Between Freud and a Naked Woman by Bruno Bosteels

The title I have chosen for this chapter refers not only to a dramatic scene toward the end of Feliz nuevo siglo doktor Freud. It can also be read as a triangular composition in which the relations between Freud and Dora, as well as that between Freud and Berman, are mediated by the visible-invisible presence of Marx and Marxism. "Between Freud and a Naked Woman," indeed, is a wordplay on what is perhaps Berman's most successful theater (and later film) production, Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Villa and a Naked Woman), itself in turn a diversion (in the sense of a situationist détournement) of the title of Jorge Enrique Adoum's experimental "boom" novel Entre Marx y una mujer desnuda (Between Marx and a Naked Woman).8 I would thus propose as a larger working hypothesis that we read Feliz nuevo siglo doktor Freud from the point of view of the history and theory of what in Latin America, too, has been the long and difficult course of Freudo-Marxism-provided of course that we come to a clear understanding of how this uncanny coupling can be meaningful to begin with.

The point is certainly not to complement Freud's allegedly "individualist" (or at best only familial) perspective with Marx's "social" (or collective) one. Nor is it to oppose, in a combination of stereotypes, the latter's "economism" to the former's "pansexualism. " To a large extent this is how the Chilean playwright Marco Antonio de la Parra, for example, stages the war of words between "Carlos" and "Sigmund," the two characters in his hilarious play La secreta obscenidad de cada día who may, or may not, be the same as their historical equivalents, but who might also be using the latter's names as pseudonyms in the play, either because they are planning a terrorist attack on the government official visiting a local high school or because they are two pedophiles lying in wait for the schoolgirls to come out, in which case their similar trenchcoats would be hiding something other than a pistol: