Obsessional Neurosis Research Articles

Psyche and spirit: the encounter between psychological science and theology

The long history of suspicion and opposition between depth psychology and religious institutions is well known. The coryphaei of psychoanalysis - Freud, Adler and Jung - believed that religion, especially in its institutional aspect, had a pathogenic effect on the psyche. The qualification of religion as an ‘obsessive neurosis’ was experienced by believers as a whipping in the face, which hindered the initiation of dialogue with those who so radically disqualified the experience of others.

Analysis of an obsessional neurosis in a child – Translation of an article by Eugénie Sokolnicka (1922)

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar um dos resultados da pesquisa de pós-doutorado intitulada “De Ferenczi para Sokolnicka: um caso de herança fantasmática em psicanálise”, que busca identificar a influência do psicanalista húngaro na situação francesa inicial da psicanálise através da recuperação do trabalho de sua discípula Eugénie Sokolnicka. Apresentamos a tradução de um artigo inédito em português, no qual a autora relata o tratamento psicanalítico de um menino de dez anos que sofre severos sintomas obsessivos. Desse relato, destacou-se os conceitos ferenczianos de desenvolvimento do sentido de realidade e o papel da onipotência do pensamento, o papel dos sintomas transitórios em análise, uma concepção de pedagogia psicanalítica e a condução do caso a partir da técnica ativa, utilizada pela primeira vez com uma criança.

Oedipus’ anxiety from past to the present: a case study

ABSTRACT In his 10th seminar titled ‘L’angoisse,’ Lacan argues that anxiety is due to the possibility of not being castrated. He argues that the reason behind the subject’s anxiety is the question ‘What does the Other want from me?’. This causes anxiety in the subject, who is located as the object of the Other’s desire because, in this position, the subject faces the threat of being devoured by his mother. The subject is protected from anxiety through the function of Name-of-the-Father, which refers to the mother’s lack. As a result of this function, object a has fallen from the subject. Object a exists both as the object of anxiety and the object cause of desire. The subject constantly circles the object to be able to possess it, but the closer he gets to the object, the more anxious he becomes. The concept of uncanny is located at the core of anxiety; it corresponds to the concept of lack of lack. In addition, Lacanian clinical structures differ with regards to their relationship to lack and deal with anxiety in different ways. This study centers on the Lacanian theory of anxiety and aims to explore the relationship between anxiety and obsessional neurosis through a case study.

Orang-Orang Neurosis Obsesif yang Menghayati Hidup di Antara Dua Alam: Dunia Real Sehari-hari dan Dunia Virtual Artifisial <em>Game</em>

Games are an ever-interesting cultural phenomenon whose development has been very rapid. Now, there are offline games, online games, arcade games, multiplayer games, etc. Games cater to all ages, and now there are even offline games for toddlers. Meanwhile, there are also more and more genres of online games. Some utilize Virtual Reality, while others even bring virtuality into everyday reality, namely, Augmented Reality. Some of the most popular Augmented Reality games are Ingress, Pokémon Go and Mobbles. Such games, with virtual missions/quests elements in their gameplay, encourage players to go out of the house to adventure in the real world and to meet real people. This study aims to examine the players (subjects) of the Augmented Reality game Mobbles. Mobbles is an Augmented Reality game that was first released in 2012 and was very popular between 2013 and 2016. This is quite a long period of popularity for an online game that was developed DIY by a group of friends from the United States. Of course, as the work of “MSMEs”, in 2016 Mobbles lost its popularity to another game that carried a similar theme but was supported by much greater capital power, namely Pokémon Go. Even so, until 2019, people who are members of Mobbles communities continued to play it, and had even established “friendship communication” with the game’s developers. That is what makes Mobbles particularly interesting. This research uses the theory of subject formation from Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially the concept of the Borromean Knot (RSI). This research examines the activities of a group of players who are members of Mobbles communities, especially from 2014 to 2017. The approach and data search method used is (auto-)ethnography with direct participatory observation. The results obtained from this study are that the gamer subjects are subjects of Obsessive Neurosis. It shall be suggested that from this analysis of Augmented Reality, we can further see and critique the smartphone applications that help us so much that they have become an integral part of our daily lives.

Obsessions And Compulsions: A Lifespan Perspective.

Freud traced the origin of the obsessional neurosis, which he considered a model condition for psychoanalytic inquiry, to a fixation in the anal phase of psychosexual development. Although many analysts have raised doubts about his account, and while the Sullivanian and Lacanian traditions have proposed alternatives, no approach has accounted for what Freud observed as the dizzying variety of obsessive presentations, which seem to defy a singular explanation. The broader research community has moved on, meanwhile, to genetic, neurological, and cognitive-behavioral explanations of what we now call obsessive-compulsive disorder. I argue that we can best account for the variety of obsessive presentations and meaningfully contribute to this interdisciplinary dialogue by framing obsessive-compulsive symptoms as the result of a disorder of volition, an exaggerated sense of willpower, not tied to any one developmental phase or bodily zone. Such a disorder evolves through the lifespan processes of introjection, identification, and repudiation in relation to an anxious/critical parent or an unpredictable environment. I trace these processes through three major developmental milestones. The implication is that, by looking in depth at how the obsessive person internalizes relationships, psychoanalysis can make a unique contribution to a conversation beyond its own borders.

Antiandrogenic treatment of obsessive compulsive neurosis: A case review

IntroductionObsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a mental disorder in which patients who suffer from it have repetitive and undesirable thoughts, feelings, ideas, sensations (obsessions) and behaviors that drive them to do something over and over again (compulsions).Often the person tries to get rid of the obsessive thoughts through compulsions, but this only provides short-term relief. Not carrying out the obsessive rituals can cause enormous anxiety and suffering.ObjectivesTo describe a 23-year-old male patient, who suffers from anxiety and mood symptoms, reacts to ego-dystonic obsessive ideas and sexual content, of months of evolution, and who manages to calm down through compulsive masturbation or watching sexual videos on the internet. All this clinic negatively interferes with their quality of life, asking the patient for medical help to calm these ideas.MethodsWe carried out a review in Pubmed with the terms Antiandrogens and TOC, in order to make a better description of the clinical case.ResultsAfter several treatment attempts (Sertraline, Paroxetine, Clomipramine, Clomipramine + SSRI), reaching maximum doses according to clinical guidelines, and with poor therapeutic response, it was decided to discuss the case with the endocrinology department of our hospital, deciding to start treatment with antiandrogens, in order to alleviate the persistent intrusive ideas of a sexual nature. The administration of antiandrogens in men can cause a decrease or increase in the development or involution of secondary sexual characteristics in men, reducing the activity or function of accessory sexual organs, and hyposexuality, with decreased sexual desire or libido.After several weeks, there was improvement in the obsessive symptoms with a decrease in compulsive rituals. However, after the 3rd mo, some symptoms reappeared, but not with the same severity and intensity as before treatment. In addition, we cannot ignore the adverse effects that have occurred, such as involution of secondary sexual characteristics. However, and taking into account the negative repercussion that this clinic had on the patient’s quality of life, the benefit obtained exceeded the risk, having noted clear improvement with this therapy, and maintaining evolutionary controls by both psychiatry and endocrinology.ConclusionsPatients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder can be effectively treated with anti-androgenic pharmacological agents with various modes of action. The most effective group of such agents is the long-acting analogues of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone. The objective of this review is to elucidate the possibility of using such powerful anti-androgenic agents in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Auditing and the unconscious: managerialism’s memory traces

ABSTRACT This paper takes J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid” as a point of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place, audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits – and this should remain a question for deliberation – then a set of questions emerges for post-apartheid universities, which the paper seeks to develop. By what scenes from the past are audits haunted? What memory traces do audits reactivate? What phantoms do audits seek to exorcise? Can we speak of the demons by which auditing is possessed? And what sort of working through the past would this call for?

A Psychoanalytical Reading of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck

Ibsen, as a playwright, as Thomas F. Van Lann comments, has been accused of deceiving his audience regarding the matters of his play- both its central business and its manner; particularly in his style and mode. While reviewing Ibsen through a Lacanian lens, critics such as Oliver W. Gerland III, argue that reading Ibsen is a task of revising interpretative paradigms and that Ibsen’s protagonist revises strategies for enacting the “self”. The Wild Duck (1884), has been critiqued as a poignant drama of illusions, where an idealistic outsider’s gratuitous truth-telling destroys a family. This paper argues that Ibsen’s texts stage the Oedipal crisis in a revised form by taking recourse to Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, where he suggests a paradigmatic triad as a representation of the displaced form of familar Oedipal structure. For Lacan, the Oedipal structure is not a simple love for the mother and hatred for the father, rather it places the child in the realm of the Symbolic, i.e its linguistic association with the father. He argues that the self is rooted in the mirror stage and the infant’s identification with images of coherence and stability- e.g its own reflected image. This paper argues that Ibsen locates his drama in the simples of the Oedipal complex, but revises it. Hjalmar Ekdal’s Imaginary web is disrupted when the idealist Gregers Werle breaks down the Imaginary, invokes the Symbolic authoritarian “no”, and substitutes it with the retelling of Hakon Werle. This paper seeks to accentuate Gregers’ idealism as what Lacan termed as obsessional neurosis and a display of his own lacking in preserving his Imaginary i.e playing a father to his friend and maintaining Hjalmar’s heroic image in his mind, finally resulting in little Hedvig’s suicide.

Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings by Michael C. Finke

Reviewed by: Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings by Michael C. Finke Carol Apollonio Finke, Michael C. Freedom from Violence and Lies: Anton Chekhov’s Life and Writings. Reaktion Books, London. 2021. 236 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. £25.00. In this essential, gripping book, Michael Finke combines biography and criticism with rare sensitivity and authority within a slight, action-packed 200 pages. Donald Rayfield’s classic 1997 biography, which drew on previously unavailable archival sources to offer readers a fresh, fully human Chekhov, will remain on the scholar’s bookshelf. Finke’s book shows why Chekhov’s life — as a writer, doctor and public figure — matters. Drawing upon new sources — notably the volumes in the second series of the Letopiś zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (2000–16) — and offering fresh readings of the epistolary and memoir literature, he tells the story of a man embedded in the social and intellectual culture of his time, and a writer whose works remain relevant in contexts unimaginable during his lifetime. Finke tells of Chekhov’s medical study and practice, his active social life, and his pathway to fame through the literary institutions of his time. Chekhov long cherished the goal of a scholarly career, which both prevented him from wholly committing himself to fiction during the 1880s and informed his distinctive treatment of narrative point of view as he became a literary master in the 1890s. Finke introduces Chekhov’s three planned dissertation projects — a history of sexual dominance; a history of doctoring in Russia; and the one that was realized, though did not lead to a doctoral degree: his famous research work, Sakhalin Island (pp. 25–26), the medical — Finke emphasizes — study where, [End Page 362] and only where, Chekhov ‘presented himself as the hero of his own narrative’ (p. 85). Despite the writer’s resistance to ‘being seen’ in his works, psychology is ‘the ground floor’ (p. 75). Characters’ utterances function lyrically and musically, ‘pointing to larger hidden complexes’ (p. 12). As early as the 1883 ‘The Death of a Clerk’, plot projects inwards — into the mind (or belly) of one individual, rather than emerging from the actions, reactions and interactions among characters (pp. 39–40). Troubled father-son relationships or absent fathers figure prominently from the early (disputed) play, Fatherlessness, to the late drama (p. 30). In works such as ‘Story of an Unknown Man’ and ‘My Life’, ‘the main character is the son of a dominant father; his life choices involve submissiveness, humiliation and pain’ (p. 155). Finke demonstrates that for Chekhov ideology is secondary to psychology, even in stories which have attracted attention as ‘anti-Tolstoyan’ narratives (p. 156). Finke reads Chekhov’s 1998 ‘Little Trilogy’ as a set of case studies presenting developmental stages a la Freud ‘from which remaining fixations may lie at the core of psychopathology’ (p. 148). The cycle traces a path of decreasing distance between storyteller and subject (neighbour, brother, self): the ‘man in the case’ suffers from a castration complex and obsessional neurosis; the ‘Gooseberries’ protagonist manifests pathological narcissism; and the narrator of ‘About Love’ has fallen into an Oedipal trap (p. 148). Chekhov’s attitude toward Jews evolves throughout his lifetime. Finke offers a nuanced treatment of the theme in life and works — though not, interestingly, in the pages devoted to Chekhov’s friend, the painter Isaac Levitan. Jewish women are prominent in Chekhov’s life, including as sexual partners. Chekhov’s unsavoury, eroticized portrait of a Jewish woman in the 1886 story ‘Mire’ was published, not coincidentally, in the antisemitic Alexei Suvorin’s New Times. Finke’s chronicle introduces welcome subtlety into the story of Chekhov’s ten-year friendship with Suvorin, addressing the complex forces at work for the young writer whose refusal to take political stands earned him the enmity of the liberal literary establishment, and who for some time depended on the wealthy publisher’s financial support — including for his research trip to Sakhalin in 1890, which Finke analyses as a ‘medical geography’. Chekhov’s famous support of Alfred Dreyfus in 1897, Finke shows, was only one of the factors at work as their paths diverged. As Finke...

Medical, psychoanalytical, and political thoughts on a shared obsessional neurosis

The scope of this paper is to present some medical, psychoanalytic, and political thoughts on the Covid-19 pandemic. A medical catastrophe cannot be without political consequences and indeed, in this initial period of the pandemic, the stakes are already high, with increased risks of nationalism, totalitarianism, digital capitalism, and medical populism. The Lacanian categories of the Real and the Symbolic, the clinical structure of obsessional neurosis, and the concepts of enjoyment and of the “letter” are the tools used in the paper. On this basis, Lacanian psychoanalysis, in dialogue with medicine, political science, and sociology, presents an analysis of the pandemic crisis.

Religion as ‘universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’? Re-reading Freud on religion

In his writings on culture, Freud stipulates a close relation between religion and psychopathology, and obsessional neurosis in particular. In this article, I would like to explore the nature of that relation. How is it articulated, and how is it transformed in the course of Freud’s work over four decades, between 1894 and 1939? (How) can cultural (i.e. by definition, collective) phenomena be understood on the basis of symptoms described for individual psychology? On what basis can categories of individual psychology be extended to the analysis and history of cultural and societal formations? What perspectives can psychopathology open up for the analysis of culture? Is religion ‘the cure’, or ‘the symptom’? Or are there grounds for breaking open the relation between psychopathology and religion as it has increasingly solidified in the course of Freud’s work, and has been hotly contested ever since? This article works its way through these questions, and proposes to open some paths of investigation on the subject that are inherent in psychoanalytic theory, but have been prematurely closed off by Freud himself, as well as his adepts and critics.Contribution: This article critically engages with Freud’s most (in)famous statements on the relation between psychopathology and religion through an exposition of the articulations of this relation, as they change with the introduction of particular concepts and theories.

Bourdonnements de l’Autre. Trois jours chez ma tante d’Yves Ravey

The novel Trois jours chez ma tante (2017) by Yves Ravey presents a main character who fits well in the tradition of the narrators in the author’s work: untrustworthy and in the throes of a mania which leads him to betray the people who are close to him. I propose to explain the strange behaviour of this narrator, a certain Marcello Martini, with reference to psychoanalysis, and in particular to Jacques Lacan’s theories pertaining to obsessional neurosis. We shall see that Marcello’s tendency towards betrayal and self-destruction reveals itself to be a “jouissance,” an effect of the position he occupies within the family structure, where he finds himself alienated from the mother and subject to the paternal law. More broadly, this study examines the presence of evil in Ravey’s work, which can be seen to be less an arbitrary or an intrinsic phenomenon than the consequence of a psychological structure which puts the very existence of the human subject into question.

Obsession et rachat: “Enlèvement avec rançon” d’Yves Ravey

The 2010 novel Enlèvement avec rançon by Yves Ravey is, perhaps unwittingly, a case study in obsessional neurosis. In this concise work, the reader is guided through the twists and turns of a crime committed by the narrator, Max, who has recruited his older brother to assist him in kidnapping the daughter of his boss at the sheet-metal business where he is an accountant. Despite its resemblance to a crime novel, the narrative is focussed primarily on the knot of familial and professional relations which give rise to the kidnapping plan. Within the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis, I demonstrate that Max’s enigmatic and often contradictory motivations – to get rich, betray his brother, seduce the kidnapping victim – can be explained with reference to Lacan’s extension of Freud’s work on obsessional neurosis. Lacan, in highlighting the patrocentric nature of this psychological structure, shows that obsession invariably takes the form of a jouissance, a self-destructive behaviour in which the subject takes an unconscious pleasure in his betrayal by the father, and is thereby removed, enlevé (kidnapped), from the chain of desire. More broadly, Ravey’s novel, like his other narratives in which the father’s role in family power relations is put into question, points to a crisis of modernity in which the subject, lacking the law provided by the father yet paradoxically still under its sway, seeks consolation in compulsive rituals.

Reinventing Modernism: Randall Jarrell’s Unwritten Essay on T. S. Eliot

AbstractDespite a wealth of new primary-source publications and archival discoveries, many scholars persist in the belief that midcentury poets like Randall Jarrell rejected their modernist predecessors in a quest for originality and novelty. This article demonstrates, on the contrary, Jarrell’s underestimated and enduring creative debt to T. S. Eliot by reconstructing, for the first time, a book-length essay that he planned to write about Eliot but abandoned. The article shows that Jarrell regarded Eliot’s work as the result of a psychological struggle with “obsessional neurosis,” and it reveals the logic and evidence that Jarrell planned to use to argue this claim. It concludes by showing that Jarrell himself adapted aspects of Eliot’s obsessional style in his poetry and hoped to follow them to a different end.

Obsessional Neurosis, the Paranoid-Schizoid Position, and the Bourgeois Family in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

This paper is a psychoanalytic analysis of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle as an exploration of obsessional neurosis, the paranoid-schizoid position and the bourgeois family.

Handle with Care

This essay examines two sets of coronavirus-prevention guidelines issued by New York City’s health department in early spring 2020. The department advised residents not to touch their faces “unless” they had washed their hands but advised them to masturbate “especially if” they had washed their hands. Those recommendations reshaped New Yorkers’ relationship to their bodies and, in so doing, contributed to a new permutation of biopower. Drawing on several theories of biopower, this essay’s first section explains that the department’s recommendations used large-scale biopolitical tactics with small-scale implications to encourage New Yorkers to meet the expectations of what Nikolas Rose has called “biological citizenship.” Exploring potential responses to the body’s biopolitical regulation, this essay’s second section considers the prohibition against touching in Sigmund Freud’s outdated but culturally resonant theory of obsessional neurosis. While obsessional neurosis may transgress, cancel, or achieve a compromise with that prohibition, only a ceremonial such as handwashing offers promise for responsible action. However, it, like the obsessional’s other actions, operates in a cycle of desire and prohibition which cannot fully account for how biopower now promotes and regulates bodily knowledge and movement. In search of alternatives, this essay’s final section turns to four coronavirus-themed pornographic videos produced by gay and bisexual men. These videos troubled public-health guidelines while providing potential viewers in New York and beyond with critical and creative options for pandemic-era action. In sum, these productions revealed that creation can come out of crisis.

A Rathole: Foucault, Freud, and the Problem of Isolation

The article discusses the problem of isolation and draws a parallel between two different approaches to it - Michel Foucault’s archeology of power and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Foucault’s perspective is exemplified by his critique of the strategies of power as they were applied to the epidemics of leprosy and bubonic plague. For leprosy there was an undifferentiated exclusionary space, while the the plague brought about a segmented space for confinement. The passage from the one strategy to the other marks the development of the disciplinary model of power: leper colonies are transformed into prisons and psychiatric wards. Freud’s approach is examined in his treatment of the Rat Man, the patient whose analysis prompted Freud to formulate his theory of obsessional neurosis, or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The article emphasizes the relevance of the problem of OCD to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The traditional strategy of power applied to leprosy was isolation by means of exile from towns, while for the plague isolation meant shutting towns down with their inhabitants each in their own place as if imprisoned. COVID-19 brought about a new strategy of self-isolation which entails creating physical and psychological barriers together with social distancing. Obsessional neurosis is evolving from an individual pathology into a kind of collective one: epidemiology influences mentality. In conclusion, the article takes up two literary examples - Roman Mikhailov’s text “The Wrong Side of a Rat,” and Varlam Shalamov’s story “Lepers,” from the Kolyma Stories collection - in which breaking out of isolation, disease and infection are presented as alternative affective experiences.

V11-01 TESTICULAR TRANSPLANT IN MAN. WHOLE ORGAN TRANSPLANT. HISTORIC VIDEO 1978

You have accessJournal of UrologyTransplant, Misc GU Cancers & Bladder Reconstruction (non-cancer) (V11)1 Apr 2020V11-01 TESTICULAR TRANSPLANT IN MAN. WHOLE ORGAN TRANSPLANT. HISTORIC VIDEO 1978 Jorge Campos*, Jose Ma. Gil-Vernet, Jose Ma. Gil-Vernet, and Magnolia Cholico Jorge Campos*Jorge Campos* More articles by this author , Jose Ma. Gil-VernetJose Ma. Gil-Vernet More articles by this author , Jose Ma. Gil-VernetJose Ma. Gil-Vernet More articles by this author , and Magnolia CholicoMagnolia Cholico More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000000945.01AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: We present a historic video of a whole organ transplant of the testicle in man with the full surgical technique, including both artery (Fig. 1) and vein anastomosis (Fig. 2), as well as the vas deferens reconstruction (Fig. 3). We believe it is the only testicular transplant as a whole organ of testicle ever made. It was done on November 1978. METHODS: A cadaveric testicle was transplanted into a 21-year old patient who had lost both testicles three years before due a non-specific infectious process. According to his Psychiatric evaluation, ever since, he suffered from grave obsessional neurosis. The same technique developed by Prof. JMa Gil-Vernet in 1970 experimentally was used. Warm and cold isquemia on testicular parenquima were investigated, the various methods of preservation of the organ, the gonadotrophic response was studied as well as different immune suppressant agents used in different dosages. RESULTS: The testicle was rejected three weeks later probably due to the host versus graft response in spite of all the ultimate knowledge available at that time as well as immunosupressant agents of the period. CONCLUSIONS: The great advances in histocompatibility and immunosuppression of today, combined with this detailed description of the technique for such a complex organ transplantation, will deliver improved results in the very special and selected case. Source of Funding: None. © 2020 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 203Issue Supplement 4April 2020Page: e1014-e1014 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2020 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Jorge Campos* More articles by this author Jose Ma. Gil-Vernet More articles by this author Jose Ma. Gil-Vernet More articles by this author Magnolia Cholico More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Clínica de la histeria masculina

Este artículo se propone interrogar la histeria en el varón, a partir de la pregunta relativa a la incidencia que la especificidad masculina presta al tipo clínico, en la medida en que, para aquella, la vía fálica requiere una puesta a prueba de la potencia y la posibilidad de su sintomatización. Así es que puede advertirse la importancia de distinguir entre histeria masculina, posición seductora y homosexualidad, para que se plantee la verdadera diferencia clínica significativa: aquella por la cual hoy en día muchos casos de histeria masculina se confunden con la neurosis obsesiva, o con cuadros como la fobia o borderlines.

From Relativity to Paraphrenia in D.H. Lawrence's “The Man Who Loved Islands”: Speculations on Einstein, Freud, Gossamer Webs, and Seagulls

The development of D.H. Lawrence's "The Man Who Loved Islands" through Cathcart's consecutive ownership of three islands engages the consequences of Cathcart's intense isolation from humanity. In the process of charting the steps in this character's collapse of body, mind, and spirit, Lawrence employs metaphors that explicitly connect to Einstein's notions of relativity and spacetime. In addition to this fictionalized adaptation of contemporary research in astrophysics, Lawrence cumulatively relates the palpable decline of Cathcart's equilibrium, the pattern of his anxiety, and the context of his depression to precise pathologies outlined in Freud's work the previous decade about obsessional neurosis, melancholia, and ultimately, paraphrenia. Lawrence's awareness of the work of an innovative psychiatrist and writer, Trigant Burrow, provides additional insight into Lawrence's personal preoccupations and doctrinal emphasis in the tale.