Working-Through
Résumé
In this article, I address the issue by relying on various canonical sources. I start from a lexical analysis of the term, indicating its ambiguous translation and going through various acceptations according to whether it is used by psychoanalysts, historians or literary scholars. Heavily relying on Freud’s founding texts, I then address the central issue of resistance that provoked Freud’s reflections on the subject and show in which way it problematises the ordinary use of the word. The second part attends to the tension between mourning and melancholia, working-through and acting-out, in La Capra’s wake and as originally evidenced in Freud’s writings. I finally focus on working-through’s problematical closure and the refusal of simplification on ethical grounds. Each part draws on a selection of theoretical and critical texts and provide examples taken from a contemporary fictional corpus.