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"On horror's head horrors accumulate." Othello (111,iii)
1. The Medusa's Head and the Castration Complex
Freud first wrote about the motif of the decapitated Medusa's head in a brief set of notes dated May 14, 1922. According to the editors of the Internationale Zeitschriftfir Psychoanalyse und Imago who published the manuscript posthumously in 1940 as an essay under the title "Das Medusenhaupt," Freud's text is to be regarded as a companion piece to Sandor Ferenczi's note on the same topic, published in 1923 as "Zur Symbolik des Medusenhaupts."I Freud's editors propose that unlike Ferenczi's completed and published text, Freud's notes on the Medusa's head appear to be only a preliminary "sketch" for a more extensive work to come.' The title they attach to the notes, "Medusa's Head," thus designates the text itself as much as its object. Unpublished and fragmentary, Freud's essay is itself a kind of decapitated Medusa's head, cut off from an absent, imagined body of text. It is a "part" detached from a "whole" whose existence Freud's editors can only posit through an interpretation of the "part." The following paper reflects on these evocative qualities of the text "Medusa's Head" that are implied in its title. I am interested in how Freud's text interprets its object, the Medusa's head, and how, at the same time, it also invokes a larger body of Freud's work. The essay is a mirror of Perseus that reflects both on the precarious theme of the Medusa's head and also on Freud's work more generally, as a Medusa's head. Reading this text as Freud's occasion for selfreflection is not only suggested by the title, however, or by the theme of mirroring in the myth. The occasion is also the Medusa's head itself, which Freud holds up as what Neil Hertz calls a powerfully "concentrated symbol" (166) that condenses a series of entangled strands from the corpus of psychoanalysis, including symbolization and symbolic interpretation, the castration complex, the Oedipus complex, displacement, and fetishism. One particularly important strand is the visible evidence of Freud's interpretation, which is already evoked by the original myth's thematic emphasis on seeing and not seeing the Medusa. In what follows, I propose that Freud personifies the problematic of castration's visibility in a simultaneously disturbing...