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ABSTRACT
This essay examines Laura Marcus’s chapter ‘Oedipus Express: Psychoanalysis and the Railways’ in her book Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014), which argues that the train and the railway journey are implicated in many of the fundamental principles of Freudian thought, including the Oedipus Complex. Extending Marcus’s insights, Ellmann shows how this motif of train-travel resurfaces in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and his case history of the Rat Man, as well as in Melanie Klein’s case history of ‘Dick’, a four-year-old boy obsessed with trains and stations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Quoted in Laura Marcus, ‘Oedipus Express: Psychoanalysis and the Railways’, in Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 42. Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers in the present article refer to ‘Oedipus Express’.
2 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) in the Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), Vol. 7 pp. 123–246, at pp. 201–2. Henceforth cited as SE.
3 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud’s Legacy’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 314–15.
4 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) SE 18: 1-64; at p. 15. This is a summary of my fuller discussion of Derrida’s treatment of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in ‘Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis,’ in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 211–37; at pp. 223–29.
5 Quoted in Derrida, ‘Freud’s Legacy’, p. 328.
6 Ibid.
7 Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 159.
8 Derrida, ‘Freud’s Legacy’, p. 331.
9 Diane O’Donoghue, ‘On the Train(ing)’, Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, 6.3 (2001), pp. 313–15; at p. 314; see also ‘Oedipus Express’, pp. 45–6.
10 Agatha Christie, The 4:30 from Paddington (1957; London: Harper Collins, 2022), p. 52.
11 See Freud, ‘Screen Memories’ (1899), SE 3:299-322
12 Metaphor itself, as Michel de Certeau points out, refers to transportation: ‘In modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a ‘metaphor’ – a bus or a train’: The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 115.
13 Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) 7:1–122; at p. 65.
14 Freud, ‘On Beginning the Treatment’ (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis I) (1913), SE 12:121-144; at p. 135.
15 Michel de Certeau, ‘Railway Travel and Navigation’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 111–14; at p. 111.
16 Freud, ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1918), SE 17: 1–124; at p. 29.
17 Freud, ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (1909) SE 10:1–150; at p. 84.
18 See Freud, ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’ (1909), SE 10:151–318, esp. pp. 168–73.
19 Melanie Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11 (1930), pp. 24–39. For an insightful reading of this case, see Mary Jacobus, ‘Tea Daddy: Poor Mrs Klein and the Pencil Shavings,’ in First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 129–52; reprinted in Lyndsey Stonebridge and John Phillips (eds), Reading Melanie Klein (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 91–112.
20 Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol-Formation’, p. 26.
21 Ibid, p. 29.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid, pp. 30–31.
24 Ibid, p. 34.
25 Ibid, p. 32.
26 See Freud, ‘‘Wild’ Psycho-Analysis’ (1910) SE 11:219-228.
27 W.R. Bion, ‘Attacks on Linking’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40 (1959), pp. 308–-15; at p. 308.
28 The entry in Chambers Thesaurus for the noun train reads: ‘1 a train of events Sequence, succession, series, progression, order, set, suite, string, chain, trail, line, path, track, stream, file, procession, convoy, cortège, caravan formal concatenation’ 2 retinue, entourage, attendants, court, household, staff, followers, following, cortège