Freudian Approach Research Articles

The American Independent Tradition: Loewald, Erikson, and the (Possible) Rise of Intersubjective Ego Psychology

This paper has both theoretical and historico-cultural dimensions. Theoretically, it describes the origins of an “American Independent Tradition,” intersubjective ego psychology, in the work of Loewald and Erikson. Just as the British Independent or Middle Group thinkers incorporated elements of both the Anna Freudian and Kleinian approaches, so the work of Loewald and Erikson incorporated and synthesized elements from the two dominant and antagonistic schools—Hartmannian ego psychology and Sullivanian interpersonal psychoanalysis—that constituted classical American psychoanalysis. Intersubjective ego psychology, exemplified in the work of these two founding thinkers and others who follow them, remains firmly committed to ego psychological understandings and technique while also theorizing, without thereby coming to identify as either interpersonal or relational the centrality and pervasive impact of the object-relational, developmental, and analytic transference—countertransference fields. As a historicocultural study, the paper explores what makes American psychoanalysis American, though it also suggests that defining, other than descriptively, what is characteristically American is itself problematic and can be done only with self-conscious irony. It also provides a historical overview of psychoanalytic controversies in the United States, and it considers schematically the relations between “American” and “European” psychoanalysis.

Interpreting Propaganda: Successors to Warburg and Freud in Wartime

First I want to thank Peter Rudnytsky, Jack Spector, and Gilbert Rose for making the book into an opportunity for dialogue. It is welcome to respond to the commentators. In concluding his discussion of the followers of Warburg and Freud, Jack Spector succinctly and cogently evaluates the ability of the classical tradition to comprehend contemporary political and cultural upheavals. As his essay explains, the possible limitations on that ability can be found not only in modernist critiques of classicist perspectives but also in the fascist abuse of classicism in the twentieth century. Analysis of Nazi propaganda, mentioned in the book and in Spector's essay, became one intellectual and political endeavor by classically trained scholars to expose and confront that abuse, an endeavor that entered into their scholarship and the war effort. My remarks here will further address how propaganda analysis directed itself against the deceptive and dangerous classical façade of fascism. During the Second World War, émigré scholars from several disciplines-including art history, psychoanalysis, and film studies-began to interpret propaganda. Without the archival records, laboratory conditions, or focus groups available to scholars today, they in part adapted interpretive tools and concepts from their classical training. In my current research, I have begun to explore how they reapplied tools and concepts originally directed to the ancient world. 1 Here I will consider how Ernst Kris employed the dramaturgic perspective within classicism to analyze propagandistic techniques and aims, and how his studies of propaganda shared elements with those of two cultural scientists from the Frankfurt School, who also worked in applied psychoanalysis, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno. As an art historian, Ernst Kris showed the influence not only of Sigmund Freud but also of Aby Warburg. Fritz Saxl—Warburg's successor as director of the Warburg Library—described Warburg's principle of art historical interpretation as follows: "that images with a meaning peculiar to their own [End Page 122] time and place, once created, have a magnetic power to attract other ideas into their sphere; that they can suddenly be forgotten and remembered again after centuries of oblivion" (1957, 2). Warburg concentrated on how Renaissance paintings revived visual fragments of ancient Dionysian passion, violence, and suffering—fragments that had belonged to pagan rituals of self-abandonment or to ancient experiences of loss of selfhood. Not only images but magic and astrology as well possessed an afterlife. For Warburg, at their moments of highest accomplishment and understanding, the Renaissance artist and audience incorporated mentally the primal experience of images without losing their own autonomous sense of self or identity. Warburg's conception reflected in part a dramaturgic view of the world, one born within the classical amphitheater, where both actor and spectator sought to balance their psychological, and nearly magical, identification with the dramatic action on stage against their own self-awareness and attachment to the non-stage world. The distance between the audience and performance circle protected that uneasy, even painful, psychological balance, a tragic model that gradually replaced that of Dionysian ritual. Both actor and spectator reproduced that physical distance inwardly, preserving mentally what Warburg described as Denkraum—a space for reflection, a distance from which to control instinctive reactions and emotive identifications. Before the Second World War, Kris combined Warburgian and Freudian approaches both in his career and in his studies of art. During the prewar period he served as curator of applied art at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, as a training analyst in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and on Sigmund Freud's recommendation, as an editor of Imago: Journal for the Application of Psychoanalysis to the Cultural Sciences. In the 1930s, before the Austrian Anschluss with Germany, he secured positions for his museum assistants, Otto Kurz and Ernst Gombrich, with Saxl at the Warburg Library in London, allowing Kurz and Gombrich to escape Austria's anti-Semitism and authoritarian regime. Kris wrote his studies of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt'...

Flechsig and Freud: late 19th-century neurology and the emergence of psychoanalysis.

The author analyzes the potential influences of Paul Flechsig's work on early Freudian theory, particularly on Sigmund Freud's 1966b/1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. Gehirn und Seele, a discourse authored by Flechsig in 1894, is the focus of this analysis. The author believes that the links between the intellectual production of both German-speaking neurologists have been underrated to this day and attempts to establish that the early Freudian approach to many key issues in the history of psychoanalysis--dreams, unconscious processing, and drives, to name a few--was not unique but shared with some distinguished colleagues in neuropathology and psychiatry. Thus, he attempts to shed additional light on the transition from state-of-art neurology in the last decade of the 19th century to the creation of psychoanalysis as a discipline on its own.

Repression, Inversion and Modernity: A Freudian Reading of Henry Blake Fuller'sBertram Cope's Year

in the post-Interpretation of Dreams era, for example, would seem to be the development of the stream of consciousness as a narrative technique. It is also true that familiarization with Freudian concepts and ideas allowed critics to reinterpret literary texts in new ways, finding symbols and sublimated expressions of consciousness in the fiction of writers of the modern era and of those who came before them. The rediscovery and rereading of such nineteenth-century novelists as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, enriched by Freudian approaches and interpretations, amply demonstrates this. Yet at least one aspect of Freudian influence has been somewhat overlooked: the freer expression of sexuality in their texts more specifically, homosexuality following Freud's analysis of the so-called alternative sexualities. A prime example is the work of Henry Blake Fuller, a very traditionally minded product of the American genteel school, who found himself living through changes in thought and the understanding of the psyche that created the modern world.

Charles Ives and “Our National Malady”

Abstract In his psychoanalytical biography of Ives, Charles Ives: “My Father's Song,” Stuart Feder convincingly argued that Ives's health breakdowns in 1906 and 1918 were the result of emotional and psychological factors rather than a physical heart condition. But the Freudian approach and terminology employed by Feder were unknown in American in 1906 and had not been fully accepted even by 1918. Therefore, how would an American doctor in 1906 have diagnosed Ives's “condition”? A careful examination of key events in Ives's life between 1902 and 1908, and a close reading of his correspondence indicate that he may have been recognized as neurasthenic. Ives's neurasthenia locates his identity by nationality, ethnicity, gender, economic and social class, education, profession, environment, and lifestyle. As a result, his artistic values and character traits emerge as remarkably typical of his country, culture, and time.

Jack Kerouac's Duluoz legend: the mythic form of an autobiographical fiction

In the only critical examination of all of Jack Kerouac's published prose, James T. Jones turns to Freud to show how the great Beat writer used the Oedipus myth to shape not only his individual works but also the entire body of his writing.Like Balzac, Jones explains, Kerouac conceived an overall plan for his total writing corpus, which he called the Duluoz Legend after Jack his fictional alter ego. While Kerouac's work attracts biographical treatmentthe ninth full-length biography was published in 1998Jones takes a Freudian approach to focus on the form of the work. Noting that even casual readers recognize family relationships as the basis for Kerouac's autobiographical prose, Jones discusses these relationships in terms of Freud's notion of the Oedipus complex.After establishing the basic biographical facts and explaining Freud's application of the Oedipus myth, Jones explicates Kerouac's novels of childhood and adolescence, focusing on sibling rivalry. Supporting his contention that the Beat writer worked according to a plan, Jones then shows how Kerouac revised Town and the City (1950), his first published novel, in Vanity of Duluoz, the last novel published in his lifetime, to de-emphasize the death of the father. He treats three versions of Kerouac's road novelincluding On the Roadas versions of Oedipus's fateful journey from Corinth to Thebes. And he argues that Pic, often considered peripheral to the Duluoz Legend, replicates the Oedipal themes.Jones demonstrates that Maggie Cassidy, Subterraneans, and Tristessa share a form that results from Kerouac's unresolved rivalry with his father for the love of his mother. He discusses Kerouac's replacement of the destructive brother figures in On the Road and Visions of Cody with the constructive hero of Dharma Bums. He also shows how the Oedipal structure of the Duluoz Legend applies to Kerouac's nonfiction.In the penultimate chapter, Jones explains how Big Sur, Kerouac's story of his alcohol-induced nervous breakdown, actually marks the climax of the Duluoz Legend. The alcoholism, Jones insists, is not the cause but a symptom of a breakdown brought on by his attachment to his mother. He shows how Kerouac's obsession with his family repeats Oedipal themes throughout the Duluoz Legend. Finally, he deals with Oedipal themes in Kerouac's nonnarrative work, including Old Angel Midnight, Some of the Dharma, Scripture of the Golden Eternity, and several poems.

Citation and Subjectivity: Towards a Return of the Embodied Will

Freudian and phenomenological approaches to subjectivity allow the existence of a residual core self. Recent work within cultural analysis and sociology has rejected such a residue. The writings of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu are two cases in point. In the former case, this refusal functions to provide the possibility of reconstructable gendered identities. For Bourdieu, it confirms the primacy of the social. In both cases, the refusal is part of a case made against psychological essentialism. However, the campaign against essentialism may not be served by the rejection of all aspects of the autonomous embodied self. As a test of the implications of this self-denial, an examination is made of the shift in transsexual discourse from the early culture of dissimulation to current trends of openness and the transcendence of dichotomous models of gender. It is shown that the model of citation found in the work of Judith Butler works poorly in the early stage, but works well in the later culture if stripped of its contingent association with dissimulation. The culture of open citation is shown to be dependent upon external certitudes which duplicate, in potentially stronger terms, the very essentialism which the rejection of residual selfhood was first meant to defeat.

Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of Trauma

Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of Trauma Angelika Rauch (bio) 1 Classical Analysis: Problems for Trauma Therapy According to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, American ego psychology has taken a leading role in debunking what it considers antiquated Freudian approaches to the study of trauma. As neutral observers and students of the facts, ego psychologists have purportedly reclaimed the study of trauma as the search for an objectifiable traumatic event in the past, one that can be accessed as recovered memory, as a specimen of pathogenic development, or as cognitive and behavioral effects that point to an inaccessible implied memory buried in the psyche. Central to this revision of psychoanalytical trauma therapy is the dismissal of Nachträglichkeit as an antiquated and irrelevant concept. Harold P. Blum, for instance, writes in a recent article of JAPA that “‘deferred action’ is an ambiguous concept, a dubious, antiquated, theoretical legacy.” According to Blum, “deferred action overlooks the immediate and potentially powerful effects of preoedipal trauma and is dissociated from considerations of cumulative trauma and developmental disturbance.” [1155]. With respect to Freud’s case of the Wolf-Man, Blum states that “[d]eferred action emphasized traumatic events and memory rather than cumulative developmental effects of shock and strain trauma, and pathogenic object relationships.” Key to Blum’s view, then, is the assertion that “the concept of deferred action deterred consideration of real infantile experience and the complex overdetermination of pathogenesis through development” [1156]. Blum apparently takes the side of those who like to argue that trauma is more real than imagined. Whereas oedipal trauma is an imaginary or illusory trauma, preoedipal trauma is comprehensible as real shock and, as such, is empirically true. This is an idea that is very compatible with “recovered memory” therapy, a subject that has become controversial in recent debates about child abuse and recovered memory syndrome. In contrast, Arnold H. Modell in Other Times, Other Realities points out that “[t]he concept of Nachträglichkeit is virtually unknown among American psychoanalysts. This may be due in part to Strachey’s faulty translation; but this idea is also inconsistent with the belief in an orderly hierarchical psychic development such as that envisioned by ego psychologists.” [3]. In other words, Freudian Nachträglichkeit violates the principles of space and time assumed by empirical scientists whose conceptions are founded on the causality of such principles as stimulus/response. It is here, of course, that ego psychology’s treatment of trauma would come into conflict not only with Freudian analysis, including its French Freudian variants, but with the kind of trauma studies being conducted by the contributors to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory. They include Bessel [End Page 111] van der Kolk, Onno van der Hart, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Robert Lifton, and, of course, Cathy Caruth herself. Emphasis on the reality of traumatic shock (as abuse, stress, accident, and so on), however important it may be, loses sight of a hermeneutical dimension of psychoanalytic therapy that Caruth and her contributors emphasize: the question of how meanings are associated or bound to the understanding of life’s events. My own clinical approach to psychoanalysis favors the introduction of an even stronger hermeneutical perspective that is sensitive to the kinds of issues raised by philosophers like Dilthey, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Gadamer, for whom the question of experience is not reducible to restricted understandings of stimulus/response, nor—as in the case of Caruth (for example, in Unclaimed Experience)—to the privileging of language as a formal (that is, literary) construct. Rather, I am interested in emphasizing a hermeneutics of the therapeutic encounter within which questions of language, culture, history, and behavior are situated. With respect to trauma therapy, I will introduce a number of well-known analytical contributions even as I take the following statement of Arnold Modell’s as my point of departure: The analyst or therapist becomes an unwitting collaborator in the recreation of the past, while still retaining a proximity to present time. The therapist becomes the person with whom one can reexperience trauma within a new context or experience for the first time what has been absent in the past. Affects belonging to...

Living in the Past: Savage Nights, Bisexual Times

This paper argues that one cannot see bisexuality as present at all times and in all civilisations (as in the Freudian approach popularised in Marjorie Garber's recent book Vice Versa), but must see it as a socially specific conception of desire, composed of particular understandings of gender, sexuality, and selfhood. One such element of a contemporary bisexual identity is ‘fluidity’, a capacity to change one's sense of self over time, which plays an important part in contemporary bisexual discourse. In particular, the author looks at how such bisexual narratives use modernity's language of a relentless progress through time towards absolute self-realisation. The author then considers Cyril Collard's film Savage Nights as an example of this concern with the attainment of a stable identity, in order to show how a bisexual notion of fluidity may not be as radical as many contemporary bisexual writers hope.

Grimms' Fairy Tales: A History of Criticism on a Popular Classic (review)

364 Book Revkws "prudent" abridgment of tie Conversations (Fiükr αÎμίÎμίÎμα references to Goetiie 's scientific expertoÂœnts), shÎμ sÎμÎμms to takÎμ her advocacy a Uttlc too far. Several of the articles in the coUection are quite informative—tadudtag Joan von Mehren's biographical sketch, Urbanski's study of FuUer's rhetoric, and Judith Strong Albert's discussion of FuUer's impact on me feminist movement. A weakness of the book, howev8r, is that it lacks an introduction. The book begins widi a personal letter (May 18, 1980) to the editor (Urbanski) from R. Buckmtoster FuUer, who at mat time was Margaret's oldest Uvtog relative. The kner canvasses a number of topics, including his theories of education, Margaret FuUcr scholarship, and the synerçetic operations of the ιιηίνÎμΓβÎμ. Stoce the letter does not address any of the essays to the volume, one may be left confused about die book's purpose. Although the contributors write short, highly personal accounts of how Margaret FuUer tofhenced thek lives or scholarship, the book would have benefited from a discussion of its intended place to FuUer scholarship or from an explanation for the choice of die particular sckctions to this volume. University of Minois at Chicago Astrida Orle Tantillo James M. McGlathery, Grimms' Fairy Tales: A History of Criticism on a Popular Classic. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1993Given the Ï• ητηÎμηβÎμ amount of important, ^w, and often contradictory scholarship published on the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen during the last twenty-frve years, James McGlathery's comprehensive study of the most significant critical works about this "popular classic" can sene both scholar and student as a handy gukk to the different approaches to the tales. Moreover, McGlathery deals not only with tie more recent criticism but also discusses die historical origins of folktale scholarship to the nineteenth century and covers relevant research to four different languages. McGlathery himself has written extensrrely on the Grimms' taks and favors a psychoanalytic and Uterary approach to the tales that explores thek immanent nreantogs to thematic dusters. Î¥ÎμΕ , ΙιÎμ is, for ΟίÎμ most part, judicious in his summaries of interpretative methods that differ from his own. As he states, his aim was to "tadude sufficient breadth and depth to give a good accounting and rep- Κ5ÎμηΕ 3ίίνÎμ picture of the various types of scholarship and commentary and an outline of thek development.... The purpose of an account such as this mUitates against fiükr exposition of given critical positions, instead, the aim has ΰÎμÎμη to fit ΟίÎμ work of particular individuals into the context of the whole without misrepresenting them" (3). To accomplish his task, McGlathery divides his book into ΰιτÎμÎμ parts: 1) The Folktales; 2) The Grimms' Collection; 3) individual Stories and Motifs. In the first section, McGlathery begins with a historical survey of the development of folktale scholarship. After briefly discussing the work of the Grimms themselves and Theodor Benfey, he explains how scholars sought to explain the origins of folk taks through notions of monogc^sis and polygenesis. By the bÎμgtontog of the twentieth century, however, the shift to folktak studies was influenced by the Finnish or historical-geographical school led by Antti Aarne and carried on by Stith Thompson in America. As McGlathery explatas, this school of thought in- Goethe Yearbook 365 ίÎμ^Îμα to "show which tale types were native to, or predominated to, a given area, so that a particular story might be claimed as belonging Îμβϕ Îμα3% to a particular national culture.... Or, to a comparative way, differences to versions between geographical areas could be βÎμÎμη as helping to αÎμίΕ ηÎμ cultural differences betwÎμÎμn nations" (9). This approach led to the valuable index, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (1911) and Thompson's Narrative Motif-Analysis (1955). McGlathery succinctly sums up the Finnish School's accomplishments and alludes to oder important encyclopedic work such as Handwörterbuch des deutschen Märchens (1930-40) and die ongoing Enzyklopädie des Märchens (begun to 1975). Then he turns to otiier important scholars and tiiek distinctive approaches to the Grimms' tales and folktales in general. After a brief discussion of the rise of the Freudian approach, he comments on the work of German Uterary scholars who were interested to questions of genre, including Friedrich Panzer, Albert...

Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of Self

Kramer vs Kramer. Kramer, the psychotherapist, vs Kramer, the psychopharmacologist. Kramer, the ethicist, vs Kramer, the pragmatist. Kramer, the eclectic psychiatrist, is in conflict and transition, representative of that which envelops the theory and practice of psychiatry. They are elucidated in this thoughtful and refreshingly provocative book, which bridges Freudian, behavioral, social, neuroanatomic, and pharmacologic approaches to an understanding of brain function. Kramer, the provocateur, challenges the diagnostic presumptions, psychoanalytic concepts, and cultural ramifications in patients with a wide variety of personality traits significantly altered by the serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine hydrochloride—Prozac. Kramer, the introspective clinician, covers such common problems as depression, compulsion, rejection sensitivity, stress, kindling, risk, self-esteem, inhibition, pleasure, and anhedonia. He traces the effects of Prozac on these conditions, noting the remarkable changes wrought, changes that were previously thought to occur only with extensive psychotherapy. The transformative powers of the medication on the sense of self clearly

Ending is for Life

It is easy enough to talk about a therapy having ended. After all, it had a beginning, so why should it not come to an end? The author suggests this is true only in the concrete sense. No matter whether the therapeutic outcome is felt to have been successful or a failure, it can be argued that once psychotherapy has been set in motion, the process is genuinely `without end'. An exception of a kind is to be found where the relationship is transformed from therapy to friendship; but is not true friendship also an opportunity for continuing personal development? Freudian, Jungian and Group-analytic approaches are compared. The whole question of beginnings and endings is concluded with reference to the recurring nature of the individual lifecycle, which in this author's view is indispensable to a meaningful account of the evolutionary universe.

Review of The legacy of Erich Fromm.

Nearly 30 years ago I read Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving for a required undergraduate course in philosophical psychology. Quickly, I became enamoured of Fromm as writer and thinker. In subsequent years I read Fromm's Man for Himself (1947), Marx's Concept of Man (1961), and The Sane Society (1955), finding his unique blend of ethical, Freudian, and Marxian approaches illuminating. Yet I could not help but wonder how come mainstream North American psychology, and community psychology in particular, ignored Fromm's understanding of the dialectical relation between social historical forces and the individual, as in the concept of social character. Then along came Daniel Burston's inspired book. In his effort to breathe new life into Fromm's legacy, Burston employs a critical, developmental perspective, clearly showing both the continuities and the anomalies in Fromm's texts, research, and clinical practice. Writing in a highly readable, lucid style, accented with metaphorical expressions, Burston initially provides some biographical context, discusses Fromm's ambivalent involvement with the Freudian movement, and analyzes Fromm's many original contributions and relation to psychoanalysis, critical theory, existential and humanistic psychology, and social psychology. Both an intellectual historian and a clinician by training, the depth, breadth, and sensitivity of Burston's scholarship are impressive. He adroitly guides the reader along potentially confusing, intersecting paths of knowledge in Fromm's work derived from Judaic and Christian thought, variants of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and developments in Marxian critiques. Throughout Burston's treatment of Fromm, he maintains a balanced yet affectionate perspective, elucidating not only Fromm's strengths but also his contradictions and weaknesses.Readers who are fascinated by the evolution of psychoanalytic thought and by the melodramatic characteristics of the principal actors and supporting players in the psychoanalytic movement will be intrigued by Fromm's roles. Besides exploring Fromm's struggle with Freud piety and dealing with the obvious relationships between Fromm and Frieda Fromm - Reichmann, Karen Hornei, Sandor Ferenczi, and Wilhelm Reich, Burston shows the connections between Fromm's earlier theoretical formulations and subsequent developments in object relations theory, such as the parallels between Fromm and W.R.D. Fairbairn. Regrettably, Burston does not spend much time considering Fromm's actual clinical work in terms of its goals, format, and methods. More coverage of the implications for practice of Fromm's explicitly ethical stance with analysands and his preference for a more classically Freudian approach to analysis would be informative. In fact, Burston devotes far more attention later to the well - known Asch and Milgram experiments in order to demonstrate, in part, that Fromm also had something to say about conformity and obedience to irrational authority. I found this section overdrawn, but readers especially interested in the history of orthodox social psychology might have a different impression. For me, the most appealing aspects of Fromm's oeuvre pertain to his theoretical and empirical explorations of social character, which Michael Maccoby (1976) in The Gamesman updated and refined to account for the more recent stage of monopoly capitalism. Fromm identified the relation between personality development and socio - economic structures and dynamics in free market cultures. Moreover, in his studies of social character Fromm did not adopt an ecological position of person - environment fit, which originates in sociological relativism with respect to ethical values, and which posits adaptation to the environment. …

Freud's Resistance to Reading and Teaching

This special double issue of College English in some ways illustrates what its essays are about, possibly the resistance, as Freud said about analysis, against the uncovering of resistances (Analysis 239). This first issue begins where a Freudian approach to pedagogy necessarily starts, with the Freudian concept of resistance-four essays, by Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl, Patrick McGee, and Robert Brooke, dealing with blockages theoretical and practical to reading and to teaching. The second issue, with essays by Gregory Ulmer, Gregory Jay, and Ronald Schleifer, moves beyond to explore Freud's concept of the as it bears on the role of the teacher (the subject who is supposed to know), the student, learning, teaching, reading, and so on. The essays of both issues argue that the to reading and teaching is also the force that makes them possibleparticularly that reading and teaching must in an important sense fail before they succeed. This claim arises in relation to Freud's discussion of the to therapy and Paul de Man's resistance to and from specific comparisons of the classroom and the therapy session. The course of these essays will move from (1) a consideration of and its place in a Freudian approach to pedagogy, (2) to a theory of the subject for a Freudian account of student/teacher interaction, and (3) to a theory of Freudian discourse as a communication model. All of these essays, but especially those in the second issue, then move toward another consideration-the ideological critique of what teachers teach and how they teach it. These special issues of College English also illustrate the they are talking about in that a few contributors bowed out early-schedules busier than

Toward the Study of the Psychodynamics of Mothering and Gender in Egyptian Families

Feminist interest in the social origins and the emotional/psychological development of gender roles has led to a new theoretical debate on thecritical importanceof mothering. The feminist contribution in this area lies in the formulation of a successful theoretical synthesis of Marxist and psychoanalytic insights to explain the development of gendered roles and personalities in contemporary capitalist society. In contrast to conventional Freudian approaches, which posit the universality of the psychological/emotional processes by which the self is developed, the feminist critics emphasize the historically (and socially) specific nature of the family, mothering patterns, and the way such patterns influence the development of gendered personalities in the West.

Olivier, Hamlet, and Freud

That Laurence Olivier was influenced by Freud in his 1947 film of Hamlet is well known.' It is hard to miss the suggestion of Oedipal malaise in the erotic scenes between Olivier and Eileen Herlie as Gertrude, the phallic symbolism of rapier and dagger as Olivier presents them, and other indications of a robust and enthusiastic interest in psychoanalysis. It is more difficult to specify exactly how the film uses psychological ideas, and to say what it achieves by doing so. The present essay attempts a reassessment of the psychological dimension of the film, making use of several new or overlooked resources. Olivier's autobiography, Confessions of an Actor,2 provides a helpful account of the director's consultation with Ernest Jones regarding Hamlet. Freud himself had written briefly on Hamlet,3 and Jones, a prominent British psychoanalyst, had expanded Freud's suggestions into a full-scale interpretation of the play in an article first published in 1910 that was to undergo several revisions and republications, finally appearing in 1949 as Hamlet and Oedipus.4 Olivier's remarks indicate how the director understood the Freudian approach to Hamlet and establish that his use of it in the film was intentional. But the Confessions throw light on the film in more subtle ways as well. Olivier's life story is full of Shakespearean allusions: quotes, misquotes, conscious and unconscious parallels. Echoes of Hamlet are particularly frequent, and reveal how central this text was in Olivier's conception of himself and in his construction of an autobiographical persona. Finally, the Confessions offer a candid account of the psychological tensions, Oedipal and other, of Olivier's early life in ways that are relevant to his work on the Hamlet film. In fact, as I shall suggest, Olivier's treatment of the Oedipal theme in Hamlet was influenced as much by his own early memories as it was by contact with Jones. Both the elaborate visual symbolism of the film and its emphasis on the main character's alternation between passivity and grandiosity bear a close relation to early sections of the autobiography. Several aspects of Olivier's address to psychological issues in Hamlet do not conform to the Freud/Jones view, but are illuminated by other psychoanalytic texts. Oedipal conflict in the film often has a passive character, and, though Freud elaborated a theory of the negative Oedipus complex, in which conflict is resolved by a feminine or passive submission to the father,5 he never applied this theory to Shakespeare's play. For other aspects of the film we must turn to

Cinderella: A Casebook (review)

Reviewed by: Cinderella: A Casebook Priscilla A. Ord (bio) Dundes, Alan (ed.). Cinderella: A Casebook. New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1982 (hardbound); New York: Wildman Press, 1983 (paperbound). Alan Dundes is to be congratulated on Cinderella: A Casebook, the most recent addition to the Garland Folklore Casebook series, not only for the scope but also the depth of the material. Dundes, professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, is general editor of both the Garland Folklore Bibliographies and the Garland Folklore Casebook series. Only two other book-length treatments of the Cinderella tale preceded the present work. The first, by Marian Roalfe Cox, is Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o' Rushes, Abstracted and Tabulated, with a Discussion of Medieval Analogues and Notes (1893). Anna Birgitta Rooth's doctoral dissertation, based on seven hundred versions of the tale, was published under the title Cinderella Cycle (1951). Designed for use in children's literature, folklore, and comparative literature, Cinderella: A Casebook is organized in four distinct sections. The first presents the complete texts of three of the more popular versions of this tale. These are, respectively, "The Cat Cinderella," from Giambattista Basile's Il Pentamerone (1934-1636); "Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper," published by Charles Perrault, under his son's name, in Histories ou Contes du Temps Passé (1697); and "Ash Girl" (Aschenputtel)," collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and published in their first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812). The second section is devoted to comparative studies; it includes "Cinderella," an essay by W. R. S. Ralston originally published in 1879; "Notes on Cinderella," a paper presented at the International Folklore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 by E. Sidney Hartland in response to Marian Roalfe Cox's publication earlier that year; and "Cinderella in China," one of three lectures on Chinese folklore, presented by R. D. Jameson, professor in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at the National Tsing Hua University in 1932. Also included are "The Bride-Show Custom and the Fairy-Story of Cinderella by Photeine P. Bourboulis (1953); "From Perrault to Walt Disney: The Slipper of Cinderella" by Paul Delarue (1951); "The Study of the Cinderella Cycle," a previously unpublished paper by the well-known folklorist Archer Taylor; Tradition Areas in Eurasia," an essay by Anna Birgitta Rooth, that appeared in 1956 following the publication of her prodigious Cinderella Cycle; and "Cinderella in Africa," an article by William Bascom (1972). Interpretation of the Cinderella tale is the focus of the third section. "A Javanese Cinderella Tale and Its Pedogogical Valve" (1976), by James Danandjaja, shows how a particular version reflects both Javanese value and world view, and "A Cinderella Variant in the Context of a Muslim Women's Ritual" (1980) by Margaret A. Mills analyzes the role of one variant in a modern ritual. Spiritual, Jungian, and Freudian approaches are presented, respectively, in Aarland Ussher's "The Slipper on the Stair," Marie-Louise von Franz "The Beautiful Wassilissa," and Ben Rubenstein's "The Meaning of the Cinderella Story in the Development of a Little Girl." Beginning with Dundes' own "'To Love My Father All': A Psychoanalytic Study of the Folktale Source of King Lear," the fourth and final grouping presents psychoanalytic, structural, and critical analyses of several Cinderella tales. Included are David Pace's "Beyond Morphology: Lévi-Strauss and the Analysis of folktales" (1977); A. K. Ramanujan's previously unpublished "Hanchi: A Kannada Cinderella"; [End Page 139] Alessandro Falassi's "Cinderella in Tuscany" from his book Folklore by the Fireside: Text and Contest of the Tuscan Veglia (1980); and Jane Yolen's "America's Cinderella," reprinted from Children's Literature in Education (1977). Each selection appears in its entirety, complete with attendant footnotes and references, and original publication information is clearly stated. As important, however, are the superb headnotes that professor Dundes has prepared; they not only provide the transition from one selection to the next, but they set each work in its place within the study of folktales in general and the investigation of versions of "Cinderella," "Catskin," and/or "Cap o' Rushes" in particular. They also contain...

Personality types in Ayurveda.

The basis of human personality as given in ancient Hindu Ayurvedan literature is reviewed and interpreted in the light of current knowledge and understanding. The structure of mind expounded in Sankhyan philosophy is explained and its parallelism with the Freudian approach is brought out. The formative influences in the development of the mental constitution of an individual are described. An attempt is made to demonstrate close similarity between Ayurvedan and Lewin's field (Gestalt) theories. Significance of Tridosh (Vet, Pitta and Kaf), by vitiating the chemical balance, as etiological factors of mental illness is described. Sixteen personality types and their correspondence with 16 types of mental disorders are mentioned.

Perspective and engagement in counseling and psychotherapy: The phenomenological approach

A phenomenological view of counseling and psychotherapy is introduced via a consideration of Freudian and Rogerian approaches to these activities. Both the Freudian and Rogerian approaches are seen to be based on an attempted disengagement between therapist and client. This attempted disengagement is found in the invalidation of the client's perpective by the therapist. The ackowledgment of the validity of the perspective of both therapist and client, and of the engagement resulting from the meeting of perspectives in interation, is the basis for counseling and psychotherapy from a phenomenological approach.

Perspectives on contemporary mysticism

Contemporary mysticism is in continuity with religious mysticism of all ages. Mysticism, like all religion, has an ideological and an experiential dimension. Traditional Freudian theory is inadequate for understanding either the ideological or the cognitive aspect, because it does not adequately account for either the cognitive process or the self-conscious "I." Categories of both ego psychology and the social scientific approach to religion illuminate contemporary mysticism in ways unavailable to the traditional Freudian psychoanalytic approach. The epistemological implications of the mystical attitude are considered, in both the religious and the scientific enterprises.