Psychoanalytic Methodology Research Articles

Review of the Empirical and Clinical Support for Group Therapy Specific to Sexual Abusers.

This review compiles 48 empirical studies and 55 clinical/practice articles specific to group therapy with sex offenders. Historically, group therapy has always been the predominant modality in sex offender-specific treatment. In the first decades of the field, treatment applied a psychoanalytic methodology that, although not empirically supported, fully appreciated the primary therapeutic importance of the group modality. Conversely, since the early 1980s, treatment has applied a cognitive behavioral method, but the field has largely neglected the therapeutic value of interpersonal group dynamics. The past decade has seen a growing re-appreciation of general therapeutic processes and more holistic approaches in sex offender treatment, and there is an emerging body of empirical research which, although often indirectly concerned with group, has yielded three definitive conclusions. First, the therapeutic qualities of the group therapist-specifically warmth, empathy, encouragement, and guidance-can strongly affect outcomes. Second, the quality of group cohesion can profoundly affect the effectiveness of treatment. Third, confrontational approaches in group therapy are ineffective, if not counter-therapeutic, and overwhelmingly rated as not helpful by sex offenders themselves. Additional conclusions are less strongly supported, but include compelling evidence that sex offenders generally prefer group therapy over individual therapy, that group therapy appears equally effective to individual therapy, and that mixing or separating groups by offense type is not important to therapeutic climate. Other group techniques and approaches specific to sexual abuse treatment are also summarized.

Психоаналітичні дослідження в сучасному українському літературознавстві

The article is devoted to the technique of psychoanalytic literary interpretation in Ukrainian literary criticism. The article deals with the importance and relevance of psychoanalytic narrative’s research. The specificity of the adaptation of psychoanalysis to the Ukrainian cultural space is defined. The basic milestones in the formation and development of psychoanalytic research in Ukrainian literary criticism from the early XX to XXI centuries are given and the main stages of the psychoanalytic school in Ukraine are also outlined. The expediency of studying psychoanalysis as a method of research and interpretation of contemporary fiction literature is proved. The detailed review of Ukrainian researchers’ critical works on the application of psychoanalysis in the study of the writers’ personality and creative works is realized to justify its use to contemporary literature. A lot of attention is paid to works that are appearing in Ukrainian literary and theoretical discourse in recent years (works of S. Pavlychko, N. Zborovska, M. Ilnytskyi, T. Hundorova, M. Moklytsia, I. Zherebkina, A. Pecharskyi, A. Bidiuk and others). They allow to extend the range of psychoanalytic studies involved in literary criticism. The main task of literature of recent decades is clearly outlined. An analysis of the effectiveness of psychoanalytic methodology is trying to be made. According to this aim it is proposed to pay attention to the works of contemporary literature that are written using the psychoanalytic implication (works of N. Zborovska, O. Zabuzhko, E. Kononenko). The discursive method is used in research.

Anxiety and phantasy in the field: The position of the unconscious in ethnographic research

This article contributes to the geographical literature on reflexivity by asking what it means to take the researcher’s unconscious seriously in ethnographic research, and proposes psychoanalysis as a theoretical and methodological resource for researching the unconscious dimensions of fieldwork. I begin by describing three moments from my fieldwork with panhandlers and drug users that evince the operation of the unconscious. I then review psychoanalytic work in the social sciences where the researcher becomes the object of analysis and situate the debate on psychoanalytic methodology as an extension of earlier work on reflexivity by feminist geographers. I outline three methods for investigating the unconscious dimensions of fieldwork: analysis, supervision, and case consultation. Summarizing my experiments with these methods, I discuss: the discovery that key elements of my research were inextricably connected to my own anxieties as a researcher, how analysis of a dream from early in the fieldwork revealed phantasies rooted in childhood and a profoundly ambivalent relationship to my informants, and I propose a dialectical method for incorporating the revelations of psychoanalytic reflexivity into research. I conclude by discussing some of the possibilities and consequences of taking the unconscious dimensions of fieldwork seriously.

Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education

Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education Stout, C. (201 3). Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association. 212 pages. ISBN 978-1 -890160-55-5.The field of education is filled with numerous texts pertaining to research methodology and methods, constituting its own popular genre. Teaching and Learning Emergent Research Methodologies in Art Education (2013) is a new addition to this genre and is specifically geared toward art education. With the goal of broadening concepts and issues pertaining to the teaching of methodological approaches in art education research, editor Candice Stout is both conceptual and pragmatic in her editorial approach. She and the contributing authors-who are leaders and innovators of qualitative approaches in the field of art education- describe their philosophical and theoretical orientations as well as their pedagogical strategies for teaching qualitative research courses.The ten chapters read not as prescription but as provocation, an open invitation for those who teach and learn arts-based research, or who are currently immersed in research, to come and play, linger, and experiment with form and content, illustrating Stout's assertion thatteaching and learning are forever works in progress (p. vii).The book consists of an introduction followed by ten chapters, each of which is devoted to a particular qualitative approach that includes theoretical orientations, instructional practices, examples of student work, and author reflections. Graeme Sullivan, Janet Miller, Candace Stout, Liora Bresler, Rita Irwin, Kathryn Ricketts, James Haywood Rolling Jr., Charles Garoian, jan jagodzinski, Paul Bolin, Christine Thompson, Lynn Beudert, and Elizabeth Garber each contributed individual or coauthored chapters that pertain to their particular realms of expertise. As a whole, the chapters present a diverse range of methodological and/or analytic approaches to topics, concepts, and issues pertaining to qualitative research in and for art education, highlighting several arts-based approaches as well as psychoanalytic methodology, phenomenology, historical investigation, and action research.Some chapters coalesce in a synergistic way around particular topics or forms of inquiry. A theme of what could be characterized as chance in motion can be seen, for example, across three chapters that focus on arts-based research. Sullivan's and Miller's chapter on creative and critical approaches to graduate research is a means of opening up the nature of craft pertaining to both social science and arts-based research; those familiar with Sullivan's contributions concerning studio practice as research will recognize the approach in this chapter as one that encompasses intertextuality, play, and the insistence of chance and change that is inherent in any research endeavor-whether it be in science, art, or somewhere (in)between. James Rolling addresses arts-based research within a larger landscape of the quantitative-qualitative divide, in which arts-based inquiry emerges out of a negotiation of bodies of knowledge. This negotiation, he argues, is conducive to motion that blurs methodological divides and is at play (in)between and among the Arts and sciences. Garoian's chapter on prosthesis as art research underscores the indeterminacy of play in art, a research logic determined more by slippage and contingency than prediction and causality. Indeed, the concept of research as chance in motion-where the irrational, contingent, and experimental are all at play-underscores many of the contributions in this edited book. Readers will take away the message that research is continually emergent in both process and method.Some authors discuss their work with methodological approaches that exist both within and outside of the field of art education that carry important lessons for the conduct of art education research. …

Stages in the psychological resolution of schizophrenia.

From the work of Dr. Michael Robbins in Massachusetts, USA, it is known that nine schizophrenic patients out of a series of 18, and a further schizophrenic patient, treated by him achieved positive outcomes using psychoanalytic methodology. Four of these had strikingly successful outcomes, for example completing their treatment without a need for further medication, and also becoming happily married or graduating at university. This paper aims to illustrate the stages identified by him through which this can be accomplished. Dr. Robbins’ Stages of Psychological Therapy of Schizophrenia are compared with Dr. Steggles’ detailed case study of a patient’s recovery from schizoaffective disorder. These two data sources are juxtaposed and compared. Dr. Robbins’ therapeutic stages are found to parallel exactly Dr. Steggles’ findings from her case study, which she summarized as her psychodynamic pentapointed cognitive construct (PPCC) model of her schizoaffective patient’s experience. Psychological therapy of schizophrenia is still in its early stages of development. However, Dr. Robbins’ psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic technique has given rise to positive outcomes in 10 of the 19 patients he treated, that is, his series of 18 patients together with a further patient; these 19 patients he gave full psychological treatment, i.e., usually four sessions per week. The Stages he identifies in his therapeutic process match perfectly the stages Dr. Steggles identified in her own patient’s healing mind. Not all schizophrenic patients are likely to be able to benefit from this psychological therapy. Females seem to be better able than males to respond to the treatment, and motivation is necessary for a successful outcome. It is not known how to identify precisely those patients who will be successful. But those patients who do benefit may counterbalance by their economic activity the healthcare costs of those who do not recover, as well as achieving benefit from their human suffering. Many of the other groups of patients suffering from schizophrenia can be helped by engaging with a clinician for social skills or family therapy, and where appropriate this should always be done.

Demandas contemporâneas da psicologia no setor público: reflexões winnicottianas sobre a tendência antissocial

The purpose of this article is reflect the contemporary demand for psychology in public health services, especially that that refer to children and adolescents, and their guardians, in which the concept of antisocial tendency is the main complaint. To achieve the development of this reflection, we used the psychoanalytic methodology, so that practices of a university extension project allowed the psychoanalytic understanding of the concept of antisocial tendency and its impact on today's public health. From this methodology, the discussion of this work is supported from the concept of antisocial tendency, by Winnicott, and a brief history of the insertion of psychology in the public health, besides the presentation of the university extension project. Thus, the results indicate the possibility of constructing clinical different framings of the psychotherapy in individual setting to manifestations of antisocial tendency in children and adolescents considered antisocial. After the analysis of the concept, of the insertion of psychologists in public health and of the clinical framings proposed by the university extension project, was concluded by the need for a look of psychoanalysis by Winnicott in which the environment is considered in the treatment offered to children and adolescents considered antisocial.

Negotiating femininity with and through mother–daughter and patient–surgeon relationships in cosmetic surgery narratives

Synopsis This paper explores the contradiction between dominant discourses of individualist decision-making and patient narratives of cosmetic surgery, in addition to relational understandings of the body in cosmetic surgery. Using a psychoanalytic methodology for reading interview transcripts called poetic transcription, the paper analyzes five narrative interview transcripts that explore five women's experiences with various cosmetic surgeries. The patient narratives stress the decision as one that happens in relation to others, and in particular parental relationships and romantic/sexual relationships. This is challenging to acceptable explanations for undergoing cosmetic surgery, which emphasize that the decision is made not to please others, but independently. Patients position mothers and mother figures in their narratives as symbolic of an idealized femininity to be emulated or rejected; at the same time, patients position their surgeons as either authoritative father figures to be identified with, or as romantic or sexual partners to be idealized.

Phenomenology of Psychoanalytic Data. A Biosemiotic Framework

In my continuing efforts to build a bridge between psychoanalytic findings and biosemiotics here, as in previous works, ‘biosemiotic’ refers to the hierarchy of meaning-forms (from biological to semiotic-organizations) underlying an updated psychoanalytic model of mind. Within this framework I present a broad range of bio-semiotic phenomena, processes, dynamics, defenses, and universal and unique internalized interpersonal patterns, that in psychoanalysis all commonly fall under the broad heading of the “Unconscious.” Reconceptualized as interpretive data within the purview of a psychoanalytic discourse-semantic this biosemiotic framework posits an epigenetic continuum of human meaning-organizations originating at basic organic levels, moving upward through biological, psycho-somatic and affective expression, proto-semiotic transmissions, represented forms, and finally to explicit linguistic signs and complex symbol systems. In addition to assuming an uninterrupted epigenetic continuum crystallizing in hierarchic organization, this framework accentuates the multilayered and increasingly condensed quality of higher more elaborate organizations of meaning in human communication, drawing attention to persisting biological undercurrents in implied sense, intent, and motivation, all of which impact on repressive/defensive mechanisms. Drawing from previous works (Aragno 1997, 2005, 2008a, b, Psychoanalytic Inquiry 29(1):30–47, 2009, Biosemiotics 3:57–77, 2010, 2011a, Signs 5:71–74, 2011b, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Centennial Paper, Special Centennial Issue 59(2):239–288, 2011b, Signs 5:29–70, 2011c) in which I labored to update and revise Freud’s first topographical theory of mind, this paper presents the phenomenology of unconscious ‘data’ for the purpose of introducing a diverse range of non-linguistic signifying forms from which psychoanalysts infer mental processes and ‘interpret’ meanings. An important underlying premise regarding psychoanalytic data and its relation to the basic biosemiotic ‘agenda’ is that until grounded in an updated developmental theory of mind inclusive of pre- and proto-semiotic-forms, that is evolutionarily plausible, epistemologically based, and correlates with contemporary neuroscience, the term “sign” is merely an abstract linguistic ‘label’ rather than a mental act with antecedent developmental stages manifesting meanings through different forms and modes of expression. Drawn from the yields of the psychoanalytic method and semantic this revised metatheoretical approach provides insights into the sensory-emotive, bodily origins of unconscious layers of non-linguistic signification thereby expanding our understanding of the formative stages of the ‘semiotic function’ in human evolution. This being the third in a series of papers integrating the yields of psychoanalytic methodology with the underlying premises of ‘Biosemiotics,’ some familiarity with the background knowledge provided in the previous two is strongly recommended.

Set This House on Fire: the Self-Analysis of Raymond Carver

The convergence of features of Raymond Carver’s short-story oeuvre and of psychoanalytic methodology suggests that Carver’s writing served as the fulcrum and focus of a self-analytic experience. Within this model, his stories function as container and mirror of myriad aspects of the writer’s self. Tracing the developmental arc of the contextual meanings of one motif—fire—through six stories and their ur-texts demonstrates gains comparable to certain analytic goals, including enhanced integration, accountability, and self-awareness. Over time, Carver’s narratives of rage, impotence, and despair give way to a new story: of mourning, forgiveness, and the rekindling of hope.

The Marriage of Psychoanalytic Methodology with the Biosemiotic Agenda

An overview of core phenomena and processes leading to Freud’s establishing his psycho-analytic method and early metatheoretical concepts is followed by the author’s revision of his topographical model into a seamless biosemiotic theory of mind and human communication. A careful methodological analysis of the semantic/referential scope; speech/listening processes, and semiotic features, of a dialogue designed to make the unconscious conscious, reveals an epistemological bridge between psychoanalytic methodology and the biosemiotic agenda within a unifying inter-penetrative paradigm.

(K)not an Impasse: Working Through Lacanian Theory as Research Methodology

Abstract This essay illuminates key points in the development of a psychoanalytic theory–informed case study of student writing in Criticizing Television, an undergraduate, writing-intensive art education course. The discussion describes the research context, including a select group of concepts that structure the inquiry: subjectivity and desire, the Other, thick interpretation, critical consciousness, and resistance. In addition, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and methodology are briefly explicated and problematized, providing a foundation for an exploration of Ellie-Ragland Sullivan’s Lacanian Poetics and Carol Gilligan’s Listening Guide, followed by discussion of an impasse method of reflexive data analysis. The impasse, first perceived as an obstacle in the research, is linked with the concept of critical (un)consciousness, becoming the metaphorical, methodological (k)not upon which the case study and its data pivot. You tie yourself to what comes untied— to what unties you within your ties. You are a knot of correspondences. — Edmond Jabès (1990)

Interviewing Enjoyment, or the Limits of Discourse*

This article addresses how psychoanalytic methodologies can be used to conduct and analyze semistructured interviews. Drawing on my work as a research assistant during the summer of 2006, I discuss the process of interviewing soccer fans who attended televised broadcasts of the FIFA World Cup soccer matches in cafés in Vancouver, British Columbia. The research examined the emotional geographies of nationalism and consumption using the Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of enjoyment. Reflecting on the intersubjective and embodied dimensions of the interview process, this article discusses the difficulties of capturing and conveying interviewees' enjoyment. Specifically, I explore how enjoyment, which is partially extradiscursive, disappears when articulated and represented through speech. I assert that psychoanalytic attempts to methodologically grasp enjoyment must be attentive to not only how subjects represent their enjoyment through discourse but also to their tears, ecstatic chanting, and celebration; that is, to the enactment of enjoyment itself.

Traversing Fantasies, Activating Desires: Economic Geography, Activist Research, and Psychoanalytic Methodology*

In this article I recount the ways that key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—the relationship between language and desire, fantasy and subject formation, ethics and the traversal of fantasy—have enabled a novel methodological approach to activist research. Psychoanalysis allows us to recast research as a process of encountering and traversing fantasies, which is simultaneously a process of engendering new representations, desires, subjectivities, and societies.

Introduction: Psychoanalytic Methodologies in Geography

This special section began, as many do, with an Association of American Geographers conference. In 2007 Paul Kingsbury and I organized two sessions with a total of nine papers (and ten scholars) th...

Locating the Melody of the Drives*

Psychoanalysis has profoundly influenced those social theories that inform qualitative methodology in human geography. Yet many geographers are skeptical about the value and viability of psychoanalytic methodology because of its alleged reductionist causal explanations and relativistic interpretations of data. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, which affirms Jacques Lacan's undermining of the dualism of causality versus sense, this article illustrates the potential value of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a qualitative methodology in geography. Using a methodological case study from my research on Jamaican tourism, I illustrate how we can locate a Lacanian understanding of the drives in the interactions between tourists and hotel workers. In so doing, the article provides new insights into the enduring allures of tourism's commodity-form by focusing on how the object petit a—a chimerical object that incites desire and an unattainable object that the drives encircle—takes place in customer service and entertainment activities.

Mortgaged Futures: Trauma, Subjectivity, and the Legacies of Colonialism in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s The Book of Not

Because it ... den[ies] other person all attributes of humanity, colonialism forces people it dominates to ask themselves question constantly: reality, who am I? Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of Earth I was ... being transformed into a young woman with a future. What I was most interested in was myself and what I would become. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not Introduction In World Memory, a collection of essays on trauma, memory, and witnessing in global contexts, Jill Bennett and I argued that trauma studies has been circumscribed by its predominant focus on Euro-American events and experiences and particularly Holocaust. We called for a transformation of field from a monocultural discipline grounded in a psychoanalytic methodology to a mode of enquiry that can inform study of memory within a changing global context. To facilitate this transformation, we advocated that trauma scholars engage with the multicultural and diasporic nature of contemporary culture, and that postcolonial critics engage with trauma studies to develop frameworks for analyzing traumatic legacies of colonialism (5). Our concern was not simply that trauma studies was impoverished by failing to address non-Western memories of trauma and loss. Rather, we were concerned that opportunities for understanding historical traumas and sufferings of other cultures transmitted through truth commissions, literature, film, and visual art were being denied by Western orientation of trauma studies. If trauma's address beyond itself was indeed, Cathy Caruth proposed, to function as a means of moving out of a 'historical isolation,' it would be necessary for literary and cultural critics to engage with diverse testimonial practices and cultural languages of trauma (11). In recent years, trauma studies has become increasingly global, although there is still, arguably, limited dialogue regarding core concepts and frameworks of postcolonial theory and trauma theory. In this essay, I pursue project of wording trauma studies through a reading of Tsitsi Dangarembga's recent novel The Book of Not (2006), which addresses issues of trauma, colonialism, and denial during violent transformation from white-minority rule in Rhodesia in 1970s to an independent Zimbabwe in 1980s. This novel, a compelling contribution to contemporary literature of trauma, expands canon beyond Western experiences, introducing new voices, subjectivities, and legacies of colonial trauma. At same time, it enables critics to ask to what extent Western trauma theory provides a productive lens through which to address issues of postcolonialism, racism, and identity. As I write in April 2007, stories about political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe, desperate state of its people, and brutalities being perpetrated against opponents of Mugabe regime feature regularly in international media, a potent reminder of how unresolved legacies of colonial trauma haunt global future. Along with novels such Yvonne Vera's Stone Virgins (2002), The Book of Not is part of a recent flowering of Zimbabwean women's writing, that is concerned with, among other things, war of liberation and its after-effects. (1) Much of historical and fictional literature of Zimbabwean war has been written by men and has obscured women's experiences of war (Lyons 26). Whereas Mothers of Revolution presents oral testimony from Zimbabwean women involved in war, Dangarembga innovatively uses irony, humor, and farce to dramatize absurdities of racism in a colonial society and impediments to witnessing it, thereby bringing into visibility what is unspeakable in (post)colonial Zimbabwe. The novel dramatizes narrator's struggle to break out of a repetition compulsion, manifested in her obsessive desire for recognition, which continually leaves her deflated and depressed. …

Transgender on Screen

Transgender on Screen is an eclectic investigation of gender through representations of (and ambivalent responses to) crossdressing, transgenderism and transsexuality in mainstream film. Phillips argues that little has been published that puts transgender at its heart, and thus ‘This book is designed to fill in the gap’ (p. 1). As he negotiates specific films which feature trans1 subjectivities and themes from within the genres of comedy, horror and others, Phillips offers some introduction to various theoretical frameworks through which to read these films and characters. He posits trans as an interdisciplinary subject matter, but bases his own readings predominantly on the use of psychoanalysis. This book may be significant for media studies or film studies students for whom psychoanalytic tools are useful and whose interest in trans studies and gender politics is growing. Similarly, those involved in gender studies, queer theory and feminism may benefit from the psychoanalytic methodologies employed when reading representations of trans. As an activist from within the trans community, however, my reading of the book is as one whose interests lie in the valorization (or not, as the case may be) of trans subjectivities specifically. It is perhaps necessary to state that my response may not be the same as other readers, but it raises concerns over some of the understandings of trans people that Phillips offers in relation to the films that he critiques. He engages us with psychoanalytical modes such as Lacan's notion of the ‘Real’ and the ‘imaginary’, the ‘symbolic realms’ and the ‘father's law’, as well as Freud's notion of ‘castration anxiety’, each of which offers understandings of how gendered roles are psychically constructed in the world and more specifically from within the family. He understands these types of analysis to be ‘essential tools in the exploration of a powerful textual unconscious’ (p. 5). Phillips also outlines the work of gender studies and queer theorists as an important backdrop when engaging with trans. He breaks down the multiplicity of identities within trans, such as drag queens, female impersonators and transsexuals, informatively, relying heavily on Marjorie Garber. Throughout his introduction he offers short, concise and compelling summaries of understandings of sex, gender and sexuality in relation to the trans body. This demonstrates how ‘trans’ hosts multiple and diverse meanings as well as subjectivities, which ideologically might seek to explode binaries. Phillips cites Garber to this effect: Transvestitism is a space of possibility structuring and confounding culture: the disruptive element that intervenes, not just a category crisis of male and female, but the crisis of category itself.2 (p. 3)

A Historical Guide to Herman Melville (review)

R E V I E W GILES GUNN, ed. A Historical Guide to Herman Melville New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Paper $19.95; 272 pages. T he Oxford Historical Guide to Herman Melville situates Melville’s life and writings firmly within the various literary, philosophical, political , economic, and spiritual movements and crises that occurred during Melville’s lifetime, which “straddle[d] an era of incomparable, almost cataclysmic, historical change in America” (4-5). Most of the essays in the volume contextualize Melville’s ideas not just in terms of significant events in the United States, but in reference to a broader transatlantic, even global, perspective. In the wonderful opening “brief” biography by Robert Milder, for example, Milder reminds the reader that for Melville, history “did not begin spatially at the American shoreline and temporally in 1776” (30). Rather, Melville’s take on history and art was inflected through the entire Western tradition, from the classics up through Melville’s own wide ranging and sometimes esoteric interests. Milder eschews the widely held but largely erroneous view of Melville as a writer whose extraordinary early productivity was followed by a lifetime of disillusionment, melancholy brooding, and authorial inertia. Rather, Milder describes three “acts” in Melville career: a “first act” that included the major writings from Typee (1846) through The Confidence-Man (1857), “a distinguished second act” that included Melville’s poems on the Civil War and his epic spiritual and theological poem Clarel (1876), and a “final (albeit abbreviated) third act” that included, along with several verse collections, Melville’s nearly completed manuscript for Billy Budd (ca. 1884). In Milder’s portrayal, Melville emerges as an extraordinarily gifted man whose early exposure to alternative ways of life in the Pacific awakened him to the narrow-minded provincialism of many American practices and institutions, but whose familial and social allegiances nevertheless limited his ability to turn that early awakening into direct, praxis-oriented critiques of some of the most egregious injustices (such as slavery) in American society. Because so much of Melville’s “inner life” must be inferred, Milder’s psychoanalytic methodology is especially provocative. In describing the death of Melville’s father Allan when Herman was only twelve, for example, Milder wonders “to what extent the mature Melville’s feeling of God the Father’s C 2006 The Authors Journal compilation C 2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 67 R E V I E W indifference, abdication, or nonexistence was rooted in the boy’s sense of paternal undervaluation and desertion” (20); he reads Pierre as generated from “some buried compulsion,” evidence of Melville “vivisecting himself in public or submitting as analyst and analysand to an unusually drastic and humiliating form of psychotherapy” (35-6); and, in a nod to Herbert Marcuse, Milder suggests that Melville’s early experiences in the Pacific awakened him to the fact that phenomena such as imperialism, missionary activism, and economic exploitation in “the newly colonized Pacific” were replacing “the pleasure principle (spontaneity, freedom, sensuality, immediate gratification) [with] the reality principle (discipline, toil, austerity, delayed gratification).” For the most part, Melville saw this process as “tragic and wasteful,” but at the same time it allowed him to maintain hope in his life and in his writings, at least for a time, for a “better, because more conscious, paradise to be regained” (23). Despite his essay’s brevity, Milder covers virtually every phase of Melville’s life and career, from his early enthusiasm and elation about being a published author, through his psychically trying and physically exhausting struggles to find a spiritual base (the frustration of which, as Milder notes, may have resulted in Melville’s abuse of his wife, Lizzie), through his final years, the primary achievement of which was “to live for the light guided only by spiritual instinct, as an underground shoot might grope its way towards the sun” (51). Calling Melville a “skeptical idealist” (27), Milder effectively encapsulates a productive tension that characterizes so much of Melville’s writings. On one hand, Melville often seemed to espouse...

How Does the Nation Plug the Hole in Irish Constitutional Discourse?

This article uses a psychoanalytical methodology to examine how the nation secures the ideological coherency of Irish constitutional discourse. The 1937 Constitution of Ireland makes a claim to embody the nation, but paradoxically it also seeks to invoke the nation as its own authorizing agency. Drawing particularly on the work of Slavoj Žižek, this article explores how the concept of nation, as a little “piece of the Real,” effectively conceals this cognitive gap. The invocation of nation in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland configures political subjectivity by appealing not just to liberal-legal universality, but also simultaneously to a fantasy frame of Irish nationalism. Psychoanalytical theory is valuable in this context because it allows us to treat the ideological address of constitutional discourse as one that fragments rather than constitutes the subject. The ideological operation of the nation is encapsulated by the “inevitability” with which the legal subject finds something of itself in the partial and contradictory accounts of nation that are articulated by Irish constitutional discourse. Crucially, the inconsistencies and contradictions in this melange of national images point not simply to the aporetic nature of legal origins, but to ideological efficacy of the nation as a foundation of legal authority.

Historica Passio : Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice

This essay reinvestigates an old crux: why does King Lear say that he has passio? Peterson argues that contrary to most writing on subject, Lear does not suffer from either hysterica passio or Several hundred years of criticism have attempted to illuminate Lear's statement, yet ironically, historicizing and psychoanalytic methodologies most often marshaled by critics to elucidate Lear have obscured Shakespeare's perspectives on his character. The essay first defines hysterical ailments in 17th-century terms and explains that it is because Shakespeare understood hysterica passio as a strictly female pathology that Lear's identification of illness must be perceived as king's misprision, not as Shakespeare's errors in reading period medical case histories (such as Richard Mainy's case of the mother, narrated by Samuel Harsnett) or playwright's anticipation of psychoanalytic theories of hysteria. Tracing three hundred years' of commentary in some fifty editions of play, Peterson documents how glosses and commentaries on Lear's hysteria create a circular set of assumptions, all of which elide relevance of hysterica passio to cultural, medical, historical, and literary contexts and controversies. The essay demonstrates how literary critics mistranslate or misread Harsnett's text (long recognized as an important influence on Shakespeare's composition of Lear) by altering source's essential content, phrasing, and punctuation to make it match preconceived notions about play's representation of early modern illnesses and