'I suffer in an unknown manner that is hieroglyphical’. Jung and Babette en route to Freud and Schreber

Woods, A.

Abstract

To begin: two fragments. The first is an embroidered jacket. It belonged to a woman called Agnes Richter who lived in an Austrian asylum in the late 1890s. In the words of artist Renée Turner, the jacket is "embroidered so intensively that reading is impossible in certain areas. . . . Words appear and disappear into seams and under layers of thread. There is no beginning or end, just spirals of intersecting fragmentary narratives. She is declarative: 'I,' 'mine,' 'my jacket,' 'my white stockings. . . .', 'I am in the Hubert-us-burg / ground floor,' 'children,' 'sister' and 'cook.' In the inside she has written '1894 I am / I today woman.'" Re-embroidering the laundry number printed on her jacket, "something institutional and distant" is transformed "into something intimate, obsessive and possessive." She transcribes herself. This is "hypertext"; this is "untamed writing."

Citation

Woods, A. (2011). 'I suffer in an unknown manner that is hieroglyphical’. Jung and Babette en route to Freud and Schreber. History of the Present, 1(2), 244-258. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.1.2.0244

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2011
• Deposit Date: Sep 8, 2011
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 12, 2014
• Journal: History of the Present
• Print ISSN: 2159-9785
• Electronic ISSN: 2159-9793
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 244-258
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.1.2.0244
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1528121