Fantasy Production Research Articles

Creating Hysteria: Women and the Myth of Multiple Personality Disorder

JOAN ACOCELLA: Creating Hysteria: Women and the Myth of Multiple Personality Disorder. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1999, 214 pp., $25.00, ISBN 0-78794794-6. Joan Acocella's expose of the multiple-personality-disorder diagnosis is almost too convincing. There is no room for half tones or uncertainties: Creating Hysteria is an argument rather than a discussion, and Acocella argues with wit and elegance, leaving the battlefield strewn with casualties. Her main targets are the therapists whose public embrace of the MPD diagnosis during the last twenty years created an almost cultlike following, extensive media attention as well as a plethora of publications. Acocella claims that these practitioners knowingly and cynically used the diagnosis to win riches and fame, in the process sacrificing their patients. She is especially scathing about Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), the spread of which does defy understanding. (One must be a quick study of acronyms to follow this book.) Yet, unethical therapists are not the sole casualties of Acocella's battle. This is war, and she sweeps away all that clutters her path. As most of the women diagnosed with MPD also reported childhood sexual abuse, Acocella questions the reality of these reports as well as the good faith and suffering of the survivors, thus returning full circle to the Freudian assumption that childhood sexual abuse is a product of female fantasy. The child-protection movement, twelve-step self-help groups, feminism, insight therapy, new age theory, and social constructionism are just a few of the other corpses that litter this field. Acocella also has a disconcerting habit of using one set of beliefs, events or institutions as evidence, then discarding the same set when the next stage of her argument requires it. The media, for example, are transformed from hypocritical traders of truth for ratings in its embrace of MPD to champions of justice when they renounce the diagnosis, instead championing FMSF (the False Memory Syndrome Foundation) (pp. 97-98). Managed care, villainous when it supports the MSD diagnosis, becomes heroic when it balks at financing long-term treatment of MPD or indeed any long-time therapy (pp. 113-116). The DSM, as a diagnostic tool, is alternatively dismissed and used as scientific proof for Acocella's claims. Acocella's argument also depends heavily on clusters of associations. If we agree that most reported cases of SRA defy credibility, we must also doubt the credibility of well-documented cases of disassociative identity disorder (DID) (the new name for multiple personality disorder) (p. 57). Autobiographical accounts of cannibalism and baby sacrifice, which abound in the SRA literature, such as Jenny Walter Harris's Suffer the Child, a ghost-written account of a woman with over four hundred alters who was accosted by legions of demons (p. …

Beyond Caligari: the films of Robert Wiene

While the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became an international film classic, its director, Robert Wiene, was disparaged and even forgotten. Wiene's oeuvre, however, exhibits a surprising versatility and quality, featuring Raskolnikov, an expressionist adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, INRI, a monumental Bible epic, Orlac's Hands, a psychological thriller, and Der Rosenkavalier, an ambitious opera film. His last film, Ultimatum(1938), is a vehement warning of approaching war, which remains relevant today. With painstaking research of the major European film archives, the author's detailed portrait reveals a career far more differentiated than hitherto acknowledged. Caligar/i - though rated the second most important film in German film history in a recent critic's and scholar's poll - was a landmark rather than a culmination in a career that successfully oscillated between artistic and commercial interests. As the field of film studies rediscovers film history and the value of historical context for the analysis of individual films, monographs on filmmakers are increasingly valuable to scholars and students of both film history and cultural studies. Through the provocative and prolific career of Robert Wiene, a wider, more dynamic view of fantasy production in the Weimar Republic is revealed, enabling the reader to better appreciate the complex shapes of Weimar cinema, its inimitable blend of modernism and mass culture, of avant-garde enterprie, and generic production.

Organizations, from Concepts to Constructs: Psychoanalytic Theories of Character and the Meaning of Organization

The authors argue that difficulties in defining organizations arise from the fact that organization is not a concept, but a cognitive, emotional and symbolic construct. The way different individuals experience organizations depends on their psychological character, a product of their psychological development. The paper develops a psychoanalytic approach which links individual character with experiences of organizations; it is argued that some individuals experience organizations as groups, others as theatres for heroic exploits, yet others as political arenas for deals and compromises. Essentially, different psychological characters construct organizations to accord with their predominant psychological desires, casting themselves as central characters within wish-fulfilling fantasies of what organizations may be. At the end of the article, it is suggested that even academic traditions of organizations may express different stages of character development. Organizations then are not so much approached through a variety of arbitrary though captivating metaphors or images; instead, these images or metaphors are themselves found to be products of wish-fulfilment and fantasy.

Cooperation, Collaboration and Language: Science and its Transition

Before going to the central theme it is perhaps necessary to say what science is, as opposed to other human knowledge. In a rather short statement science may be defined as a world picture, or it may be closer to the heart of the matter if it is said that science is the product of organized fantasy about the real world. Up to this point it must be hastily added that there are also many other branches in human knowledge that share the same characteristics with science. For example, experiment is thought to be peculiar to science. Actually the alchemists of the middle ages did undertake experiments. What was missing in their experiments -and only later applied by Lavoisier and other giants of science in that period- are the hypothetical-deduction methods that science multiplied. Again, observations and logic were also thought to be peculiar to science. We learned, however, the astrologers did make observations and that theologians had logic and that logic is is perhaps the most methodological component of all human inquiry. Thus, as such, one would not be able to discern science from the rest of human activities. But there are boundaries within which science can legitimately operate. The first one is that science denies two types of truth: truth by logic and truth by faith. On the other hand science accommodates only one truth. The other boundary is the constant test by internal logic of necessity and by external public record. These boundary conditions must always be observed, as otherwise one will fall into the realm of magic.

SIEGFRIED RIDES AGAIN: WESTERNS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE THIRD REICH

The paper investigates the popularity of the Western genre in Germany during the 1930s as an integral part of the machinery of fantasy production that was both Nazi cinema and Nazi politics. While it deploys a critical concept of cinematic genres that relates generic conventions to the dynamics of spectatorial expectations, desires and investments, as well as specific imperatives of the entertainment industry, it traces the status of the cowboy within a (fascist) society that relied heavily on a constant mobilization of cultural resources for the sake of political legitimation. Nazi Westerns, the paper argues, indicate a comprehensive redefinition of the location of culture under the condition of fascism, while they at the same time remind us of the fact that Nazi culture was far less homogeneous and autochthon than its proponents in the past and most historiographers still today would like to suggest. In an analysis of Herbert Selpin's Water for Canitoga, the paper further shows how Nazi Westerns deploy the phallic rhetoric of the traditional Western, its idiom of masculinity and physical immediacy, in order to suggest surprising continuities between the nineteenth-century world of cowboys and the twentieth-century cosmos of engineers: German Westerns of the 1930s invite their spectators to imaginary voyages to the Far West that help revamp ideological formations of the nineteenth century – Wagner's romantic anti-capitalism – for the twentieth century only to avow and disavow simultaneously the technological faces of modernity. As they celebrate technological progress as a triumph of cultural forces, these Nazi Westerns render modern technological means as catalysts to explore the power of elemental forces, the rhythmic timelessness of pre-modern life; Nazi Westerns stage a complex protest against modernity by means of modernity's own tools of technological mediation and representation.

Anachronism and Anomaly

Reviews 75 were, all in all, about forty male servants among Wen's household staff," while the original text reads: "Those servants who worked in Wen's house are all about fortyyears old." However, this is unquestionablya brilliant choice byJoshua Fogel for introducing this writer to English readers, because the novel is a fine example of Chin's unique ability to blend history and fiction as well as to display his style ofdetective fiction. Though Chin Shunshin may not be well known in the English -speaking world, his vast output is widely appreciated not only by Japanese but also by Chinese readers, since a number ofhis works have been translated into Chinese. Hopefully more ofhis writing will appear in English and other languages, so that more people will become acquainted with this gifted Japanese writer. Nanyan Guo University of Otago, New Zealand Anachronism andAnomaly Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri. Deception, a Novel ofMurder and Madness in Tang China. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991. 640 pp. Hardcover $22.00. Paperback $5.99. During the Second World War the eminent Sinologist Robert van Gulik (19101967 ), unable to pursue more scholarly interests due to pressing duties in the Dutch Foreign Service, turned his attention in his leisure moments to translating an anonymous eighteenth-century detective novel—the Wu Zetian si da qian (Four grand and marvelous cases from the era ofEmpress Wu Zetian)—which appeared in 1949 under the tide Dee GoongAn: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee. His intention in publishing this work was to make a genre ofChinese fiction, little studied or translated previously, known to the Western world. After the war he returned to scholarship with a translation ofa thirteenth-century Chinese legal casebook, the Tang-yin pi-shih: Parallel Casesfrom under the Pear-Tree (1956). Apparendy stimulated by these forays into traditional literature and history , he then gave free rein to his imagination during the late fifties and early sixties and wrote some seventeen novels ofhis own based on the exploits ofJudge y nwersity Deg -p^ese DOOk;S were the product offantasy, tempered by a great font oflearning derived from decades ofstudying Chinese culture. Van Gulik created a legendary hero unrecognizable to the readers of Di Renjie's (Judge Dee) biographies in the ofHawaii Press 76 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 1995 dynastic histories. The real Judge Dee was a noted jurist ofthe early Tang (618— 907), but he was not numbered among the half-dozen men who earned reputations in die late seventh and early eighth centuries for their uncanny acumen in unraveling baffling mysteries, the primary qualification for a hero ofdetective fiction in both the East and die West. Whatever the case, Van Gulik succeeded, not only in creating a Chinese hero for a Western audience, but also in accomplishing the all but impossible task ofmaking an imperial official living and working in ancient times into an intelligible figure for a modern English audience whose values, knowledge, and experience were as different from those of traditional China as could be imagined. The popularity ofhis novels is certainly the best measure ofhis success. They have been printed and reprinted periodically for nearly four decades, and at least one ofthem was made into a movie. Deception is an attempt to remake the Judge Dee legend. In die words of the authors, Van Gulik "placed this man in a time resembling the China ofa much later dynasty" (p. 634). So they set out to write a novel that, although fictional, is an "extrapolation from the truth, much ofthat truth far stranger than any fiction we might have dreamed up" (p. 633). What "extrapolation" means here is far from clear, but the authors evidendy intended to write a novel that placed Judge Dee in his own times and to formulate a narrative that, in some fashion, was true. The blurb on the cover gives Daniel Altieri's qualifications for undertaking diis task, describing him as an Orientalist. He appears to have received enough instruction in Chinese to attempt a translation of a manifesto in classical Chinese which Di Renjie had submitted to die throne. In addition, die Center for Asian Studies at Western Washington...

Bodytalk: when women speak in Old French literature

Contemporary feminist readers have argued that old French literary representations of women--from the excessively beautiful lady of courtly romance to the lascivious shrew of fabliau and farce--are the products of misogynous male imagination and fantasy. In Bodytalk, E. Jane Burns contends that female protagonists in medieval texts authored by men can be heard to talk back against the stereotyped and codified roles that their fictive anatomy is designed to convey. She investigates key moments in which the words of these medieval dissent from and significantly restructure the conceptions of female sexuality, wifely obedience, courtly love, and adultery that are so often used to define and delimit femininity in the French Middle Ages. Burns provides the feminist reader of medieval literature with a strategy for reinterpreting the female body in its stereotyped, fetishized, and fantasized for. Arguing that the gendered body mattters in our reading of female protagonists, she shows how women characters can rewrite, through their attributed speech, the narratives that define and contain them. Bodytalk is an incisive, polemical, sophisticated, and often witty book about the gender issues that are raised by the very presence of female characters in male-authored texts. It brings recent feminist theory to bear upon the discussion of medieval texts, and contributes significantly to current feminist criticism by offering historically specific accounts of some of the founding moments of western conceptions of love, desire, and sexuality. A volume in the New Cultural Studies series.

A norm-referenced longitudinal study of medical student drinking patterns

The alcohol consumption patterns of a single class of 121 medical students was assessed at six points over the course of 4 years of medical school training, along with other measures of drinking-related impairment, family history of alcoholism, personality, and psychosocial functioning. Research Diagnostic Criteria were applied to make diagnoses of alcoholism. Eleven percent of the class reported drinking at a level considered "heavy" by class social norms, most transiently. Eighteen percent of the class met criteria for alcohol abuse by virtue of drinking-related impairment during medical school; they were likely to evidence a prior history of alcohol abuse and a family history of alcoholism. Half the excessive drinkers abused alcohol, but two-thirds of the abusers were not excessive drinkers. Alcohol abusers describe themselves as less warm, kind, gentle, and emotionally expressive than their classmates, and were more preoccupied with themes of power in spontaneous fantasy productions. These findings suggest that interpersonal strategies to intervene with alcohol abusing medical students may encounter predictable resistances, and suggest another intervention approach better suited to their psychological concerns.

A Review of Influences on Sexual Fantasy: Attitudes, Experience, Guilt, and Gender

The important role of sexual fantasy in human sexuality has received wide support in the past decade and a half. The initial interest in establishing fantasy's normality has shifted to examining the functional aspects of fantasy and the variables that influence it. The following article reviews variables that affect sexual fantasies including the role of an individual's personality/sexual attitude, sexual experience, sex guilt, and gender. Also, a hypothesized link between parental sexual attitudes and their children's fantasy production is explored. A variety of methods have been implemented to investigate fantasy and a number of these methods are critiqued and some possible methodological improvements are suggested. Finally, the similarity of findings across studies and methods seem to warrant expanding fantasy investigation to other areas and some future directions are suggested.

Sex fantasies revisited: an expansion and further clarification of variables affecting sex fantasy production.

Findings of prior research which indicated both external factors (experimental response cues) and internal factors (sex guilt) influencing subjects' writing of their sexual fantasies were expanded. University males (N = 88) and females (N = 122) were studied. They read sex fantasy examples varying in conventionality of the sexual activity and the relationship context before reporting their own fantasies. Sex guilt level of all subjects was measured as well as their subjective responses to writing the fantasies. The data were analyzed to determine whether varying response cues along certain dimensions could influence subjects to write parallel fantasies. Sex guilt levels and sex of the subject were the best predictors of the length, explicitness, and variety of content of subjects' reported fantasies. Males wrote longer, more explicit and varied fantasies but were affected similarly by sex guilt levels as females. High sex guilt subjects in general produced more restricted content and shorter fantasies. They also experienced more embarrassment and less arousal. Females were more likely to have high levels of guilt about sex than males. The varying dimensions of the fantasy examples had little effect on the types of fantasy material revealed and therefore the erotic/explicit aspect of the examples found in the prior research seems to be the factor that produces effects on fantasy production. Comparing the two studies, females may respond with longer, more explicit fantasies when given erotic but more traditional sexual examples.

Sexual Fantasy and Attitudes as Functions of Sex of Subject and Content of Erotica

The effects of erotic content and subject sex on sexual fantasy were mediated by general sexual attitudes. When erotic content consisted of mild erotica showing males rather than females, male subjects ( N=123) expressed significantly more negative themes in briefer fantasy productions than females ( N=123). Analyses of affective and arousal responses to single-sex and heterosexual erotica indicated patterns generally consistent with the fantasy outcomes. Negative sexual attitudes were associated with negatively-toned fantasies, more negative affect, and less sexual arousal. Variations in affective and arousal responses to erotic stimuli, as discussed by the theory of the Sexual Behavior Sequence, were demonstrated to extend to the production of sexual fantasy.

Relation between Activation Level and Production of Fantasy

40 college students rated themselves at intervals on scales measuring anxiety, alertness, relaxation, and sleepiness. Subjects imagined a fantasy animal and then rated the animal's mood and activity level. Subjects' activation level tended to influence fantasy in a congruent direction. However, the amount of influence on fantasy production was not very great. To a remarkable extent, fantasies seemed to have a life of their own.

Group treatment of single males with erectile dysfunction.

Nine men with chronic erectile dysfunction (three primary, six secondary) who had no regular sexual partner were treated in two 12-session all-male psychoeducational therapy groups. Treatment intervention addressed specific factors which inhibited adequate sexual function with a focus on coping skills to overcome those factors. Pre, post, and follow-up behavioral self-report data and responses on a goal attainment scale questionnaire indicated that the treatment groups were successful for five men with secondary and one man with primary erectile dysfunction. Subjective report and pre- and posttreatment fantasy productions to TAT cards for the first group indicated that all men significantly improved their attitudes about sexuality and their sexual self-concept. The results suggest that this is a viable, cost-effective treatment for secondary erectile dysfunction, but not for primary erectile dysfunction unless supplementary individual therapy is provided.

Sex Differences and Androgyny in Fantasy Content

Fantasy stories were composed by 153 undergraduates (93 females, 60 males) who also responded to the Bem Sex Role Inventory. The fantasy stories were collected by group administration of a Thematic Apperception Test. The stories were content analyzed along 17 imagery categories. Males and females differed significantly in ten of these categories. The results indicate a substantial continuity of sex differences in fantasy content between earlier decades and the mid 1970s. However, women had relatively more imagery of a self-assertive, pleasurable, and careerist nature than had been found in earlier studies. The fantasies of sex-typed persons were more situation-bound and more sexual than those of androgynous persons. Sex-typed persons appear to experience limitations in fantasy production which parallel their limitations in overt behavior.

The assessment of a relationship disposition, "fantasy withdrawal," from Rorschach face sheet data.

This study investigated the predictive relationship of Rorschach face sheet variables, selected on the basis of psychoanalytic considerations of the patient-examiner relationship, to a dimension of clinical-theoretical relevance in the evaluation of treatment outcome, "fantasy withdrawal." The first step in the present study involved rank ordering and grouping of 19 nosological subgroups along the dimension of fantasy withdrawal. This ranking and grouping served as the criterion against which several quantified aspects of fantasy production on the Rorschach were assessed. The score categories were selected on an a priori basis as most likely to predict the ordering of the patient groups along the dimension of fantasy withdrawal. A formula for such prediction was developed, applied to the original groups, and then reapplied to a patient group in the present hospital setting.

Gender-specific variances in sexual fantasy.

Six sexual fantasy categories were derived by inductive content analysis, based upon the starting criterion that fantasy is a dynamic and interactional event. Detailed narrative descriptions of sexual fantasy in three conditions, including 'Daydream,' 'masturbatory,' and "During Sex Relations' were obtained from 48 male and 45 female volunteer graduate students. Detailed narrative descriptions of sexual fantasies were collected by administration of sexual fantasy questionnaires. While the intention was to empirically derive sexual fantasy categories which could be used for personality assessment of gender identity, the hypothesis predicted gender-specific variances in fantasy productions according to derived fantasy categories. Results indicated that significantly more females than males fantasized themselves as recipients of sexual activity from fantasized sexual objects, while males fantasized the sexual object as recipients of sexual activity. Marginal tendencies toward reversal of this gender pattern occurred in the 'Mastubatory' condition for males, and in the 'Daydream' sexual fantasy condition for females.

Imaginative skill, wording of suggestions and hypnotic susceptibility.

Abstract 3 groups of 20 Ss based on preselected imaginative capacity were administered either a hypnotic susceptibility scale containing item wording that suggested a goal-directed fantasy or one that did not. Preselected imaginative ability did not predict hypnotic susceptibility or the production of goal-directed fantasies during hypnosis. However, Ss who received the hypnotic scale containing item wording that suggested goal-directed fantasies reported more goal-direded fantasies than Ss who received the other scale. Limitations of the study are discussed and the causal role of goal-directed fantasy in hypnotic responsiveness is questioned.

Relations of Divergent Thinking and Intelligence Test Scores with Social and Nonsocial Make-Believe Play of Preschool Children

Test estimates of intelligence and divergent thinking are compared with observations of social and nonsocial make-believe play in a sample of 63 socially and economically disadvantaged preschool children. Controlling for the effects of age, indices of cognitive ability correlated positively and significantly with social make-believe play but not with solitary make-believe play. Uses Task performance scored for fanciful uses, but not for common uses, related to social fantasy play. Results suggest that social interaction is an important component in the relationship of fantasy play to cognitive development. A component of divergent thinking related to metaphorical or fantasy production appears to be a useful predictor of the propensity for sociodramatic play.

A Note on Internalization as Process

To the view of internalization as fantasy, there is counterposed the view of internalization as process. The philosophical roots and basic argument of the "fantasy" view are evaluated, particularly in reference to the position of metaphorical terms in psychoanalytic theory. Especially confusing is the literal interpretation of metaphors of spatialization distinguishing the inner dimensions of psychic experience from external referents. The persistent theoretical need is to translate metaphorical usage into meaningful and consistent theoretical terms. The organization of introjects cannot be reduced to memory elements, object representations, or fantasy products. Internalization as process refers to a series of real psychological events whose specific delineation and description has not been accomplished.

RELATIONS OF DIVERGENT THINKING AND INTELLIGENCE TEST SCORES WITH SOCIAL AND NONSOCIAL MAKE‐BELIEVE PLAY OF PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

ABSTRACTTest estimates of intelligence and divergent thinking are compared with observations of social and nonsocial make‐believe play in a sample of 63 socially and economically disadvantaged preschool children. Controlling for the effects of age, indices of cognitive ability correlated positively and significantly with social make‐believe play but not with solitary make‐believe play. Uses Task performance scored for fanciful uses, but not for common uses, related to social fantasy play. Results suggest that social interaction is an important component in the relationship of fantasy play to cognitive development. A component of divergent thinking related to metaphorical or fantasy production appears to be a useful predictor of the propensity for sociodramatic play.