Faubert Michelle
Lit Med. 2016;34(2):389-417. doi: 10.1353/lm.2016.0019.
The fear that suicidality could spread through textual contagion-that textually represented suicide could enter the reader's mind and cause self-destruction-took hold long before Émile Durkheim theorized it in the Victorian period. This article argues that the fear of suicidal contagion and the horror of vaccination, both of which raged in Britain in the long eighteenth century, were linked to ideas about sympathy and the importation of the Other into the Self. With reference to the psychoanalytic notions of extimité and étrangerété; the eighteenth-century medical theories of William Rowley and Edward Jenner; the philosophy of "sympathy," as adumbrated in the work of John Locke, Adam Smith, David Hume and Edmund Burke; and two key novels of sensibility (Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther), this article examines the root of a belief that exists even today: that, in a suicidal process, the invading Other could become the Self and, Trojan horse-style, destroy it from the inside.
对自杀行为可能通过文本传播的恐惧——即文本中呈现的自杀情节可能进入读者脑海并导致自我毁灭——早在埃米尔·涂尔干在维多利亚时期对其进行理论阐述之前就已存在。本文认为，对自杀性传染的恐惧和对疫苗接种的恐惧，在漫长的18世纪都在英国肆虐，它们与关于同情以及他者融入自我的观念有关。参照精神分析学中“外在性”和“陌生性”的概念；18世纪威廉·罗利和爱德华·詹纳的医学理论；约翰·洛克、亚当·斯密、大卫·休谟和埃德蒙·伯克作品中所预示的“同情”哲学；以及两部感伤主义的关键小说（让-雅克·卢梭的《朱莉》和约翰·沃尔夫冈·冯·歌德的《少年维特之烦恼》），本文探究了一种即便在今天依然存在的信念的根源：即在自杀过程中，入侵的他者可能会变成自我，并像特洛伊木马一样从内部将其摧毁。
