Reflections on ‘Jacob's Dream’

This chapter presents a commentary on ‘Laws of the Foundations of the Torah’, 6:9 and 7:3. Maimonides deploys aggadah to add extra layers of meaning in Mishneh torah. Where he makes intense use of biblical reference, close reading and attention to midrashic resonances can be rewarding. ‘Laws of the Foundations of the Torah’, 6:9, was interpreted as broadening the chapter's theme of avoiding desecration of sacred objects and texts to include the need for sensitive reading of texts. In ‘Laws of the Foundations of the Torah’, 7:3, the juxtaposition of Jacob's dream of the ladder with Ezekiel's vision of the chariot was found to refer to the combination of theoretical knowledge and insight into historical process in the vision of the prophet. This is reflected in the ontological and teleological dimensions of Mishneh torah's form.

Michael Fishbane's Sacred Attunement is fascinating not only in what it says explicitly, but also in what it does not say. On one level, he presents a series of innovative insights into the parallels between modes of textual interpretation and modes of spiritual–ethical “interpretation” of the concrete details of lived human existence. In laying out such parallels, he succeeds—in a way that will engage both specialists and nonspecialists—in translating into a contemporary idiom the classical rabbinic notion that engagement in the study of scripture can function as a self-transformative practice. At the same time, though, we might also understand his project as implicitly putting forth a fundamental reconception of the very idea of “doing theology”—whether Fishbane himself consciously intends such a challenge or not. Prior to presenting the “Jewish” side of his project, Fishbane's first chapter lays out his understanding of “theology” in a general sense. He thus explicitly frames the chapters that follow as a specifically Jewish instantiation of a humanly universal “attempt to speak of the reality of God and direct the self toward this truth” (1). In this account, a Jewish theology does not entail claims of exclusive access to divine truth; rather, a theology is Jewish insofar as it engages in the human theological endeavor by means of close readings and constructive re-readings of the particular traditions and textual sources of Judaism (44). In this opening chapter, he emphasizes that his primary concern as a writer lies not with abstract theoretical constructions of God's being, but rather in an attempt to stimulate the reader's sensitivity to the easily overlooked depths and ethical demands that are inherent in the particulars of earthly life. For Fishbane, God is precisely in the details. The second chapter of Fishbane's book constitutes the core of his project and is where he truly breaks new ground. Taking his cue from four traditional Jewish modes of interpreting scripture, he lays out a striking account of the ways in which different ways of reading texts can serve as spiritual exercises. The same practices that make for careful interpretation can, Fishbane asserts, shape a person's mode of viewing existence as whole, train the reader's mindfulness to the details of the created world, and enhance one's ability to make active and conscious judgments in response to the choices and responsibilities that confront us in each moment. Thus, for instance, he notes the way in which the mode of peshat (plain sense) interpretation helps attune a reader to scripture's contextual particularities. Through its demand for close attention to the fine points of the written text, engagement in peshat reading counteracts the tendency to skip over the text's details in an attempt to arrive too quickly at one's own desired interpretation. In requiring care and concern for scripture's syntactical configurations that exist independently of our interpretive will, this mode of reading is “an exercise in attentiveness to the details of the text and its modes of presentation; and it is an exercise in the patient subordination of the self to the otherness of the language which has been selected by the author, but which requires one's readerly engagement to come alive” (71). After leading the reader through a peshat interpretation of Jacob's dream of the “stairway to heaven” in Genesis 28, Fishbane shifts our lens from a reading of textual phenomena to a reading of the phenomena of nature and of existence. The development of attunement to the alterity of scriptural words and phrases, he argues, will better enable a person to respond with ethical responsibility and patience to the alterity of things and persons that one encounters in daily life.

(1983). Synchronicity and chaos: Vision and outer reality in black elk speaks. Psychological Perspectives: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 30-51.

With a starting point of seeing a poem as a free association unto which the reader might form his/her own associations, the work of Emily Dickinson is discussed from the point of view of early development and relationship to mother. The paper is based on selected poems, letters and chosen parts from the biography of Emily Dickinson. It is argued that the poet seems to have experienced a trauma during the first months of life in the shape of erratic infant care, that caused environmental impingement. Having to react at this early age made the gradual unfolding of a secure feeling of identity precarious and had deep consequences for body-mind development, and for the relationship between inner and outer realities. The theory of Winnicott and his concepts of “going-on-being", “male and female elements” and impingements are considered. The relationship of Emily Dickinson to her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert, is seen as important, as the latter had a capacity for being a container of otherwise hidden parts of the poet' s inner life. Emily Dickinson's life in isolation, questions of creativity born from experiences of absence and loss and from early bridges broken down, are discussed.

Robyn Roslak's Neo-Impressionism and Anarchism in Fin-de-Si?cle France offers compelling insight into the relationship between the Neo-impressionists' landscapes of the 1880s and 1890s and their socio-political sympa thies. Concentrating on the (sub)urban cityscapes of Paris by Paul Signac and Maximilien Luce, and to a lesser extent on the Proven?al landscapes of Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross, Roslak contextualises their pro duction with in-depth historical analysis and a critical eye. She incorporates theories of cultural and historical geography, citing the work of Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, as well as of tourism studies, to chal lenge the predominantly technique-centred art history of the movement. The result is a fluid and complex network of literary, touristic, geographical, and political histories that enriches our understanding of the stylistic and social development of Neo-impressionism. Roslak's investigation into the anarchism of the Neo-impressionists pays tribute to the ground-breaking research of Robert and Eugenia Herbert of the 1960s, whose articles in the Burlington Magazine and the lat ter's The Artist and Social Reform gave clear evidence of the Neo-impressionists' anarchist affiliations. The his tory of Neo-impressionism, nevertheless, retains a degree of academic discomfort towards its followers' politics. The word 'anarchy', with its unfortunate analo gies to terrorism, violence and chaos, sadly still holds sway in the minds of many art historians as tricky, dark, historical terrain. Typically we find Neo-impressionist scholars edging around the sensitive issue of their sub jects' radical politics, to the extent that even such heavy-hitters as Jean Sutter and Fran?oise Cachin have almost totally dismissed it in their studies. Following on the heels, however, of John Hutton (Neo-Impressionism and the Search for Solid Ground (Louisiana State University Press: Baton Rouge, 1994)), Martha Ward (Pissarro, Neo-Impressionism, and the Spaces of the Avant-Garde (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996)), and Joan Halperin (F?lix F?n?on: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Si?cle Paris (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1988)), Roslak takes the matter head on. She begins with a close and subtle reading of the writings of Neo-impressionism's main defender, the critic F?lix F?n?on. Roslak argues that F?n?on's comments on Neo-impressionism go beyond mere poetic device; he ascribes the words, 'nomenclature', 'synthesis', 'decoration', and 'arabesque' to his analyses of Signac's paintings, concepts that Roslak shows were laden with profound scientific and political meaning and not only for anarchists (indeed, Roslak keenly observes how Science was upheld, not only in the minds of anarchists, but also by staunch Republicans, for the social good). For example, in her first main chapter Roslak dissects the varied meanings of the words 'nomenclature' and 'synthesis', descriptions that were used repeatedly by critics and friends of the Neo-impressionists in discussion of their work. The indi vidual unit or 'nomenclature' of the Neo-impressionist style was, of course, its divisionist touch: the dot or point. Applied with vigorous attention to detail necessi tated by an understanding of colour theory, the Neo-impressionists' facture was founded on scientific principles. Amassed together, the dots formed a lumines cent, vibrating synthesis that became complete by the optical mixture of the retina when viewed at a distance from the canvas. Importantly, Roslak explains that these concepts 'nomenclature' and 'synthesis' functioned also as chemical metaphors for anarchists to explain that the individual in an ideal society would have his autonomy and personal freedom as well as free associ ation with others in a community founded on mutual aid. Described using biological references to the cells that together make up the human body or chemical references to atoms grouping to form compounds, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin, Elis?e Reclus and Jean Grave per ceived the way to social harmony as informed by the irre futable laws of nature. Roslak asks: The undeniable similarity between the surface of a neo-impressionist canvas and the anarchists' ideal social structure leads inevitably to a question: did the artists, following the example of the anarchists they admired, choose an expli citly divided touch for their painting as a means of repre senting atoms and molecules and therefore, by extension, liberated humans?' (p. 25). Roslak concludes that we must not see anarchist theory as a 'ready-made

This study offers a close reading of “The Starry Night” that integrates both Anne Sexton’s poem (1962) and Vincent van Gogh’s painting (1889) as interrelated artistic creations. Traditionally, scholarly analyses of these works have centered on biographical and psychological perspectives, often emphasizing themes such as the depiction of suicide, which is frequently viewed as a central motif in both pieces. This study, however, aims to move beyond these conventional reviews by following a close reading to uncover the significations of each medium. By following the semiotic approach (Ferdinand de Saussure) and (Charles Sanders Peirce), this paper reveals deeper connections between Sexton’s verse and van Gogh’s visual art. The analysis will focus on the elements of both works and their depiction of Greek mythological narratives–– the story of Apollo and Artemis. We will explore how the rhetoric of the poem and van Gogh’s brushstroke techniques evoke imagery associated with the island of Delos–– the mythological location where Leto gave birth to the twin deities. Therefore, this study seeks to illuminate the symbolic and thematic interplay between the literary and visual aspects of “The Starry Night,” providing new insights into their interconnected meanings.

This paper draws on the theory and method of free association in psychoanalysis to frame an investigation of the content, structure, and function of the thinking expressed in conversations about sexuality and sexual health. The investigation emerges from an ongoing three-year study of the way adolescents, teachers, and peer sex educators negotiate and interpret the language of abstinence and the emotional terrain of sexuality in everyday speech and interaction. Through close readings of a film and related focus group data, the paper calls for attention to free associative movements of thought in sex education conversations. It argues that fostering free association in sex education will make room for the translation of sexuality into thought about the contours of sexuality in experience.

Chapter four opens with a close reading of Mrs Dalloway outlining the ‘fugal’ form of the novel. It places the novel in a matrix of medical, musical and military discourses about fugue, proposing that the novel’s form is shaped by Bach’s music. It considers the way music informs Woolf’s representation of shell shock and hysterical fugue, and thus her response to the First World War. The chapter then turns to two related questions: the association of music and homosexuality in Mrs Dalloway, Jacob’s Room and The Waves, and the relationship between music and free association in Mrs Dalloway, The Waves and ‘The String Quartet’. The chapter proposes that music informs Woolf’s representation of (homo)sexuality, and that music provides Woolf with a means of both creating and disrupting textual order.

My project deals with the aesthetics of nostalgia in a corpus of graphic novels. It starts by investigating the critical framework regarding nostalgia, which I analyze from a historical, psychological, philosophical and sociological perspective, giving particular attention to the implications it has for present times. It goes on to apply media-driven approaches about nostalgia to comic studies, trying to build a typology of the ways nostalgia may be seen as a two-phased, interactive articulation of comic production (of which I highlight motifs, style and structure) and reception (which I regrouped under the labels of readers, fans and collectors). Finally, I proceed to some close readings of key primary texts (graphic novels) to test my hypothesis in practice and draw my conclusions.

Since its release, critics have evaluated 'Rango' from technical, artistic, thematic, psychological and feminist perspectives. However, the role and purpose of nature in 'Rango' remains unexplored. This study, from an eco critical perspective, aims to discover the aqua politics of the elite to exploit the local community through controlling water resources. This qualitative research is carried out within the framework of literary and semiotic, fiction and history of the genre, animated movies. It is premised upon an explanatory and interpretative analysis of the chosen movie. The current research also evaluates the impact of water politics on the construction of individual identities. In addition, there search looks at issues of Eco feminism addressed in the movie. After watching the movie and reading the text of that movie, semiotical and close readings have been applied to explore the water politics,aqua politics, and Eco feminism. The study concludes that in the contemporary technological advance area in which other than super-power of the world, like America, Russia and China, the other less powerful yet potentially threatening countries of the world that possess weapons of mass destruction can prove highly dangerous for the world peace and, while the water resources are assuming prime importance in developing the energy resources of different countries.

Biographical narratives generate a continuous sense of political community across the state’s past, present and future, and provide the state with ontological security. Building on growing International Relations scholarship that highlights the power of visuals in shaping global politics, our article proposes visual rhetorical analysis as a tool to interrogate how governments employ images to tell their biographical narratives. The rhetorical approach transcends the methodological divide in the current ‘visual turn’ literature between the cognitive psychological and poststructuralist perspectives. We illustrate the analytical value of the rhetorical approach through an empirical study of how the totalitarian regimes of China and North Korea communicate their biographical narratives – the ‘rightful great power’ narrative and the ‘family state’ narrative, respectively – through propaganda imagery of their leaders. To this end, we develop a close semiotic reading of selected photographs of Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un in different narrative settings.

As a nascent perspective in psychology and psychotherapy, the narrative approach adopts an implicit vision of “the good life,” one that informs its criteria for what constitutes a good or coherent story, and by extension, what represents the goals of treatment. A close reading of the contributions to this special issue identifies six defining features of narrative adequacy, which suggest that a healthy or adaptive narrative is one that is (a) relationally oriented, (b) socioculturally anchored, (c) imbued with a sense of personal authorship, (d) open to reflection and the recognition of alternative positions, (e) flexible versus rigid, and (e) amenable to “stage direction” by the story-teller. With allowance for the cultural constraints implied by the emphasis on the autonomy of the narrator in this account, such criteria help explicate the possible meanings of narrative coherence, and contribute to the future development of this perspective.

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: BIOGRAPHYFull AccessAdolf Wölfli: Draftsman, Writer, Poet, ComposerJOSEPH J. SCHILDKRAUT, M.D., JOSEPH J. SCHILDKRAUTSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Boston, Mass.Published Online:1 Dec 1998https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.155.12.1787aAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In recent years there has been a resurgence of scholarly interest and research concerning the relationship between mental illness and artistic creativity. One aspect of this scholarship has focused on artists with psychosis (1), among whom Adolf Wölfli is perhaps the best known and certainly one of the most highly regarded.Wölfli’s talents and accomplishments as an artist were first recognized and encouraged by Walter Morgenthaler, his psychiatrist at the Waldau Mental Asylum near Bern, Switzerland, between 1907 and 1919. Wölfli had been hospitalized at Waldau in 1895, and he remained there until his death in 1930, at the age of 66. In 1921, Morgenthaler published his highly regarded monograph, Madness and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli (2).The book reviewed here, Adolf Wölfli: Draftsman, Writer, Poet, Composer, edited by Elka Spoerri, comprises a series of essays documenting and providing critical commentary on all aspects of Wölfli’s vast artistic output, which included drawings, prose, poetry, and musical compositions. In addition, the book contains a very brief biography of Adolf Wölfli and a “catalogue” of his existing works. As noted in the preface by Prof. Jean-Pierre Colombo, President of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation, the essays “investigate Wölfli’s artistic work not only from an art-historical point of view but also from the perspectives of psychology, psychiatry, literature, text analysis, and musicology.” In addition, Colombo notes that another aim of this volume is to “illustrate Wölfli’s pictorial work vividly and copiously...[with] 77 color plates and 111 black-and-white illustrations.”The major essay in this book is by Elka Spoerri, who was curator of the Adolf Wölfli Foundation from 1975 to 1996. In this monographic essay, Spoerri provides a summary of Wölfli’s life and a chronological description of his massive artistic output. Concerning his narrative oeuvre, she writes that it was of “paramount importance to Wölfli” and “his life’s work.” Consisting of “prose texts, which are interwoven with poems, musical compositions, and illustrations,” Wölfli’s fantastic autobiographical narrative included “forty-five large volumes and sixteen school notebooks with a total of twenty-five thousand densely filled pages…[that] is a totally unified work.”Wölfli divided this narrative into five somewhat over­lapping chronological groupings: From the Cradle to the Grave, 1908–1916; Geographic and Algebraic Books, 1912–1916; Books With Songs and Dances, 1917–1922; Album Books With Dances and Marches, 1924–1928; and Funeral March, 1928–1930. In addition, Wölfli created a body of work that Morgenthaler called “bread art,” i.e., single-sheet drawings, largely produced from 1916 to 1930, which Wölfli made “for others in order to get colored pencils, paper, tobacco, etc.”Other essays included in this volume are Harald Szeemann’s “No Catastrophe Without Idyll, No Idyll Without Catastrophe,” reprinted from a 1976 exhibition catalog; Louis A. Sass’s “Adolf Wölfli, Spatiality, and the Sublime”; Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet on “Wölfli and Autobiographical Writing”; Allen S. Weiss on “Music and Madness”; Max Wechsler on “Wölfli and Walser: Some Thoughts About Their Congruence in Spite of Their Disparity”; and Daniel Baumann on “The Reception of Adolf Wölfli’s Work, 1921–1996.” The brief section of diagrams of “Wölfli’s Vocabulary of Forms,” by Markus Rätz, is most helpful in interpreting the idiosyncratic iconography in Wölfli’s drawings.Since many of the black-and-white reproductions are quite small, it is hard to see details in the drawings that are discussed in the text. Moreover, illustration numbers are often not cited in the text, forcing the reader to search by title for specific illustrations.In summary, this book contains a rather diverse collection of scholarly essays that merit close reading. When it is time for a break, the reader can turn to the color illustrations of Wölfli’s drawings. They are magnificent.by Elka Spoerri. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1997, 252 pp., $39.95.

This study examines the psychological symbolism in Keatsian poetry using analytical psychology. John Keats ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is steeped in psychological, symbolic, and analytical perspectives, which are essential components of Jungian psychology/archetypal analysis. The current study aims to scrutinize the psychological and symbolic perspectives of Keats’s poem to understand the depth of psychic integration and archetypes in the text. This study analyzes ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by deploying Carl Jung’s concepts of syzygy or complementation of psychic energies of anima in the males and animus in the females. The term syzygy signifies a union of opposites like anima and animus and the conscious or collective unconscious. This process of complementation or complementary opposite of integration in the ode has symbolic interaction between the conscious male persona (animus) and the collective unconscious female persona (anima). Based on a close reading of the poem from a Jungian perspective, the current study provides a psychological understanding of poetic creation by underlying the conscious acts and thinking of the author as psychic interactions. This study aims to understand the symbolic representation of opposing psychic energies in Keatsian poetry. Moreover, the study analyzes the interpretation and the balance of male and female energies in Keats' poetry mean for the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind, and its effect on the poetic creativity and inner peace of the author. Thereby, the study elaborated that Keatsian poetry is a true depiction of Jungian psychology.

This reports the psychological perspective of displacement in the English Pakistani novel The Bride (also published as The Pakistani Bride), written by a Pakistani American novelist Bapsi Sidhwa. This is a sociolinguistic study with the employment of Close Reading (CR) and Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study involves social, psychological and semantic aspects with the aim to present the psychological impact of displacement on the personal and social life of the characters. Close-Reading provides the analysis of the novel and the author. Systematic Functional Linguistics provides context and semantics as tools to analyze the historical and conceptual background of the novel. The findings of the study present mixed results, supporting the supposition that displacement affects the psychological state of the characters and disturbs their individual functionality. It partially proves that their social functionality is equally affected. It may be because people are more careful in playing their social roles.