[Rousseau on the couch. "La nouvelle Héloïse as a key to his childhood trauma].

Whereas many interpreters and biographers of Rousseau tend to present their subject as a pathological figure, Niemeyer will have no truck with such ascriptions. His reading of Rousseau's epistolary novel Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) draws upon the autobiographical Confessions and reveals that Rousseau uses this novel as a species of self-therapy. In the novel the constellations in which certain scenes recur invite their interpretation as complementary scenes to Rousseau's traumatic "Urszene"--the death of his mother when giving birth to him. In Niemeyer's view, the way in which Rousseau turns his re-working of his childhood trauma to literary account qualifies him as a predecessor of psychoanalysis.