The Secret of Borges. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into His Work

Abstract

Secret of Borges. A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into His Work. By Julio Woscoboinik. Trans. Dora Carlisky Pozzi. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1998. xi + 229 pages. Some irony is to be found in this basically Freudian interpretation of Borges, who considered the great psychiatrist to be kind of madman ... laboring over a sexual (v. Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, 125). Irony-if Woscoboinik is right-in the sense that the author of so many delicate and often incorporeal stories, poems and essays was metaphorically dealing with the same obsession. The Secret, of course, is Sex, always a tempting tidbit on both the scholar's and the general reader's biographical menu. Julio Woscoboinik is a practicing psychiatrist in Buenos Aires. In this work, as later in alma de El aleph (1996), he provides a close and intelligible reading of Borges' recurring images and themes. In the Prologue, his French colleague Didier Anzieu cogently observes: The subtitle of Woscoboinik's book, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, signals the respect a psychoanalyst, no matter how talented he may be, must have for the genius of creative writers. We have Freud's own example of such a respectful attitude. psychoanalyst inquires, Why do these works please me, why do they move, seduce and disturb me ... ? (viii). secreto de in its first edition appeared in 1988. In the same year Estela Canto published a con traluz, a quite intimate account of her relationship with the writer including several of his love letters and postcards to her. Canto's and Woscoboinik's books complement each other in their common view of the Argentine creator as a timid man both inhibited and (discreetly) fascinated by women. good translation by Doris Carlisky Pozzi is based on the third edition (1991). In tnis psycno-portrait our model is cornered oy me gn os ot ueciipus and Narcissus-the mother-obsession and the self-obsession, that is-and never escapes. Woscoboinik sees his subject's situation as a kind of continuing entrapment which, though quite problematical on a personal level, is not seen as weakening literarily. On the contrary, in the analyst's view the writer's underlying sexual dilemma strengthens his imagery of mirrors, tigers and labyrinths and vitalizes his curious sense of identity as reader, writer and character in his own stories (that is, the identity paradox so clearly referred to in his mini-essay Borges y yo, the last sentence of which Woscoboinik quotes to end his study). …