Contos de ausência: uma leitura freudiana para os Contos Novos

Abstract

The relationship between psychoanalysis and the arts is both ancient and vast. In the very book that marks the official beginning of psychoanalysis (i.e, The Interpretation of Dream), Freud proposed interpretations of Hamlet and Oedipus Rex. Some researchers (Mezan, 2006; Gay, 2012) point that Freud s opinion of the arts, and the fashion he decided to study them, oscillated throughout his work. Even though it is commonly accepted that Freud s papers on the arts follow such changes, it was not possible to find any work that has made a comprehensive map of Freud s trajectory on the matter. Fulfilling this gap is the first objective of this dissertation. To accomplish this, all of Freud s works on the arts were studied and synthesized as to let the goals and methods of the psychoanalyst evident. Freud has had three distinct objectives on his incursions on the arts: (1) interpret the feelings of the reader (spectator); (2) interpret the psyche of the author; and (3) interpret the meaning of the work of art itself. After studying the work of Freud on the matter, a method for interpreting fiction as a modern psychoanalyst was proposed. The book chosen to put such hypothesis to test was Contos Novos by Mario de Andrade (1947/1997). Each of the book s tales was analyzed separately

each one composing its own universe. Only after each of these atomized interpretations a theory about the collection as a whole was presented. The conclusions reached in this last analysis led us to propose that the link that connects all of these tales is the absence of the object that leads the action. That is why this dissertation is called Tales of Absence