Paolo Azzone

Freud and The Da Vinci Code Paolo Azzone

Over the last few decades psychoanalysis has piecemeal lost ground as an appreciated source of inspiration and fresh conceptual models for researchers in the humanities. Particularly, within the field of literary criticism, psychoanalysis had been blamed with methodological unreliability, one-sidedness, and a bent on stereotyped formulations which miss the complexity of the writer-reader interaction. These views are not groundless: psychoanalysis can fruitfully contribute to the understanding of literary creations only inasmuch as it is able to unveil specific connections between unconscious partial and total object relations, interpersonal conflicts, and the full span of emotions contained in the manifest text. In Freud and The Da Vinci Code, a critical approach consistent with such principles is offered to the readers and proves able to reveal under the manifest plot of Dan Brown's blockbuster a highly articulated unconscious narrative where sexual maneuvers, parental imagoes, and fears of loss closely interact with each other. Freud and The Da Vinci Code effectively questions the novel text and is able to solve its basic manifest issues - such as Anticlericalism or the Sacred Feminine - into their very opposite. A new and highly original understanding of the novel and its enigmas is so offered to the readers.