Julia Mann’s Return to Paraty, by Teolinda Gersão: “The Human Being on the Couch of Literature”

Teolinda Gersão (1940), one of the most important writers of all Portuguese language literature, in the three parts that constitute O Regresso de Júlia Mann a Paraty (2021), supported by biographical facts, fictionally reconstructs three historical personalities: Freud, Thomas Mann, and Júlia Mann. We can read ‘Freud thinking of Thomas Mann in December 1938’ and ‘Thomas Mann thinking of Freud in December 1930’ as psychoanalytic dialogues conducted by Teolinda Gersão. Freud is the psychoanalyst of Thomas Mann and the latter is the psychoanalyst of the former, but each one, in the same act, performs their own psychoanalysis. Teolinda Gersão, Julia Mann’s ‘psychoanalyst’, makes this process believable because she was able to convincingly represent the technique of psychoanalysis. These patients do not just say and make conscious the unconscious through speech (first person in the first two parts, third person in the last part): All three (in)consciously relive their repressed world as a contemporary experience related to the psychoanalyst; it is the famous Freudian ‘transference’, the hierarchical relationship between the one who is self-analysing and being analysed and the therapist. In this relationship (of transference) of one subject with another, there is discovery and construction, rather than remembrance and restoration of the past.