Orlanda via Orlando : de la métamorphose à la transidentification projective

Abstract

This article proposes a series of reflections on the novel Orlanda, published in 1996 by writer and psychoanalyst Jacqueline Harpman. Drawing on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1929), the author constructs a remarkable female character: a teacher of literature specialised in Proust immersed in the search for the most plausible possible answer to the sudden and unaccounted-for transformation of a young man into a woman upon an interrupted seven-night sleep. The revelation of the metamorphosis is occasioned by a process of shattering of the self, of identification and, above all, of projective transidentification, according to the theories of Klein and Grotstein. Along with a narratological reading of Orlanda, the study proposes multifaceted, mainly psychoanalytic, approaches.