It has widely been accepted that Erika Kohut in Elfriede Jelinek's Die Klavierspielerin is a victim of her mother and cannot resist the overwhelming power of her-who represents the patriarchal system. Erika's Self-Cutting with razors and needles has been interpreted as masochistic behaviour. The present paper applies Tilmann Moser's technique of Clinical reading to examine Erika's failure as an attempt to survive (self-cutting as a technique to escape dissociative situations; masochistic phantasies as reinscenations of childhood trauma). It sees the end of the novel (Erika returns to her mother) as her failure to establish contact with the child within herself-and hence as the only possible way to survive in this situation. With respect to Jelinek's use of language, it is argued that the misuse of words and proverbs and the intertextual allusions in 'false' circumstances show how Jelinek tries to gain power over e.g. out of language in a similar way as Erika Kohut tries to escape dissociative and overwhelming situations: by hurting boundaries.
