Introjection, Loss, and the Politics of Possession in Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, martir

Abstract

This article explores possible political and psychoanalytic readings of tropes of introjection in Unamuno's text. It relates introjection to psychoanalytic concepts of mourning. It then examines the ethical and political dimensions of mourning as social practice in combination with the haunting or uncanny presences that accompany the losses traced by the text. It argues that the complex of introjections figured in San Manuel Bueno, m�rtir is intimately entwined with questions of gender and polity in early twentieth-century Spain, and in particular, the period preceding the achievement of female suffrage in 1931. The article proposes that the object-losses and the uncanny encounters that are threaded through Angela's account can be read in the light of the 'imaginative proximity' of women's intervention into a previously male political arena.