"Far-reaching Similarities: Freud, Jensen, Gradiva" with Sina Dell'Anno

The German Studies: New Perspectives seminar presents Sina Dell'Anno, University of Basel/Visiting Professor, Yale University

A reconsideration of Freud's Delusion and Dreams in W. Jensen’s “Gradiva” with particular attention to the role of paraphrase in psychoanalytic interpretation. Freud’s extensive retelling of Jensen's “Pompeiian Fancy,” presented as a neutral prelude to analysis, functions as something much more, namely, a rhetorical performance that subtly competes with the literary text for interpretive authority. 

Reading Freud's strategies alongside Jensen’s own self-reflexive fiction, I ask how psychoanalysis becomes "literary" in the very act of claiming to explain literature. The talk traces how recurring motifs of excavation and resemblance both enable Freud's interpretation and risk turning it into the kind of wishful projection he diagnoses in his protagonist.

Sina Dell'Anno is Visiting Scholar at Yale University (Fall 2025), supported by an SNSF PostDoc.Mobility Fellowship. Her work explores the intersections of literature and philology from antiquity to modernity, with a focus on the aesthetic challenges of difficult texts. She is the author of satura – Monströses Schreiben in Antike und Aufklärung (De Gruyter 2023). Her current project examines paraphrase as an "in-between-language" that mediates between literary and critical discourse.