Autobiografia não escrita de Martha Freud, by Teolinda Gersão: “The victory against death and effacement” or “Enlightenment as a metaphor for what is discovered”. Or fictional autobiography iluminate the darkness

Abstract

Unwritten autobiography of Martha Freud, by Teolinda Gersão, APE Award 2024, a novel based on memory and the art of archiving, resulted from reading, over three and a half years, the correspondence between Sigmund Freud and people very close to him. After carefully delving into the documents – reproduced in quotes within the fictional space – the author took approximately three years to write it. And through a “writing of the self,” in the first person, she chose the theme of the double, assuming herself as Martha Freud, through a seductive and endless game of mirrors that aims to demystify the eminent figure of the “Father” of Psychoanalysis. By revising the traditional autobiographical genre, the account is based on the act of thinking, where the space of interiority and affectivity must be expressed in order to exist and escape censorship. Through an “Initial Note,” the author reveals the objective of her writing process: to reconstruct the existential path of Martha Freud, bringing her out of the shadow to which she was relegated through History. Emerging from obscurity, the female character will free herself from the traumas of the past and acquire her well-deserved light by experiencing the “return of the buried,” which will bring her closer to the figure of Gradiva and the Warburgian nymph theorized by Didi-Huberman, in A imagem sobrevivente: históriadaarte e tempo dos fantasmas segundo Aby Warburg. The reflections of Leonor Arfuck, existents in Memoria y autobiografia: exploraciones em los limites, allows us to state that reader will be enthralled by this non-canonical, hybrid, and interstitial form of the autobiography genre.