), Le Golem (Meyrink).

Should we think like J.-C. Valtat ("1895 - Freud, Strindberg, Schreber: psychic apparatus and influencing machines") that "the paranoiac succeeded where Freud failed"? While Freud indeed elaborated in 1895 a theory of the psychic apparatus, the paranoid delusions of certain writers explicitly seized upon technological novelties: persecuting electrical machines in Strindberg (Inferno, 1897) or "nerve connections" to God in Schreber. These authors connected their writing to railway, electrical, telephone networks... elements henceforth inseparable from mental disturbances, while Freud ignored the specificities of modern technique in favor of the sole "scene of writing."

We see that many works of the early 20th century are saturated with Freudian unconscious. But concerning one of them, Le Mariage de Don Quichotte by P.-J. Toulet (1902), R. Campagnoli ("Paul-Jean Toulet's Don Quichotte and the phobia of the unconscious") wonders what part of it is irony, so much do the neuroses of his characters, imbued with "poetic charm," not resemble those that proliferate in modern literature. Published in the midst of debate between rationalism and irrationalism - two possible contradictory entries into the Traumdeutung of 1900 - his Don Quichotte rejects psychoanalysis as science in favor of a psychoanalysis as art hidden in the folds of the symbol. The author's "poetic irrationalism" fits neither with the scientism of the Freudian unconscious, nor with the positivist theories of brain medicine. P.-J. Toulet is resolutely on the side of the soul, despite a preface where he seems to reduce his Don Quichotte to a pleasant adventurer who has reconnected with reason.

In matters of the unconscious, the case of Hungary is quite particular. Cécile Kovacshazy ("Hungarian writers and psychoanalysis") traces the particular historical, political and cultural circumstances that favored an exceptional reception of psychoanalysis in Budapest, its second homeland, under the aegis of Ferenczi, Freud's spiritual son. Literature and depth psychology are intimately linked, in at least three authors: Kosztolányi integrates Freud and Ferenczi into his novels and short stories ("Freud's Cigar," 1918); M. Babits is more inspired by the French Janet or Ribot (Les Maladies de l'âme), by Schopenhauer or Bergson, partly because of the late translation of the Traumdeutung in Hungary (1935); Karinthi, admirer and critic of psychoanalysis, stages a parodic double of Ferenczi in one of his stories ("At the psychiatrist's," 1912) and his last novel, Journey around my skull (1937), relies more on science than on free associations. But parallel to the unconscious, the "délibáb" prospers, this "magical thinking" very distant from modernity, theorized by Ferenczi himself and prized by the very modern Gyula Krúdy. The themes of the self, still very flourishing in today's Hungarian literature, were thus forged at the crossroads of psychoanalysis, a very fin de siècle Hungarian naturalism and a modernity of French inspiration (including Remy de Gourmont's egotism).

According to Éric Lysøe ("Escapades to the lands of the Unconscious: the surveyor and the outlaw"), the motif of the city in the 20th century replaces that of the forest very frequent in the 19th to figure the unconscious. In several novels, these cities are traversed by an antithetical couple: the surveyor and the outlaw. L'Autre côté (1909) by A. Kubin is a strange initiatory journey that speaks of the impossibility of marking out a universe whose chaos (the drives) threatens the edges and foundations. In Kafka's Le Château (1926) the surveyor K. loses his bearings in an indecipherable city. Karinthy's Epépé will revisit this theme in 1970, under the features of a geometer overwhelmed by a city whose language he does not master, although polyglot. Unlike the surveyor, the outlaw (the sick, the mad, the drive) imposes his law. In Meyrink's Le Golem (1915) the meanings are obvious: the surveyor is the sick person and the outlaw is the psychoanalyst, against a background of underground chaos in the city of Prague and the enigma of the reversed kabbalistic letter (the yod into aleph), symbol of the "other side" of the world. In Leo Perutz's Neun und neun (1922) the hero travels through the streets of Vienna handcuffed, having "abandoned all will to a foreign power which one will learn at the end is none other than his own." In these novels, books (writing, the letter) are the catalysts of the unveiling of drives. But, as the space of Dr. Caligari already signified, "we lack words to speak of that - of the Id."

After having underlined the thematic affinities between Schopenhauer and Freud, who knew The World as Will and Representation, C. Wolff ("At the origins of the unconscious, an aesthetic of contemplation") observes in turn the manifestations of the unconscious in Le Château, Le Golem and L'Autre Côté. Nourished by fantastic literature and decadentism, impregnated with Schopenhauer's metaphysical pessimism and very influenced by Freudian "uncanny strangeness" or Jung's "depth psychology," these three novels have in common an atmosphere of "primordial terrors" and protagonists whose consciousness wavers, powerless to organize a real that escapes them. In Kafka, the labile frontiers between dream and reality, regressive episodes, archaic drives, free narrative associations are the symptoms of an infantile psyche while the chaos of the Dream Empire imagined by Kubin is dominated by a dictator who perhaps embodies Alfred Adler's thought. But despite their resemblances, these spider webs that the unconscious weaves around humans (according to Breton's metaphor about Kafka in his Anthology of Black Humor) adopt particular configurations according to the writers: in Kafka one does not get out of them, in Meyrink and Kubin "the 'dreamlike' narrative is embedded in another narrative," which resembles in one (Meyrink) the liberating aesthetic contemplation inspired by Schopenhauer while in the other (Kubin) the idea of "man's impossibility to detach himself from the principle of will" dominates.

FUTURISM, DADAISM VERSUS SURREALISM

Tania Collani, Henri Béhar and Anne-Elisabeth Halpern have attempted to clarify the links between psychoanalysis and the three great avant-gardes of the early 20th century: futurism, dadaism, surrealism. Georges Sebbag was interested in another form of writing delirium and subversion: that of the unclassifiable W. Gombrowicz.

T. Collani ("Automatism and creative constraint from Marinetti to Breton") recalls the fascination exercised on avant-garde movements by automatism, a privileged object of study for psychiatrists of the second half of the 19th century (Charcot, Janet and Clérambault), whether ambulatory automatism which will give Le Paysan de Paris, Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (Soupault), La Liberté ou l'amour ! (Desnos) and La Ville charnelle or L'Alcôve d'acier (Marinetti) or verbal automatism (spontaneous word games and various nonsense in Clérambault but also in Freud in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905). For this, T. Collani makes a detour through the numerous writings of Italian psychiatrists and alienist doctors of the late 19th century who had linked the notion of pathological automatism to that of the unconscious. Among the futurists, automatism is associated with the object, with speed, with machines, with matter itself, with modernity and psychology interests them less than the "physicofolie" of music-hall automatisms: the "I" must be destroyed in literature proclaimed Marinetti. Among the surrealists it is the opposite: Breton's "pure psychic automatism" emanates from the subject, from thought and words. It is the mediumistic and prophetic spontaneity of L'Amour fou or Les Vases communicants (1932). In these two avant-gardes however the poet has "effaced himself before his mission as a passer of vibrations of the modern world."

H. Béhar ("Dada is a virgin microbe, psychoanalysis a dangerous disease") traces historically... back to Locke the fascination with incoherence, which does not date from Dada as one might believe. The "word salad" uttered by Tzara in Zurich, in the name of a logic that excludes non-contradiction, approaches the aberrations of the dream. Through their verbal spontaneity (cries, uproar), the dadaists also wanted to parody the war... But does not their quest for verbal incoherence derive above all from a major aesthetic process of modernity: collage? And are not the polyglot and random poems of the trio Arp-Serner-Tzara the first form of automatic writing? The unconscious does not much interest the Zurich dadaists: psychoanalysis is ridiculed by Tzara - far from suspecting that he would make in 1935 with Grains et Issus a rich synthesis between Freud and Jung - or by Sophie Taueber and her parodic puppets of the King Stag. In Germany two tendencies coexist: some dadaists claim psychoanalysis (Otto Gross and later Huelsenbeck) while others condemn it as bourgeois science (R. Hausmann, La Psychologie de la politique). Freud for his part has not expressed himself on Dada and C.-G. Jung, who lives in Switzerland, considers the dadaists as adepts of an artistic "black magic." All this is quite understandable: the unconscious has little meaning outside the framework of the cure and the laws of chance or automatism are not free associations. Unlike Dada, Parisian surrealism seems at first glance passionate about the psychiatric debates of its time. But with Les Champs magnétiques, Soupault (supposedly influenced by Janet) and Breton (reader of Hesnard through whom he discovered Freudian associations at the Neurological Center of Saint-Dizier during the war) work more on aesthetic innovation than psychoanalytic pedagogy. Breton's ambivalence toward Freud is moreover no longer to be demonstrated. Does not automatic writing come finally above all from William James and the spiritist Allan Kardec? Are not Crevel's hypnotic sleep sessions, himself initiated by a clairvoyant, further proof of this?

Like H. Béhar, A-E Halpern ("Jung, Gross and Jung: three unconscious for one Dada") has searched in Tzara's writings for signs likely to designate the unconscious as a model of Zurich chaos. But Freud is in the eyes of the founder of Dada only a "stupid" defender of bourgeois order. All the dadaists will go in this direction. Malespine in 1925 reduces Freudian libido to a variant of being (Spinoza), of willing (Schopenhauer), of vital impulse (Bergson), while dreams are reduced to "cenesthesias" (see Michaux) more interesting as reservoirs of images than as expression of repression. Picabia's "presentism" in the 1920s ignores the obsession with the past. Hausmann refers to influences anterior to Freud to justify the oneirism of his phonetic poems or those of Schwitters. Same thing with Ball. Three theorists of the unconscious finally interested the dadaists: C.-G. Jung (whom Tzara appreciated), Otto Gross (analyzed by C.-G. Jung) and Franz Jung (dadaist trained by Gross). We find Jungian influences in S. Taueber's puppets and in Huelsenbeck, who as a psychoanalyst in the United States developed his own theory of sexuality (Sexuality and Personality, 1959). Scourge of psychoanalysis (after the Second World War in Palissandre et Mélasse), Hausmann dismisses both Freud and Jung and becomes the apologist of Otto Gross's thought, rejecting the Oedipus complex in favor of a theory of drives understood as levers of Revolution... very useful in Berlin in 1920. Franz Jung invents a new "destructive psychology" anti-psychoanalytic in open war against repressive institutions, familial, social, religious. This had much influence among German dadaists thanks to the review Dir freie Strasse. Johannes Baader, mystical and delirious dadaist is the living incarnation of this anarchic unconscious irreducible to any trauma. But Dada in the end preferred to all these theories the practices (chance, automatism) allowing access to deep creative forces, what Hans Richter called "anti-art."

Is Gombrowicz's world, divided between the Greens and the Ripe, dada? G. Sebbag's article ("Witold Gombrowicz or the seduction of ages") allows us to ask the question: the Ripe are seduced by the physical beauty of the Greens and thanks to their supposed intelligence strive to achieve a "cuculization" of the young, premise of adult "immaturity." In congruence with the war that body parts wage against each other, the Ripe shape "a mug" for the Greens, disfigured by the stigmata of cultural indoctrination and stupidity. The Ripe also attack the ass of the Greens, not in the sense of a kick in the buttocks of traditional authority, but in the sense of submission to the cucul. To this division of ages and bodies is superimposed a social cleavage in resonance with old feudal dominations. But the narrator of Ferdydurke (1937), viscerally apolitical, ignores class struggle and the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave. Let us not be mistaken: the hysterical exaltation of youth (which we find in Marinettian manifestos), its "bathroom eroticism" adored by the surrealists, and its collusion with the avant-gardes are deadly "war machines" invented by adults. For everything in Gombrowicz ironically turns against itself and makes the relationship between the Greens and the Ripe blind and deaf: "the more [the Greens'] beauty is omnipotent the more it is impotent," just as, on the side of the Ripe, "the more it is intelligent the more it is stupid." Let the leftist intellectuals who have used their intelligence to blind themselves feel targeted! G. Sebbag concludes that it is nevertheless beauty that predominates over intelligence, as proven by our world where the adult values of responsible intelligence are nothing to the detriment of "this drunken boat of beauty" that drags young and old into the same ridiculous spiral.

THE ART OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Catherine Steinegger, Fabrice Flahutez and Greta Komur are interested in three privileged aesthetic supports of the expression of the unconscious: Schoenberg's expressionist monodrama, Duchamp's folded ink blot and the reversals of language.

Erwartung [Expectation] is a monodrama by Schoenberg composed in Vienna in 1909 in full cultural effervescence. After having analyzed the very close links of writers and artists of this period with psychoanalysis, Catherine Steinegger ("The unconscious through Arnold Schoenberg's monodrama Erwartung") devotes herself to Erwartung, a dreamlike work contemporary with the Traumdeutung. The theme of waiting refers to the problematic of anxiety exposed in Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. The expressionism of the work is translated by a perpetually "suspended" discourse that reproduces "the tangled thread" of thought and the "jolts of the unconscious" reflected by atonal music. This work is a masterful illustration of the aesthetic of the cry. A woman prey to the torments of love walks through a forest and discovers there the corpse of her lover. This chaotic crossing is an obvious metaphor for the psychoanalytic cure and the woman prey to hallucinations an incarnation of the feminine figures studied by Freud in his Studies on Hysteria. The theme of wandering refers to the topos of the "eternal wanderer" of German Romanticism, in a premonitory atmosphere of future apocalypses.

F. Flahutez ("Marcel Duchamp and Jacques Lacan: reception of Hermann Rorschach in France / 1934") analyzes two ink drawings by Duchamp, including the horned animal head that adorns the back cover of the review Minotaure no. 6 (1934): the technique used is that of the folded China ink blot, in the manner of the Rorschach test (1921), Duchamp having refined with the brush the forms thus produced and having added two horns to them. After having sometimes mentioned this method, Breton in 1954 notes for the first time the true interest of this work, almost Kandinsky-like in the sense of a quest that unites the abstract and the unconscious. But despite this example, Rorschach's projective psychology has little interested surrealism. F. Flahutez therefore engages in a thorough investigation of Duchamp's readings to know where his knowledge of Rorschach came from: he finally retains issue no. 3/4 of L'Encéphale (1934), a psychiatry review that has appeared since 1906, and in which a certain Dr. Lacan has been writing since 1928, collaborator of Minotaure, commented on by Crevel in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. In this issue of L'Encéphale, we find long analyses by Marcel Monnier on the therapeutic and surreal foundations of the Rorschach test. Duchamp's interest in these blots is a crucial moment because in this "psychogram" the viewer "is an actor of the content." His two drawings, "halfway between automatism, Rorschach test, mask and blot, question both psychoanalysis and aesthetics." The "hypnotic" dimension that results puts "plural images" into play and produces an "aided ready-made" by association of a random folding with the voluntary addition of a detail. This form of creation is even richer than Dali's "double images" through its production of an imaginative delirium. This combination of Lacanism and conception of images as "acts of the mind" - and no longer simple passive perceptions - characterizes the Duchamp of 1934.

G. Komur ("'Opposite' meaning of words: a debate between psychoanalysis and linguistics") is interested in the plural meanings of words. She starts from Freud's observation that the same image in a dream could signify two exactly opposite things. Now it happens that this observation intersected certain analyses by linguist Karl Abel tending to demonstrate (1884) that the same signifier in archaic languages could refer to opposite signifieds. Freud in 1910 believes he sees in Abel "the confirmation of a close relationship between the dream process and the semantics of primitive languages" and the possibility that the dream is "the heritage of a primitive language." Alas, many subsequent linguistic works (Benveniste, Frege) have demonstrated the epistemological aberrations of K. Abel's reasoning. Indeed, schematically referring the same signifier to contrary signifieds is to forget that the sign exceeds the simple signifier (Saussure) and to confuse the notions of signified and referent, in other words to reduce all the complexity of the relationship between a signifier and its networks of significations, constantly modified by the fields of reality concerned and the enunciator's relationship to the world. Only this complexity allows us to understand "that the same words can serve several times to designate referents belonging to different domains of reality." This is why G. Komur, as an epigraph to her article, quotes a sentence from Breton's Second Manifesto recalling "that there exists a certain point of the mind" from which contraries (life / death, real / imaginary, past / future, etc.) "cease to be perceived contradictorily."

WAR AND ITS REPRESSIONS

Florence Fix, Anna Soncini Fretta, Michel Arouimi and Jean-Dominique Poli devote themselves to three encrypted expressions of the unconscious in wartime: the theatrical scene, laughter, the writing of the dream. While Régine Battiston and Alexandre Prstojevic attempt a psychoanalytic reading of some great novels from the Second World War.

F. Fix ("The snowman and the statue: paralysis of memory in Hofmannsthal and Horváth") opposes two works that use the scene in completely different ways to unmask the traumatic repressions of the Great War. In Hofmannsthal's L'Homme difficile (1919) which probably borrows from Jung his analysis of post-traumatic neurosis, the scene allows the hero to overcome the conscious/subconscious conflict to become adult. Haunted by a nightmarish but opaque childhood memory reactivated by the horror of the trenches, he dissolves his neurosis in marriage and social adaptation. Conversely, Horváth's hero in Don Juan revient de guerre (1936) collapses on returning from the front upon learning of his fiancée's death and, metamorphosed into a snowman, lets himself die on her grave: here the theatrical scene consecrates the triumph of the subconscious. Paradoxically devoted to a single woman in accordance with analyses of the myth by Otto Rank (The Don Juan Character, 1922), Horváth's hero is in reality annihilated not by the war as such but by the great economic and moral crisis of the 1920s. He ends up alone, dissolved in the nothingness of matter, victim of an inflation of the ego and values comparable to that of marks in 1929. Did Horvath want to represent through him a mediocre humanity antithetical to the brutal virility of Nazi myths of the 1930s? Whatever the case, his character is in the image of the decomposition of a nation and an individuality diluted in the economic crisis after having been petrified in the mud of the trenches.

Quite the opposite, Anna Soncini Fratta ("Laughing at war in Belgium: when the unconscious and consciousness relay each other") has chosen to question war laughter, when it is neither traumatic laughter (often hysterical) nor laughter linked to a disappointed ideal. Her study is devoted to the "zwanze," which relates to the German word "schwanz" (the tail) or to Hoffmann's "Schwanzen" (the pig tail tales) and designates a type of typically Brussels jokes rich in psychoanalytic meanings. Drunk with the pleasure of freedom and endowed with a specific affective coloring, these little stories sometimes cost their authors their lives in occupied Belgium. The "zwanze" has something to do with the French Poulbot, but the Poulbot did not provoke German vengeance, while the zwanze was a "war instrument." The author analyzes its unconscious foundations in the light of Freud (Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious) and the concepts of "condensation and deviation" and underlines its scope in novels that have war as their backdrop.

One hardly laughs with M. Arouimi ("Poetic oniromancy: Ramuz and Jünger") who draws us into the nauseating waters of war dreams recounted by Ramuz and Jünger in their intimate journals, testifying to a brutality mixed with mystical preoccupations (in Ramuz: the Circle, the One, society envisioned as "fragments of a broken mirror"). The author first studies "the key to wars" in a dream by Ramuz (March 15, 40) traversed by dualistic symbols, crossed negative allegories and chiasms that resolve into alchemical Unity. La Foire, a 1944 story, testifies to the obsession with a "double-bind" both deadly and fertile resulting from an infantile conflict. "The avatars of the mythical Father" are at the origin of the disturbances endured by the subject and, more, by society itself, site of a sacrificial purgation - as in René Girard - nourished by artistic creation. Underlying this dream with complex biblical meanings and Rimbaldian accents we read the terrible Unity of victims and executioners. In 1940 Ramuz relates without detour a vision that prefigures the extermination camps. The vision of sacrifice and access to the divine stem from the same process... and the literary act, "demonic," participates in the self-destruction of civilization. The author similarly analyzes a series of Jünger's dreams placed under the sign of "the grace of bombs." These architectural and gothic dreams combine the idea of Harmony and the deportation of Jews. The "gift of double sight" and the "cathartic vocation" of art refer to the cruel alchemy of the verb of Une saison en enfer and to the renewed pictorial themes of the early 20th century. The serpent, from traditions dear to Jünger, occupies an essential place in his visions (nightmarish or ecstatic) to the rhythm of the flux and reflux of the Word. Animal symbolism (turtles) or that of colors (green, gray) constitute essential elements. But the aspiration toward totality (dreams of islands, Edenic gardens and animals) only unfolds to annihilate itself in the midst of very real bombs. The prophetic visions mix war and the mystical lamb in a "confusion of orders and species" and give birth to a "suspect beauty" that transforms the sun into "dreamlike interpretation of bomb explosions." The biblical, mythological and psychoanalytic foundation of these dreams is inexhaustible, as attested by a "double-bind" dream (1942) where appears a sexually all-powerful, violent and derisory Father, who brings Jünger closer to Kafka.

The reading by J.-M Poli ("Emergence of the figure of Hypnos and artistic creation in the poetry of René Char") offers us a completely different writing of the dream in wartime, under the poetic and humanist form of R. Char's writings. Hypnos, son of Night and god of Sleep in Hesiod's cosmogony, was for the resistant poet an essential symbol of inspiration. His Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946) alternate moments of fertile retreat, painful underground elaborations and promises of Renaissance. Night is present there in two antithetical forms: the petrifying hypnosis of Hitlerian darkness opposed to protective Hypnos, "place of origins" according to Hesiod. R. Char appropriates this mythical figure by weaving networks of very concrete images: the moon, fire, the starry sky, the seasons, winter lethargy, caves, "labyrinthine burial" and "germination." Twin brother of Thanatos, Hypnos is in relation with the world of beloved disappeared who communicate with dreams. Hypnos coincides in Char as in certain Greeks (Heraclitus and not Plato) with creative energy, with fire, with the Word. The painter friends or illustrators of his works - Brauner, Braque, Miró - are inscribed in this exploration of the first night and fertile nudity. The war over, poetry can become "the Source with wide open eyes."

R. Battiston ("Evil is always there, invisible: La Peau du loup by Hans Lebert") places the novel by Austrian writer Hans Lebert, La Peau du loup, which caused scandal at its release in 1960, in a lineage of works (those of T. Bernhard or E. Jelinek) devoted to the denial of unpunished war crimes. Returning to his village a man discovers the existence of a repressed collective crime in which his father participated. This story, inspired by real facts, refers to an old peasant belief, the wolf, symbol of evil, which returns (here Nazism). A heavy atmosphere of decomposition traverses this novel conducive to archaic and archetypal sexual evocations. Through its thematic thread, the collective unconscious, it verifies the theories of G. Le Bon (Psychology of Crowds, 1895) and unmasks the collective violence propagated by leaders under whose influence the individual sheds all guilt. These phenomena have been studied by Freud, deepened by Jung, Reich, Canetti (Crowds and Power, 1960), Marcuse and Adorno, or again by S. Moscovici (The Age of Crowds, 1981), E. Fromm, D. Jonas Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners, 1996).

A. Prstojevic finally ("Europe on the couch") compares two novels (Hourglass by the Serbian Danilo Kiš published in 1972 and Austerlitz by the German Sebald in 2001) separated by three decades which allow measuring the changes that occurred "in the writing of disaster." The first relates the flight of the Kiš family and the last days spent with the father before his deportation to Auschwitz. The alcoholism, impotence, laughable manias of this fallen father afflicted with "fear neurosis," "endemic disease of the Jewish intelligentsia of Central Europe," make him an antihero of Shoah literature but at the same time a prophetic witness afflicted with the disease of "lucidity" in a mad world. Composed of geological strata, this book wants to snatch a world from definitive engulfment. The railway network is the obsessive image of a Europe crisscrossed by convoys of death. The train also plays a major role in Austerlitz: it is during a journey toward Prague, his native city - yet another metaphor for the psychoanalytic cure - that the hero accesses the repressed trauma: formerly torn from genocide by his parents, he had been sent to England to make a brilliant career and... forget. The motif of the archaeological quest, developed by Freud in Jensen's Gradiva, takes on new meaning in this novel. The writing of the Shoah has passed from conscious scientific historiography in Kiš to the groping exploration of the unconscious in Sebald and now permeates the entire European cultural unconscious.