Abstract
Abstract
This article considers Olga Tokarczuk’s novel E.E. (1995) as dialogic site for a critique of early twentieth-century psychology at the time of its engagement with spiritism. Carl Gustav Jung’s doctoral dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena” (1902) serves as a key intertext. Tokarczuk’s heroine, an adolescent medium, Erna Eltzner (E.E.), fashioned after Jung’s case study, S.W., exemplifies the use of young female patients as research subjects, studied but not listened to. Jung himself is refracted in two distinct characters, each of whom exploits Erna Eltzner as a paradigmatic case for his respective ideological commitment. The novel offers a feminist sendup of paradigms of medical care, medical diagnosis, the ethics of science and the personhood of the patient. It points to a major blind spot in the scientific study of the psyche: patient well-being and treatment. The article takes an ethics-of-care approach to examine sites of empathy in the novel.
Publisher
University of Illinois Press
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1. 1. In Flights she embarks on a quest to understand the intellectual journey inside human anatomy of Vesalius and in Kepler’s discoveries of the universe.
2. 2. On Wundt and Zöllner, see Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 8
3. On Aksakov and Hartmann, see Heather Wolffram, "Hallucination or materialization? The animism versus spiritism debate in late-19th-century Germany," History of the Human Sciences 25, no. 2 (2012): 45-66
4. On Breuer and Janet, and Jung and Freud, see Sonu Shamdasani, "From Geneva to Zürich: Jung and French Switzerland," Journal of Analytical Psychology 43, no. 1 (1998): 115-126.
5. 3. Often taken to be a parable of unfulfilled dreams or a pastiche of a psychological novel of high modernism or a mock medical case history, in the main On E.E. as a psychological novel, see Katarzyna Kantner, “Podmiotowość ‘mediumiczna’ EE Olgi Tokarczuk jako powieść psychologiczna,” Ruch Literacki, 56, no. 1 (2015).