Altered states: Sympathy, identification, and the problem of hypnosis in Hawthorne, George Eliot, and Freud (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sigmund Freud)

This dissertation examines the ambivalence of sympathy and identification in nineteenth-century literature and in psychoanalysis and its relation to the problem of hypnosis. The figure of hypnosis and earlier of mesmerism, I argue, represents a kind of limit of sympathy or identification, a blind or nonspecular identification that precedes or does not take place on the basis of a subject-object distinction. Hypnosis or mesmerism represents, in one sense, an ideal or fantasy of immediate communication, a communication no longer mediated by the constraints of self or of consciousness. But it is also a figure of excessive communicability, bringing the subject into contact with a passive, mechanical automatism, and infecting identity with something irreducibly other. The problem of hypnosis, like the post-Enlightenment discourse on sympathy out of which it emerged or the psychoanalytic concept of identification that attempts to contain it, raises critical questions about the subject and the subject in its relation to language and to others, questions that are, but are not merely, literary. This dissertation explores the curious place hypnosis occupies in psychoanalysis and shows the way in which despite his ostensible repudiation of it, the “riddle of hypnosis,” as he called it, continued to impact Freud's thought. In my reading of Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, I argue that mesmerism becomes in the novel an allegory of romance fiction, of both its reading and its writing, and is linked to a certain ambivalence towards allegory as well as towards sympathy. The concluding chapter on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and “The Lifted Veil” considers the way in which the problem of hypnosis haunts and ultimately disrupts the organicist aesthetic of sympathy that underlies her fictional project. The problem of hypnosis is in each of the writers I discuss bound up with what in their own literary (or analytic) performance escapes cognitive mastery and understanding.