From Clinic to Stage: Halid Fahri Ozansoy’s Freudian Horizon and the Remainder of the Ghost

Year 2025, Issue: 41, 1 - 18, 19.11.2025

Fatih Altuğ

https://doi.org/10.26650/jtcd.1777729

Abstract

This article examines Halid Fahri Ozansoy’s 1935 play Hayalet [The Ghost] as a complex engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis in early Republican Turkey. Reading the play through the lens of Ozansoy’s own critical essays on Freud and the French playwright Henri Lenormand, the study argues that Hayalet is more than a simple adaptation of European psychoanalytic theatre. While Ozansoy employs a sophisticated dramaturgy to stage the unconscious, using symbolic settings, a clinical framework, and an analyst figure, the play simultaneously critiques the limits of psychoanalytic reason. The central figure of the Ghost is analyzed not merely as a symptom of repressed trauma but as a spectral remainder that destabilizes the clinical gaze, implicates the analyst in the patient’s haunting, and ultimately reveals the insufficiency of a therapeutic model grounded in rational mastery. Hayalet thus emerges as a meditation on what exceeds interpretation: the untamable persistence of memory, desire, and the past.

Keywords

Halid Fahri Ozansoy , Henri Lenormand , Turkish Theatre , Psychoanalysis , Haunting

References

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