Biographical Events Research Articles

La escritura del cogito: una hipótesis sobre Samuel Beckett

This paper proposes the hypothesis that it’s possible to recognize the figure of the Cartesian cogito in Samuel Beckett’s narrative. Especially in relation to the problem of the separation between mind and body, and the paradoxes resulting from a philosophical self-reflexivity whose operations seem to describe biographical events. The subject who meditates withdraws from the world, speaking and writing, accompanied only by his own voice.

Source Discrimination in Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

ObjectivesThe context of memory experiences is referred to as source memory and can be distinguished from the content of episodic item memory. Source memory represents a crucial part of biographic events and elaborate memory experiences. Whereas individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were shown to have inefficient item memory, little is known about the context of memory experiences.MethodsThe present study compared 37 adult patients with a diagnosed ADHD with 40 matched healthy participants on a word list paradigm. Memory functions of encoding, retention and source discrimination were assessed. Furthermore, standardized measures of memory and executive control were applied in order to explore a qualitative differentiation of memory components.ResultsAdult patients with ADHD showed impaired performance in encoding of new information whereas the retention of encoded items was found to be preserved. The most pronounced impairment of patients with ADHD was observed in source discrimination. Regression models of cognitive functions on memory components supported some qualitative differentiation.ConclusionsData analysis suggests a differential pattern of memory impairment in adults suffering from ADHD with a particular deficit in source discrimination. Inefficient source discrimination in adults with ADHD can affect daily functioning by limiting biographic awareness and disturbing general cognitive processes.

A Historical and Fractal Perspective on the Life and Saxophone Solos of John Coltrane

John Coltrane's relevant biographical events are discussed along with a fractal analysis examining the sequential structure of pitches in his saxophone solos. Eighteen solos were examined, two songs on two different album releases for each year from 1959–1967. Saxophone solos were transcribed from sheet music into a format that represents an absolute pitch numerically. The pitch sequences were examined using power spectral analysis. Results indicate that all 18 Coltrane saxophone solos display sequences of successive pitches that are consistent with anti-persistent fractional Brownian motion having 1/f α power spectra with scaling exponent α between 1.6 and 1.8. Brownian motion is a type of statistical pattern that is symptomatic of self-similar or fractal patterning across time. In addition, average mutual information analyses revealed various dominant regular rhythmic patterns in several of the pieces. Eighth-note patterns were dominant in Coltrane's earlier work while greater irregularity was present in rhythmic patterns of his later work. Thus, Coltrane's improvised solos, including his later avant-garde compositions, are comprised of Brownian fractal patterns, which others using different pitch encoding techniques have previously identified in performances of both classical and jazz music. These fractal patterns quantify the concepts of order and complexity addressed in the Theory of Aesthetic Value.

Polish, hybrid, and otherwise: exilic discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz

George Gasyna. Polish, Hybrid and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz. New York: Continuum. 2011. 276 pp. $42.95, paper.George Gasyna offers a unique and much anticipated comparative reading of selected works by Witold Gombrowicz (Cosmos, Trans-Atlantyk) and Joseph Conrad (Nostromo). Such an approach might not immediately strike one as all too original, but it is truly thought-provoking in exploring the indeterminate discour se that Conrad and Gombrowicz produce as a result of their exilic experience. Far from merely cataloguing biographical events, Gasyna seeks to interrogate the inner workings of Conrad's and Gombrowicz's exilic liminal discourses, ones that defy the gravity of the sanctified cultural and literary assumptions of their age or any clean-cut identifiable ideological affirmations. Configured as such, liminal rather than reactionary, Conrad and Gombrowicz anticipate modernist and postmodernist poetics respectively. On the face of it, such a bold periodization endeavour is anything but ground-breaking, as a battery of publications calculated to tag both Polish writers with tins or that -ism has already been fired by many scholars (Slavic or otherwise). But the angle from which Gasyna delves into the writers' aesthetics is novel: he interrogates the language triggered by their cultural in-betweenness in order to point to the blind spots of indeterminacy undercutting their poetics.With tins as his solid point of departure, Gasyna superbly charts Gombrowicz's and Conrad's trajectories of exile, asserting their dual hybrid identities, or, as he puts rt, homo duplex persona, as epitomised in their works of fiction and life writing. Equipped with acute analytical skills, for winch the author owes much intellectual indebtedness to such pillars of postmodernist and poststructurahst theory as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Derrida, to list but a few, and encyclopaedic knowledge of twentieth-century European history and culture, Gasyna magnificently caters to the tastes of those who seek in-depth historical references and close-readers orientated toward interpretive hair-splitting in a characteristically deconstructionist vein.Particularly well-argued is the author's examination of the heterotopic discourse of Trans-Atlantyk, winch helped precipitate a crucial debate on the subjectivity of exilic writing (p. 178) in its indomitable resistance to cut-and-dried ideological schemata. This project of a disbanding of linguistic autonomy is pushed a step further in Cosmos, winch for Gasyna amiounces the dissolution of modern narrative subjectivity into a mise-enabime of competing simulacra (p. …

Images of the Holy Trinity: Origins, Iconographis Features, Deformations

The history of the image of the Holy Trinity reveals that the interpretation of this Christian mystery posed and still poses a challenge Christianity has attempted to face during general meetings encouraging the publishing of theological tracts and enlightening artists as well as those who commission works of art. Meanwhile, artists have tried to depict the glory of one God in three persons, distorting the image to a greater or lesser degree. Christian images often attributed human qualities to theTrinity of God and bestowed Him with an anthropomorphic silhouette. Some of them went so far as to portray the three-faced Trinity revealing a three-theistic thinking, which was a complete diversion from searching for the image of God in three persons. However, in the Christian iconographic tradition it would have been an absurd thing to do. On the contrary, the majority of the images of the Holy Trinity are worthy of respect even though they do pose a problem that needs to be faced.The doctrine of incarnation enables the portrayal of the face of God the Son. In the Old Testament, God does not disclose His face, whereas in the New Testament He reveals the face of the eternal Incarnate Word, i.e. Jesus Christ. The Church permitted the depiction of both the human form of Christ and His biographic events. Around 730, John of Damascus quoted Basilius the Great and emphasized that image worshipping was not a pagan cult as it was not the matter that was being celebrated but rather that which was being depicted, thus “we honour not the sacred image, but the prototype of which the artistic object is only a reflection.” Subsequently, the latter phrase comprised the base of all defenders of Christian images and was often being repeated in order to prove that the cult of images was based on the worshipping of the depicted persons but not the depictions themselves. Christians followed the conviction that the Son was the consubstantial image of the prototype and that only the Son “is the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) and “the expressed image of his person” (Heb. 1:3). Thus, the Holy Spirit, in its turn, is also the image of the Son: “and no one can say “Jesus is Lord,” except the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3). It is only through the Holy Spirit that we know the Son of God, God the Christ, and see the Father in the Son. By nature, the Word is the proclaimer of the thought, whereas the Spirit is the revealer of the Word. Therefore, only the Son is the living, true and everlasting image of the invisible God containing the Father in Himself, absolutely identical to the Father and only differing in that He has a cause. However, the christomorphic position has not always been gratifying, and it is sometimes thought that Latin Christianity went too far by depicting God humanly. According to French sociologists, such “human, all too human” (Nietzsche) images of God might have contributed to “discrediting” the very idea of God or even the “exculturation” of Christianity. Contemporary art has also been unable to find the means of depicting the Holy Trinity in such a way that both believers and non-believers would not consider it to be provocative. The problem will never be solved if all traditions, doctrines and disciplines, principles and facts, successes and failures in the field are not accepted.The article considers only some of the interpretation aspects of the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The portrayal of the glory of God in three persons, iconographic interpretations and deformations have revealed that throughout the history of Christianity much effort has been made to express “clearly” the essence of the Holy Trinity, and yet the mystery has remained both a mystery and a challenge. As the result, the iconographic history of the Holy Trinity and all the related controversies allow us to reconsider the ontological status of its artistic image.

French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story by Simon Kemp

Gérard Wajcman’s L’interdit. Maria Muresan underscores a similar reversal of fundamental Proustian notions in Le grand incendie de Londres where Jacques Roubaud presents “l’écriture de la mémoire” (190) as a means of destruction rather than creation. Other writers strengthen the interconnections between art and life that are found in Proust’s novel. In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien, for example, Davide Vago traces metaphors of petrification, moulage, and fragmentation to images in the Recherche, where time sculpts characters’ bodies and erodes lives and loves. Sjef Houppermans’s analysis of Renaud Camus’s body of work highlights its “mille variations de la voix de Proust,” as well as its resemblance to “la polystratification du récit proustien et son essentielle musicalit é” (229). Still other recent authors explore the play between presence and absence in the Recherche. According to Florian Pennanech, Roland Barthes seeks a means of representation “hors du fragment” (248), which he finds in Proust’s “réalisme par intermittence, un réalisme erratique, discontinu” (249). Finally, in AnneMarie Garat’s ghost story, Nous nous connaissons déjà, Isabelle Dangy concludes that Proust’s influence haunts the general shape of the novel and its rapport between involuntary memory and writing. The Société Néerlandaise Marcel Proust once again has compiled a volume of high-quality essays to keep specialists and general readers up-to-date with current research on Proust and his oeuvre. Whether the works of the contemporary writers featured here follow in the footsteps of Proust’s literary vision or develop in opposition to it, they serve to single out aspects of the Recherche that remain pertinent and engaging for readers today. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder KEMP, SIMON. French Fiction into the Twenty-First Century: The Return to the Story. Cardiff: UP of Wales, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7083-2273-4. Pp. 213. £75. Calling on a wide range of narrative theories, Kemp argues that contemporary French literary narration is still experimental even though it has abandoned the techniques of the nouveaux romanciers and has made what is often called a retour au récit. The five authors he discusses to illustrate his thesis all use narrative techniques that strain conventions. Kemp finds Annie Ernaux’s main innovation to be foregrounding the relationship between the time of the events narrated and the time of the narration; he says that the varying distances between the two create a “plurality [...] of experience” (35). This is particularly relevant to Ernaux’s works treating the same biographical events, such as her mother’s decline and death, which she narrates retrospectively in Une femme and contemporaneously in “Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit”. Her frequent inclusion of detailed “reflections on her text” even makes Kemp question whether, in some works, her writing is primarily narrative (22). This issue of how much non-narrative writing fiction can accommodate , and how much missing information a reader should be asked to supply, is raised also by those of Pascal Quignard’s works which, along with seemingly incomplete narrative, include much description and exposition. Such mixing of genre was a major reason many found his Goncourt-winning Les ombres errantes impossible to understand. Yet Kemp finds that although Quignard does not always seem to value narrative coherence, his refusal to be constrained by literary theory distinguishes his work from that of such nouveaux romanciers as Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet. 752 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 The fictions of Marie Darrieussecq, especially those after Truismes, focus less on relating events than on presenting a “model of mind” (77). This model and her interest in the biological basis of mental life have also led her to represent prelinguistic thought in stream of consciousness writing, as she does in White. Jean Echenoz, in contrast, plays with popular genre fiction such as polars, adventure stories, and fantasies, as if to see how much he can explode our expectations and still tell a story. He leaves out important scenes, changes plot direction, and shifts genres in mid-narrative; he uses an “intrusive narrator” (118); he does not seem to care about probability or coherence. Above all, he digresses so much that...

The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Performance of Form

ANDREW ALLPORT The Romantic Fragment Poem and the Performance ofForm i.“Defect of undercurrent” and Other Definitions R omanticism’s claim to inventing the fragment poem has come under fire in recent years. Leonard Barkan has argued convincingly in Unearthing the Past that the deliberate creation and appreciation of frag­ ments as fragments was an aesthetic practice as early as the Italian Renais­ sance, and that Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures and sketches were val­ ued for their possibility, not their completion: “The non finito is not a mere romantic anachronism but a real expression of early modern artistic culture.”' Other scholars have suggested that what we call the Romantic fragment is formally part of a mixed genre that goes back at least to Pe­ trarch, and includes Sterne and Diderot as predecessors, particularly for the long and digressive fragment poems of Byron.2 Others have argued for the extended influence of Romantic fragments into Modernist and even Postmodern poetry. At the heart of all these discussions, of course, is the contested definition of an artistic “fragment,” and the hope that we might come to a consensus here on a definition, much less an origin, is surely fu­ tile. But the nature of these disagreements, particularly over the canonical fragments of Romanticism, is instructive, I think, because it highlights a deeper discomfort with the notion of artistic intent. Theories which find a way to make particular fragment poems “complete,” in other words, presume a particular definition of poetry, and the amorphousness of the fragment allows each critic to put what are essentially matters of taste into formal terms. Are there, then, formal differences between the canonical I. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renais­ sance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 207. 2. Specifically, this claim is made by Elizabeth Wanning Harries in “‘Unfinish’d Sen­ tences’: The Romantic Fragment,” A Companion to European Romanticism (Oxford: Blackwell , 2005), 371. Making the case for a “poetics of arrest” rather than fragmentation, Balachandra Rajan emphasizes the idea of Romantic and Modernist poetry’s “avoidance of closure” in The Form of the Unfinished (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 4—5. SiR, 51 (Fall 2012) 399 400 ANDREW ALLPORT fragments and the obscure ones? Or just varying degrees of success in pro­ voking our need, as readers, for completion? Say we begin with that most ingenious fragment, Samuel Taylor Cole­ ridge’s “Kubla Khan,” both a dream and a fragment according to its title, and the most famous fragment of the Romantic period, perhaps the most famous fragment poem in the English literary canon, the predecessor (if not the originator) of a form that includes Keats’s “Hyperion,” Words­ worth’s “The Danish Boy,” Byron’s Don Juan, and Shelley’s “The Tri­ umph of Life,” all of which were described as “fragments” upon publica­ tion. As a dream, “Kubla Khan” has become a collective one of which “everything is known . . . except what it is about,” as George Watson put it over forty years ago.5 Many of the critical studies of “Kubla Khan” delineate terms at their outset that are actually designed to disqualify the poem as a literal fragment, preferring, as it were, to use it for more symbolic ends. It is as though the term “fragment,” so perfect a metaphor for other aspects of the poem, can­ not also be a factual description of its form. In previous treatments of “Kubla Khan” the poem is made whole, so that its stated fragmentariness must be understood as something other than its form: an idea, a modality, a condition, a manner, an imperative. For example, Thomas McFarland be­ gins his study with the statement “Kubla Khan ... is as fully terminated as any poem in the language.”3 4 Therefore, its fragmentariness must be con­ strued from the biographical events surrounding its composition; the opium-induced dream and its interruption constitute the fragment, not the poem itself. “Kubla Khan” symbolizes the ruins of the poet’s own life in the supposed incompleteness presented to the reader in its prefatory note. McFarland’s analysis convincingly illustrates both the power and the short­ comings of such an approach. In large...

Esperienza e sentimento del confine nell’opera di Gëzim Hajdari

To what extent the notion of boundary moulds the production of “migrant writers” in Italy? Is it possible to make boundary a reading key to some of these writers? To verify a possible sentiment of the boundary aside from the congruity of biographical events, into the living texts, could set an alternative procedure to the detection of the category of “migrant” within the critics. As to Gezim Hajdari verses, Italian writer in Italian of Albanian origins ( Poesie scelte , 2009), the literary analysis will intersect “border studies”. The reference to the limes in fact is at the bases of a recent offshoot of those studies which have in last years proceeded with a material reconstitution of the concept against the previous tendency to its metaphorical extension. The boundary, then , will be analyzed in terms of influence on the structure of the text, such as metric peculiarities, genre dynamics and bilingualism. Some authors who experiment the trespass even since the linguistic option draw our attention to the materiality of boundaries. Besides some poetical statements in fact, a close-up analysis of the most recent production stresses re-emergences of the identitarian theme and indubitable signals of the seismic activity in the substratum of the mother tongue. It is then possible to trace back the definition of “migrant” from the extratextual dimension of biography to (and within) the natural boundaries of the literary fact.

Neurología y Literatura 2

Introduction Good literary fiction has the potential to move us, extend our sense of life, transform our prospective views and help us in the face of adversity. A neurological disorder is one (if not the) most challenging experience a human being may have to confront in a lifetime. In this sense, literary recreations of illnesses have a doubly powerful effect. Objectives Study the synergies between neurology and fictional literature with particular reference to narrative based medicine (NBM). Development Doctors establish boundaries between normality and the abnormal. Taking a clinical history is an act of interpretation in which the doctor integrates the science of objective signs and measurable quantities with the art of subjective clinical judgment. The more discrepancy there is between the patient living though illness and the way in which disease is accounted for by the doctor, the less likely the doctor-patient interaction is to succeed. NBM contributes to a better discernment of the meanings, thus considering disease as a biographical event rather than just a natural fact. Drawing from their own experience with disease, writers of fiction provide universal insights through their narratives, whilst neuroscientists, like Cajal, have occasionally devoted their scientific knowledge to literary narratives. Furthermore, neurologists from Alzheimer to Oliver Sacks remind us of the essential value of NBM in the clinic. Conclusions Integrating NBM (the narrative of patients), the classical holistic approach to patients with our current paradigm of evidence based medicine represents a challenge as relevant to neurologists as the technological and scientific advances.

Palimpsests of Sexuality and Intimate Violence: Turning-Points as Transformative Scripts for Intervention

In this article, we explore transdisciplinary understandings of scripts as transformative interventions. Script refers, on the one hand, to cognitive, routinized behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multilayered process of enacting, interpreting, and rewriting interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embodying and provoking interdisciplinary encounters, links the various layers of practised and narrated scripts. The interrelation of the scripts of the palimpsest is marked by inextricability as they use the same space and create an illusionary intimacy. We develop our ideas about script as intervention, reflecting on scripts of violence and sexual experience. We make use of the psychoanalytic term “cryptic incorporation”. Cryptic incorporation entails the idea of an experience psychically “swallowed whole” by the subject and therefore not accessible to conscious reflection, once incorporated. Our methodological readings are both empirical and fictional. The empirical example is based on an interview with one respondent, who has experienced intimate violence during the course of her life. The autobiographical text of Shedding, written in 1975 by the Swiss author Verena Stefan, is an example of fiction. Both texts engage in the inextricability of vulnerability and intimacy. Analysing these narratives, we pay special attention to “turning-points”. As turning-points represent decisive changes within evolving life-stories, they are read as palimpsestuous scripts of a transformative process. Thus, we focus on the human ability to change scripts, to rewrite biographical events. We look for a productive entanglement of our scientific writing, understanding the writing process itself as a palimpsestuous layer of script as intervention.

Achilles the Bitter: Gorky and the Genocide

What trace do genocide and exile from the homeland leave on an artist's aesthetic language? Given the previous century's history, it would seem a fundamental question, especially for an artist such as Arshile Gorky, a survivor of the first modern genocide of 1915. How did this experience – too deep to be expunged by any subsequent biographical events – shape Gorky's art? Should we look to iconography (to the allusive symbolic content of Gorky's shapes) or to history (a devotion to remembered forms and to re-established ties with an interrupted past)? Do such forms play a compensatory, restorative function, a search for a lost wholeness and unity, as suggested by more than one of the authors reviewed here?1 Does trauma reveal its trace in an aesthetic preference for a certain palette with its emotive associations, as Peter Balakian argued eloquently in one of the first articles (1996) to deal with the impact of the Armenian genocide on Gorky?2 Or is it located in the search for a substitute form of authority in the wake of one's own tragically aborted patrimony? Gorky's legendary apprenticeship to older artists would suggest as much.

La figura del favorito regio nelle “lettere di Consiglio” e negli “Essayes” di Francis Bacon: riflessi letterari dell’ “impeachment” del Lord Chancellor

The present article, through a study of two letter of advice, written by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) for the English favourite of James I, George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, and some of his Essayes (1625), tries to analyse the theoretical reception of the figure of the royal favourite and the institutional and political context of his rising. In these works, infact, Francis Bacon not only showed an increasing consciousness on the main features of this political figure, the monopoly of patronage and royal counsel, but also expressed a negative opinion about a policy based only on a favourite. The view of the author should be connected with a political conviction, identified with the reign of Elizabeth I, in which the queen ruled with the Privy Council, and with the biographical events, who involved Bacon in 1621. Last part of the article, infact, is focused on the impeachment and the end of the political career of the Lord Chancellor. Submission Date: 23/01/2010 Acceptance Date: 07/03/2010

Biographical and Cataloguing Common Ground: Panizzi and Lubetzky, Kindred Spirits Separated by a Century

Antonio Panizzi, the British Museum's Librarian, and Seymour Lubetzky, Theoretician of Library Cataloguing, and considered to be one of the co-founders of the Paris Principles of 1961, share many biographical and theoretical points in common. This article touches on the curious parallels in their life stories, and presents and contrasts the most important aspects of the 91 Rules to be Observed in Preparing and Entering Titles, written and published by Panizzi in 1841, with Seymour Lubetzky's writings, particularly those found in the Manual of Descriptive Cataloging, Preliminary Draft (1943) and the Code of Cataloging Rules, Author and Title Entries of 1960. In addition to the historical and biographical events that led Panizzi and Lubetzky to prepare these works, the article addresses cataloguing principles, catalogue structure, bibliographic description, attribution of authorship, and the selection of entries and headings. The chief elements that differentiate the two authors — owing to the long stretch of time that divided them — are also examined. In conclusion, the works in which Lubetzky quotes Panizzi are presented. Historical perspective and temporal distance notwithstanding, Panizzi, for Lubetzky, continued to be a valid and contemporary subject of comparison — a model and example to follow. The reason behind this resides in the fact that Panizzi, according to the words pronounced by Lubetzky in his last public lecture, 'kept an eye on the future': an indispensable approach when seeking to create an effective research tool.

Disposições a militar e lógica de investimentos militantes

O artigo centra-se em discussões sobre modalidades de engajamento e militância, com base em investigação conduzida no estado de Sergipe com dirigentes e ex-dirigentes de instituições associativas bastante diversas: sindicatos, instituições de filantropia, defesa de direitos humanos e opção sexual, movimento negro, conselho de leigos católicos e ONGs ambientalistas. O eixo de análise gira em torno das condições de aquisição de disposições para diferentes engajamentos e da forma como tais disposições se realizam e se atualizam ao longo de itinerários individuais. Os resultados apontam condições de socialização familiar e religiosa favoráveis, escolarização elevada, passagem pelo espaço universitário, eventos biográficos marcantes, ativismo militante e vinculações partidárias precoces como elementos decisivos à realização de carreiras militantes.

Die Tjutčevs im bayerischen Kurort Bad Reichenhall

The present article deals with two episodes in the life of the renowned Russian poet F. I. Tyutchev and his family spent in the Bavarian Alpine health resort Bad Reichenhall in 1859 and 1872. Thereby hitherto unknown material from Bavarian archives is brought to light and, besides, a new approach to the topical aspect of one of Tyutchev's best known poems, ,,Al'py, as well as some details concerning a late occasional poem - both in connection with the two relevant biographic events - are discussed.

Biographical truths and their clinical consequences: Understanding ‘embodied memories’ in a third psychoanalysis with a traumatized patient recovered from severe poliomyelitis

The relationship between ‘narrative’ and ‘historical–biographical truth’ in psychoanalytic treatment has become the subject of many controversial debates in recent years. Findings of contemporary memory research have lead to great scepticism as to whether therapists are able objectively and reliably to reconstruct biographical events on the basis of their observations in the therapeutic situation. Some authors even claim that psychoanalysts should concentrate exclusively on observing the here and now of the patient′s behaviour within the transference relationship to the analyst. In this paper it will be discussed whether the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater in this debate. Centred around the insights from a third psychoanalysis with a patient who suffered from a severe case of childhood polio, the hypothesis will be discussed that working through the traumatic experience in the transference with the analyst, as well as the reconstruction of the biographical–historical reality of the trauma suffered, prove to be indispensable for a lasting structural change.Integration of the trauma into one′s own personal history and identity is and remains one of the main aims of a psychoanalytic treatment with severely traumatized patients. The reconstruction of the original trauma is indispensable in helping the patient to understand the ‘language of the body’ and to connect it with visualizations, images and verbalizations. The irreversable wounds and vulnerability of his body as the ‘signs of his specific traumatic history’ have to be recognized, emotionally accepted and understood in order to live with them and not deny them any longer. Another important aspect in psychoanalysis is to develop the capability to mentalize, in other words, to understand the intentions of central (primary) objects related to the trauma.The concept of ‘embodied memory’ might be helpful in understanding precisely in what way ‘early trauma is remembered by the body’. Observing in detail the sensory‐motor coordinations in the analytic relationship enables one to decode the inappropriate intensity of affects and fantasies which match the original traumatic interaction and are revealed as inappropriate reactions in the present, new relationship to the analyst.

Fenomenologia Clínica das Perturbaçoes da Personalidade

Abstract Personality disorders are among the most intriguing and fascinating mental disorders. As they are characterized by pathological traits, not signs and symptoms, they are unsuitable for treatment with psychotropic drugs or other biological treatments. A psychological understanding of these disorders is possible based on cognitive or psycho-dynamic explanations but the author argues that these theoretical models miss the essential point, as they Jack a foundational ground on what is specifically human in human beings, their humanitas. Any deviation from this ground might lead to the so called de-humanization of medicine or other clinical disciplines. This paper proposes an existential understanding of personality disorders grounded on the being of man. A clinical practice oriented towards the phenomenological method conceives human beings as an “opening of meaning” where the entities of the world can show themselves. The “opening” however is structured and if one revealed content (for instance a biographical event) is misunderstood as a structural component that might generate a set of interrelated pathological personality traits. A clinical case is presented to illustrate this process.

Tattoos, body piercings, and self-injury: Is there a connection? Investigations on a core group of participants practicing body modification

Reliable psychosocial data about practitioners of body piercing and tattooing are few and controversial. The goal of this study was to reinvestigate the issue by studying a large sample of individuals with body modifications (BMs), focusing on the motives and relations to biographical events. A 55-item anonymous self-report questionnaire was distributed among volunteers of what is considered to be a core group of individuals wearing BMs (N=432). Results show that BMs changed the participants’ attitude toward their body considerably, and 34% of all participants reported BM practices in conjunction with decisive biographical events. Twenty-seven percent of the participants admitted self-cutting during childhood. This group differed from the group without self-cutting with respect to several features before, during, and after BM. The rate of medical complications of BM was 16% in the total sample, with a remarkably higher rate (26%) among participants with a history of self-cutting. The data suggest that the significance of BMs ranges from simple peer group imitations to highly informative symptoms of possibly severe psychopathological conditions. In the latter case, BMs sometimes serve as therapeutic substitutes.

The Power of Visual Memory: the Earliest Remembered Drawing of Alberto Giacometti, Snow White in Her Coffin

Since the time of Freud, many psychoanalysts have seen screen memories and earliest memories as reflecting underlying dynamics. I propose that an earliest remembered artwork is a highly condensed construction similar to a screen memory. Alberto Giacometti’s earliest remembered drawing, of Snow White in Her Coffin, contains clues to the artist’s personality and references to childhood experience. Giacometti’s memory of the drawing done in childhood is a striking condensation of significant biographical events and psychodynamic conflicts, as well as a marker of important unconscious fantasies. The artist’s postwar sculptural style, utilizing gaunt figures, epitomizes the final transformation of the psychological meaning of his earliest remembered drawing.

<i>I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community</i> (review)

Reviewed by: I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community Guillermo Bartelt Susan Oakdale. I Foresee My Life: The Ritual Performance of Autobiography in an Amazonian Community. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 206 pp. Paper, $24.95. The canon of a culture provides the desired concepts and categories into which individuals are socialized and that continue to be reestablished through interactions based on particular discourse structures. One such structure is the autobiographical narrative, a cultural practice that serves as the function of [End Page 363] reconstructing experience and making it acceptable not only to the listener but also to the narrator. Culturally shared meanings are negotiated and personal identities are established primarily for the benefit of the narrator. In other words, an acceptable sense of the self for presentation not only to others but also to oneself depends to a large degree on how well biographical events fit the cultural canon. This process of recontextualization becomes especially challenging for individuals with unusual or disturbing life experiences that demand at least a partial canonization through a relation to the established categories of the culture. Further complications are introduced when this process involves bicultural individuals, such as Natives of the Americas, who must come to terms with the integrative pressures of competing sets of cultural prescriptions. The setting for Oakdale’s study of narrative autobiography is the Xingu Indigenous Park, where Native casualties from the ever-encroaching Brazilian frontier have been encouraged to resettle. The data were elicited from Kayabi speakers, who seem somewhat defensive about appearing to outsiders as having “lost their culture” because they dress in modern clothing and have acquired Portuguese as a second language. However, as they quickly point out to the ethnographer, their tribe of 536 individuals still celebrates traditional festivals, at which some of the narrative performances analyzed in Oakdale’s study occur. The three genres of Oakdale’s recorded texts, which include political oratory, cures, and songs, apparently share the characteristics of travel accounts. For example, political oratory addresses movements in and out of Xingu Park, texts associated with cures describe a shaman’s journey to the land of spirits, and in songs the protagonist finds himself as a warrior in enemy territory. As a device for the presentation of the self, these accounts are interpreted by Oakdale as narrative representations of adult male knowledge. The ideal of male maturity, argues Oakdale, involves the dialogic management of other voices, such as those of ancestors, spirits, and enemies, which emerge through the narrator as a medium. Thus, the self becomes “a figure of the other” and is regarded as the property of relationships rather than a private entity, as in Western cultures. Although Oakdale’s conclusions seem reasonable enough, at least according to her citations of descriptions of other Amazonian groups, it would be difficult for anyone to replicate her study. Probably the greatest deficiency in her presentation is the lack of Native language data. Since many of her interpretations derive from the meanings of Kayabi grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic markers, it is somewhat mystifying why Oakdale relies only on English versions of the texts and chooses not to include the original Kayabi discourses with interlinear translations. Even her Native translators’ explanations [End Page 364] of Kayabi concepts, which she rephrases in English, should have been provided verbatim in Portuguese. Otherwise, it is unclear how another ethno-linguist would be able to add to or amend Oakdale’s findings. Another weakness in the study is Oakdale’s neglect to embed her analysis in the significant literature on life histories. In reviewing her bibliography, one is struck by the omission of such influential works as Charlotte Linde’s Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence (1993). In other words, how does the Kayabi way of structuring autobiographical narratives contribute to our understanding of adult speakers’ universally having life stories that are exchanged with others and that express a culturally acceptable sense of the self? Although the Kayabi stories clearly reconstruct the lives of the narrators as coherent in terms of asserting group membership, Oakdale makes no attempt to connect these narrative preferences to universal processes. For example, it is not clear from...