Psychoanalytic Reading Research Articles

The Psychoanalytical Reading of Some Selected Poems of Robert Browning

The main aim of writing this paper has been producing unique, insightful interpretations of a few selected poems of Robert Browning that shed more light on Browning’s writing style keeping the psychoanalytical theories in mind. The paper includes an introduction to Browning’s writing style and Browning as a poet. Consecutively, the paper proceeds with the interpretation of the poems, which have been divided into two categories for a focused analysis. The first group contains poems that were published in a collection called ‘Dramatic Romances’(1842) and the second group contains poems that were published in a collection called ‘ Dramatis Personae’(1864).

Destin de la pulsion épistémophilique du chercheur. L’exemple de « William H. Masters »

This article focuses on the issue of epistemophilic impulse for the researcher through the example of the character William H. Masters, as he's portrayed in the television show “Masters of Sex”, created in 2013 by Michelle Ashford and inspired by the original eponymous novel by Thomas Maier. The television show retraces the course of the first two researchers who are interested, from the late 1950s, to the subject of sexuality in particular through these physiological responses. The work of Masters and Johnson revolutionizing the habits of thousands of Americans, before knowing worldwide fame. Our work proposes a psychoanalytic reading of the psychic functioning of the protagonist William Masters; our thinking takes as its starting point the researcher's “impulse of knowing” and questions its construction through different steps of sexuality and its impact on the choice of love objects.

Poetics in the shadow of the other's language: The melancholic discourse of the trilingual poet Amelia Rosselli

Translations of summaryIn this paper, I propose a psychoanalytic reading of some of the writings of Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet who, at the age of seven, lost her father Carlo, who was persecuted and murdered by Mussolini's regime. History and her history conflate into personal and collective trauma which defies human possibilities to work through and mourn. Rosselli's work testifies to such predicament of the human subject of the 20th century, his/her dislocation, alienation and internal irreconcilable divisions. In particular I examine Diary in three tongues, which is the most autobiographical of her works and a self‐analytic piece, written after the conclusion of her second analysis. In the Diary, Rosselli employs textual strategies which convey the fragmentation and destructuring of language, where her traumatic experience resides as a wound inflicted to the symbolic order. I propose that her writings contain her unconscious memories in an estranged and melancholic language which becomes the crucible to express her impossible mourning, in a complex mixture of Eros and Thanatos which allowed her to survive psychically and to create a very personal experimental poetic discourse which made her a literary figure of international acclaim. My primary engagement will be with Freud's theory of mourning and melancholia and its successive elaboration by Kristeva, who maintains that the melancholic discourse finds its expression in the pre‐verbal and infra‐verbal aspects of language, which she calls ‘semiotics’, in dialectic articulation with its symbolic components. Drawing on literary texts, significant inferences can be made on the psychoanalytic listening to the prosodic aspects of language as the carrier of inchoate forms of representation of that which exceeds language: trauma, raw affects, mnemic traces, that is, the unrepresented and/or unrepresentable.

Saved by Trauma: A Psychoanalytical Reading of the Atonement

AbstractThis work offers a Lacanian account of the work of Christ on the cross. It proffers a Holy Saturday theology in which God has to embrace suffering and death in its entirety in order to end the stranglehold of the world's system of sacrifice; the divine took on death as a constitutive factor. A reading of the atonement is constructed in which a diabolical system is shattered from within by the actions of a unique victim; it also relates the vicarious element of the atonement to the psychoanalytical concept of transference. Ultimately, this article hopes to contribute to the ongoing interaction between psychoanalysis and theology. Naturally it also hopes to influence the debate over which discursive “model” of the atonement is most helpful.

Book Review: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Romans 6–8: Paul V. Axton, The Psychology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul

Book Review: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Romans 6–8: Paul V. Axton, <i>The Psychology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul</i>

Fantazmatická ozvena. Dejiny a konštrukcia identity

The article enquires into the nature of group membership, on which the writing of the history of feminism rests. The author's approach, largely sustained by psychoanalytic reading, construes feminist movements not as the inevitable expression of the socially constructed category of women, but as the means for achieving that identity. Group membership provides the illusion of wholeness only by appealing to fantasy. Within the history of Western feminist movements, two fantasies, prevalent from the late eighteenth century, operate to consolidate feminist identity: the fantasy of the female orator and the feminist maternal fantasy. The fantasies function as resources to be invoked and thereby resonate at various points in history. The aim of the article is not to deny the social fact of feminist movements, nor to question the existence of active political subjects. It is to suggest that psychoanalysis may elucidate the unconscious dimensions of these phenomena as well as the fact that they owe at least some of their existence to the operations of fantasies that can never fully satisfy the desire, or secure the representation, they seek to provide.

Drug-addiction and boundaries of the Self A psychoanalytical reading through the Rorschach test

The present research intends to analyse the phenomenon of drug addiction through the Rorschach test. The protocols, analysed according to the French School Method, have been administered to a sample of 10 subjects. The data have been evaluated integrating quantitative and qualitative aspects, which have revealed the main dimensions of the drug addicted personality, mainly regarding the functioning modes of the narcissistic personality based on the over-investment of limits. The results show an impoverished cognitive set where the capacity of the investment in the imaginary activity is absent and a certain rigidity of thinking is revealed. The investment in the formal aspects of the table provides justification of the emotional isolation where the attention to the external reality acts as a defence from an internal reality whose impoverishment is perceived as threatening and distressing. Interesting outcomes are evident in relation to the emotional sphere and the attempt of social adaptation from some indexes such as the quantity of human responses which result to be in the normative range. The Rorschach test provided an important contribution in this evaluation/understanding of the drug addicted personality: if on the one hand it confirmed some basic traits of the functioning of these subjects, on the other hand it provided the possibility to research new and unexpected frontiers that, from the closure and the over investment of the boundaries of the Self (predominance of formal responses, of “reponses peau”), reaches an attempt of psychic stimulation addressing a “primitive” emotional sphere, in the form of specular relations (reflection responses) or partial (Hd).

Clothing, Law and the Institution of the Subject’s Internal Normativity

Abstract Gender Studies have shown that gender is a social construct. In the paper, I argue that gender as a social construct should not hide its “Real” dimension: social constructs participate in what Lacan calls the Real. In this perspective, gender is conceived as a symptom built by the subject to protect itself against castration. The subject is therefore tied to its gender as it is tied to its symptom – in the psychoanalytical sense. It builds the image of gender in order to be able to enter in a relationship with the Other. In other words, the imaginarization of gender makes possible – paradoxically – for the subject to access the impossibility of a sexual relationship. Gender is therefore the result of the imaginarization of castration. Whereas the psychoanalytical reading has often been interpreted – especially in Gender Studies – through a structuralist view, I argue that the psychoanalytical approach to the construction of gender does not contradict its social determination. However, one may stress that social determination according to psychoanalysis cannot but be introduced by the symptom, that is by the subject itself and through the fantasied construction of its relationship with the Other. I suggest to read this psychoanalytical interpretation of gender with the notion of the institution as developed by Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s view of the institution is particularly relevant here for two reasons. First it overcomes the opposition between the subject and the social which are both instituted and instituting at the same time. Second, Lacan’s theory of sinthome which reads the symptom in terms of sexual relationship implicitly refers to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the institution. I will show to what extent the Merleau-Pontian notion of the institution helps to conceive of the Real in gender understood as an intertwining of social and subjective construct. I claim that this view overcomes both a structuralist approach – which represses the historicity of the social – and a view which represses the function of gender in the subject’s construction and its symptom.

Death and Renewal in The Velveteen Rabbit: A Sociological Reading

Article providing a sociological interpretation of The Velveteen Rabbit critical of recent materialist and psychoanalytic readings, and arguing that this children's story exemplifies the use of a non-materialistic idea of death to suggest other themes about love and life, and discuss implications for near-death research.

"Skott, jag tror jag hör skott"

”Shots, I think I hear shots”: The Use of Repetition in Monika Fagerholm’s The American Girl&#x0D; This article examines the role and use of repetition in Monika Fagerholm’s novel Den amerikanska flickan (The American Girl, 2005) through a narrative, stylistic and a psychoanalytic reading. Using the work of Bruce F. Kawin, I illustrate how Fagerholm uses a permissive style, which relies on an emphasis generated by repetition. The article also examines how the novel utilizes repetition to manage time, and examines how Sigmund Freud’s notion of ”repetition compulsion” applies to the novel’s characters. The article concludes that Den amerikanska flickan repeatedly uses popular culture, quotations and music until the work itself becomes something beyond its many allusions.&#x0D; Throughout, I illustrate how repetition permeates the novel in terms of both its theme and characters. Fagerholm is a postmodern author who knows how to challenge the concept of truth, and her novel questions whether a story can be told at all. It could be argued that Fagerholm’s style of writing constitutes an aesthetics of doubt, or search for the truth: a search for anorigin tale, which is biased and therefore impossible to capture.

The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul by Paul V. Axton

"The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul by Paul V. Axton." Toronto Journal of Theology, 32(1), pp. 164–165

Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense by Maurice Ebileeni

Reviewed by: Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense by Maurice Ebileeni Anne Luyat (bio) Maurice Ebileeni. Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of Nonsense. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 155 pp. ISBN: 9781501306617. Maurice Ebileeni's psychoanalytic reading of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner explores five of their novels in light of French philosopher Jacques Lacan's concepts of non-sens, symptom, and sinthome. It is a demanding but rewarding read. The concept of nonsense is shown to be a means of sublimating the textual recognition of the chaotic in three works by Conrad—Lord Jim, "Heart of Darkness," and Under Western Eyes—and in two works by Faulkner—The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. In his consideration of nonsense as a concept during his lectures in 1955 in Paris at L'Hôpital Sainte [End Page 95] Anne, Lacan referred to Aristotle's definition of nonsense or tuché as a trauma or a missed encounter with the real. Lacan expanded the concept when he gave his first seminar at the École Freudienne in Paris in 1964, noting that nonsense was inassimilable to the symbolic order because it remained outside the domain of conceptualization. In Lacanian terms, the dying words of Kurtz, "The horror! The horror!," in Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness" indicate the existence of an unrecognized and unresolved trauma. In relating the nature of Kurtz's excesses of avarice and cruelty during the time he worked in Africa, the story's narrator Marlow indicates the origin of the unresolved trauma and gives the words of Kurtz posthumous significance. Ebileeni suggests that the efforts of Conrad's narrators to understand the symptom—what is going wrong in the life of another character—constitutes a valuable exercise but one that in the case of extreme perseverance on the part of a narrator can become an indicator of neurosis. During his meeting with Kurtz's fiancée in Brussels, Marlow comes to the full realization that what he knows about Kurtz is unspeakable and should not be repeated. When Kurtz's fiancée inquires about the last moments of Kurtz's life, Marlow tells her the untruth that Kurtz spoke only her name before dying. Marlow's decision not to communicate the last words of Kurtz to her because the words were too terrible to repeat increases their resonance in the story while it frees Marlow from any further attempt to discover their exact meaning. The haunting leitmotif of Kurtz's unresolved trauma, "The horror! The horror!," continues to echo the existence of the chaotic in the life of Kurtz and the missed encounter of his fiancée with the real, but the words themselves can no longer draw Marlow into their vortex. Ebileeni believes that the efforts of Conrad's narrators to identify the symptom in the lives of other characters and to understand their distress will protect them and prevent them from sharing a similar destiny. Marlow employs an eloquent metaphor to describe his own close call with fate: "I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot" (Youth 151). Ebileeni believes that Benjy's howling in The Sound and the Fury also represents the presence of an unexplained trauma and fills a gap in Benjy's mind. Benjy's successive howls also serve to reveal a certain degree of instability in the novel's other characters. As trauma begets trauma, the other characters begin to recognize the necessity of maintaining effective communication with one another. Their change in attitude is due at least in part to their having witnessed Benjy's futile attempts to make himself understood. The wrenching sound of his suffering reveals the extent of his trauma and underlines the dramatic composition of the novel. Ebileeni's explantion of the symptom in Conrad and the sinthome in [End Page 96] Faulkner employs terms which Lacan defined in his 1974 and 1976 seminars in Paris. The symptom, or what is going wrong in a character, is considered by Lacan to be a form of neurosis, while the sinthome, the place where an error appears, creates a situation closer to psychosis. Lacan used the example of a three-ringed Borromean knot in order to...

”Din frihet är nära kopplad till min egen”: En feministisk psykoanalytisk läsning av emancipations- och modersmotiv i Maud Reuterswärds Elisabet-trilogi

Title: Your Freedom is Closely Connected to my Own: A Feminist Psychoanalytical Reading of the Motifs of Emancipation and Motherhood in Maud Reutersward's Elisabet Trilogy One of the most complex forms of relationship in fiction for young adults seems to be the one between mothers and daughters. The Swedish author Maud Reutersward (1920-1980) has written several books for young adults in which a relational crisis between a mother and her daughter is the central theme. Throughout Reutersward’s trilogy about Elisabet Hof, the mother plays a key role. The trilogy features an emotionally instable and mentally absent mother whose depression eventually leads to her attempting to commit suicide. Through a psychoanalytical lens, this paper highlights and discusses how the mother-daughter relationship in Reutersward’s trilogy is mediated through dialogue, point of view and tone. The mother’s voice and the verbal communication between mother and daughter is focused by using Luce Irigaray’s theoretical approach of the maternal function in psychoanalysis and culture. In addition the paper attempts to widen the critical perspectives and provide alternative ways of understanding the mother in Reutersward’s trilogy.

Theorizing the Deep Parallel between Goffman and Freud: Goffman's Interaction Order as a Social-structural Underpinning of Psychoanalytic Concepts of the Self

A dialectical reading of Goffman and Freud connects the Interaction Order to the psychoanalytic conception of the self and thereby open up new possibilities of interpretation and transformation. Goffman’s concept of the Interaction Order enables us to understand more clearly the Freudian concepts of superego, ego-ideal, and the introjected Father. Next, we draw out the dramaturgical approach of both Goffman and Freud in terms of performing self and performing illness and discuss how the psychoanalytic reading of Goffman’s work sheds light on the formation of neuroses and the neurotic symptoms which Freud characterized as a type of performance. Here we link Freud’s “symptoms” to Goffman’s modes of disordered or flawed modes of interaction, specifically hysteria connected to havoc and obsessive compulsive disorder connected to hyperritualization. This dialectical reading allows us to rethink notions of sociality and thereby opens new possibilities for constituting the relation between the self and the social.

Pantomimes of Death within Suburbia: Abject Boredom in Yates’Revolutionary Road, Lynch'sBlue Velvet, and Bowen's “Attractive Modern Homes”

AbstractThis article will apply a psychoanalytical reading to suburbia, claiming that boredom is the trigger of abjection. The focus will be on the theories of Julia Kristeva, and the short story “Attractive Modern Homes,” by Elizabeth Bowen, the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, and Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch. The first section will examine boredom as a modern phenomenon, developed from the ennui of the cities as a coping mechanism for suburbia. This article will suggest that boredom itself cannot be perceived as a state. Instead, it is only when an event penetrates boredom that this state can be recognized and radicalized. These events will be explored as examples of Kristeva's “primal repressions.” The second section will explore the abject and the emergence of the Real, focusing on moments of abjection in the sources. Within these, the abject is portrayed as a pantomime of death, bound to the confrontation with mortality. However, there can be no escape from the symbolic order, and the conventions of suburbia are maintained. The final section will study the fetishism of language, resulting in isolation from self.

Apocalyptic Narcissism and the Difficulty of Mourning

In this article I examine how death and loss feature in recent apocalypse fiction and suggest that, in a genre mostly concerned with finitude, there appears to be paradoxically little room for expressions of mourning. I assess contemporary attitudes towards mortality through the writings of Philippe Aries, Zygmunt Bauman, Simon Critchley and others, and propose a psychoanalytic reading of solitary survivor narrative, inspired by the work of Martin Jay. In the final part of the article, I turn to Sigmund Freud and Rene Girard to explore the relation between apocalyptic teleology, melancholy, and the expectation of global catastrophe.

Kautilya’s The Arthashastra: A Marxist and Psychoanalytical Reading of Select Chapters in Book I.

In the proposed paper, we attempt to make use of some highly influential theories such as Marxist theory and Psychoanalytical Theory to analyze the pioneering work on statecraft and political psychology namely The Arthashastra by Kautilya (370-283BC) a classical discourse, which is highly relevant even today. For instance, the paper uses the concepts propounded by Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramci. Althusser’s concept of ‘state power’ and ‘state control’ along with Gramci’s concept of ‘rule’ and ‘hegemony’ is associated with Kautilya’s technique of ‘demonstrating omniscience’ of the king which is described in Book I, chapter X1. Kautilya refers in Book I, chapter IX about ‘ambition’ and ‘lust’ as the general methods in tackling clandestine agents for protecting the best interests of the King. Such an idea wouldn’t have dawned upon Kautilya unless he makes an intense probe into the fundamental nature of human psyche. This fact becomes even more surprising because it was written in 4th century when there hadn’t been any systematic and established body of knowledge on human mind and the unconscious as we have today in the 21st century. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s2p678

Slavoj Žižek, Rex Libris, and the Traumatic Real

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek to gain insights into representations of the librarian and the library in contemporary popular culture. Design/methodology/approach – A psycho-analytic reading of the comic book series Rex Libris using Slavoj Žižek’s treatment of Jacques Lacan. Findings – Žižek’s approach can provide novel and previously unconsidered insights into the understanding of librarian stereotypes in particular and representations of the library in general. Research limitations/implications – This paper is limited to the representations of the librarian and the library in one comic book series. Its findings need to be generalized to representations in other forms of popular culture. Originality/value – As far as the authors know, this is the only paper that has applied the work of Žižek in the library and information science (LIS) literature. As such, not only are the insights into the representations of librarians and libraries important, this paper also acts as a valuable introduction to the work of Žižek for the LIS community of scholars.

Arendt on the Couch

Margarethe von Trotta’s film Hannah Arendt starts and ends with its protagonist on the couch. Hannah Arendt’s intellectual objection to psychoanalysis notwithstanding, this framing invites us to consider the psychoanalytical symptoms Arendt’s own thinking is caught up in. The essay reads the Eichmann trial episode as one telling instance of a repetition pattern that spans Arendt’s intellectual life: Arendt thought and wrote provocatively, sometimes ruthlessly, exposing herself to condemnation and risk. This psychoanalytic reading opens up the possibility that by voicing her controversial judgments, Arendt re-created for herself the conditions of her own precarity, summoning time and again her personal formative trauma as a refugee only to survive it each time. Arendt’s uncharacteristically two-dimensional account of Eichmann’s personality in Eichmann in Jerusalem is read along these lines as symptomatic of this very survivor trauma.

Review: Viollet-le-Duc: Les visions d’un architecte

Viollet-le-Duc: Les visions d’un architecte Cite de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Palais de Chaillot, Paris 20 November 2014–9 March 2015 Organized to mark the bicentennial of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc’s birth as well as to showcase an important archival donation, Viollet-le-Duc: Les visions d’un architecte challenged received notions of the rationalist practitioner rooted in positivist thought and natural science. An enormous assembly of drawings, objects, personal writings, and ephemera returned Viollet to his romantic roots and centered his oeuvre on a lifelong series of hallucinatory visions. While reflective of a recent romantic turn in Viollet studies, the show failed to represent the full complexity of that scholarship. For instance, Martin Bressani’s Architecture and the Historical Imagination (2014) deploys a psychoanalytic reading of early personal loss to position Viollet within larger historical processes and events.1 Although this exhibition similarly delved into biography to reframe the prolific and polyvalent nature of Viollet’s practice, its consistent recourse to a reductive literary romanticism ultimately occluded his implication in the full breadth of nineteenth-century intellectual and social development. The exhibition best promoted the “visionary” in its treatment of Viollet’s decisive encounter with Prosper Merimee and his series of youthful voyages in pursuit of the sublime and folkloric. However, when presented beside his companions’ travel albums, the obsessive detail of Viollet’s drawings—whether focused on architecture, local costume, or geological formation—suggested a …