From Dream story (Schnitzler) to Eyes wide shut (Kubrick): From identity through meaning formation to identity through excitation.

Using different psychoanalytic points of view, in this comparative study of Traumnovelle by Schnitzler and Eyes wide shut by Kubrick the author analyses the cultural changes between the first and last thirds of the 20th century. This change consists in the way ‘facts of life’ are dealt with. It is a change from identity through insight and understanding to an identity through excited self-objectification. This change proceeds along the lines of ‘I think therefore I am’ to ‘I feel therefore I am’ arriving at ‘I am excited, therefore I am noticed and thus I am’. In the description and illustration of 48 hours in the life of a married couple, this transformation from thinking to feeling and sensing is made tangible. After 9 years of being married, the couple faces the end of their passionate love. They struggle with the primordial anxiety in love life: the traumatic loss of faith in one's capacity to love. This transformation is accompanied by a change in media that symbolizes the couple's experience: from the language of dreaming, reading and listening in Schnitzler to the representation in audiovisual media, i.e. visual art, theatre, movies and public events in Kubrick. It marks a change in the representation of psychic life in space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]