Psychoanalytic Terms Research Articles

A Psychoanalysis of Female Characters in the Novels Heat and Dust and Inside the Haveli : Function of Mother Archetype in the Characters of the Narrator and Geeta

The psychoanalysts enhance our understanding of our consciousness, the self and self-identity. Psychoanalytic theory plays an important role in the comprehension of the fundamental condition of selfhood. The self is not an unified entity in psychoanalytical terms. Human subject emerges as an outcrop of the unconscious desire. After Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, a swiss psychologist is considered as an eminent contributor to psychoanalysis who theorized the concept of collective unconscious. The purpose of my study is to find out the presence of the collective unconscious and to analyse two female characters, The Narrator , from the novel Heat and Dust and Geeta from Inside the Haveli with the help of Jung's theory of collective unconscious and mother archetype. In this research paper several theoretical concepts of Carl Jung are used to analyse the female characters. Jung’s theories are applied during the analysis process such as personal conscious, collective conscious and archetypes. I would use qualitative method for the analysis of the characters of the Narrator and Geeta. I would use important dialogues and incidents for the data collection for the analysis of the characters. The psychoanalytic study of the Narrator and Geeta shows that they both have collective unconscious. I would study the function of mother archetype in the life of the Narrator and Geeta

Iconicity and Deconstruction: the Prose by Vladimir Nabokov and the 20<sup>th </sup> Century Post-Modernist Philosophy

Introduction. This research aims at analyzing the novel by Vladimir Nabokov Transparent Things (1972) from the perspective of post-modernist philosophy. By post-modernist philosophy I mean the post-structural view of the sign theory, that focuses on iconicity, symbolic and iconic nature of the sign, the сoncept of deconstruction, the concept of rhizome, the concept of silence, the concept of différance (as stated by Derrida), the concept of difference and repetition introduced by G. Deleuze. This philosophy is linked to a more general view expressed, for instance, by Derrida (in his work the Gift of Death (Donner la mort)). The main innovative element of this research, therefore, is to study the prose by Nabokov as an example of post-modernist writing simultaneously applying the views and concepts introduced by cognitive linguistics, literary critics and post-modern writers like J. Derrida, U. Eco, R. Barthes.Methodology and sources. The research method used is semantic and structural analysis of the novel by Nabokov Transparent Things. Its main tool is the use of ideas introduced by French poststructuralists regarding the theory of sign, the symbolic nature of language, study of multiple meanings generated by a word in the process of its use and decoding.Results and discussion. The results of this research allow to outline main tendencies in the development of the 20th century narrative. It adheres to the general law of multi-level structure of the novel, play of words and sounds, which corresponds to the general view of difference (as coined by Derrida), deconstruction, rhizome, iconicity of sign. The rhizomorphic structure of the novel at the same time is mirror-like, which allows to apply the difference-repetition dichotomy put forward by G. Deleuze. If the micro-structure of Nabokov’s texts allows to make generalization about the author’s use of language, its macro-structure reveals deeper philosophical notions, implying that the death of the character in the novel leads to the study of the transcendental, or ”the Other” in psychoanalytical terms, thus putting the plot on a different scale of values. The view of language and its structure in its relation to the notion of transparency, allows to see the sign in a Heideggerian way, as bearing the replica of the world, having more in itself about the world, than anything else.Conclusion. The novel Transparent Things by Nabokov falls into the category of similar novels in which the author develops symbolic language and explores its potential, following the general pattern and establishing the rules of narrative construction in postmodern tradition.

The difference between neuroscience and psychoanalysis: Irreducibility of absence to brain states

ABSTRACT There is a difference between neuroscience and psychoanalysis in terms of their primary correlate for subjectivity. Neuroscience defines its discourse in relationship to the materiality of the brain – something that is present – whereas one of the defining features of psychoanalysis is its relationship to problematic forms of absence, namely, unconscious mental processes. One central concern in this regard is the proposition of unconscious mental processes as a wish-fulfillment. In this paper, the logic of the unconscious as a wish-fulfillment is mobilized as a type of knowledge having significant value for understanding neuroscience as a social and historical community. From this perspective, one of the central problems of neuroscience, the “hard problem of consciousness,” is framed not as a problem of neurological correlation but of problematic experience itself. This reframing of the hard problem of consciousness suggests that in order to bring neuroscience and psychoanalysis together, theorists need to think principles of absence. This can be explored with the metaphysics of absence, where indeterminacy and incompleteness become central, and also in the psychoanalytic formulation of the death drive, where we reach the limit of conscious mastery and control. From this foundation, neuroscience and psychoanalysis may find productive dialogue in constructing an “absential science” which would allow a space for new theory of the human relationship to sex (libido) and death (mortality). This paper argues that such new theory is necessary because the future development of neuroscientific technologies could transform fundamental experiences of absence which structure subjective discourse.

A Measure of Philosophical Distance

A Measure of Philosophical Distance Bhrigupati Singh (bio) How is conceptual foreignness received within an existing territory? I am grateful to my respondents for receiving my invocation of foreignness from phenomenological psychopathology not as a question of culture or nationality but rather, in terms of philosophical distance. As I ask in the article: how do we measure philosophical distance? Rather than complete agreement, or assimilation, or estrangement, perhaps distance is best calibrated through the small events of thought–understandings, misunderstandings, and clarifications, that punctuate even the most thoughtful and hospitable reception, as I have been fortunate to receive from our respondents. In my brief response, I will focus on some of these smaller events and crossings, in the hope of further specifying what Cavell’s philosophical corpus might offer to the study of schizophrenic experience and psychic life. As a foreigner enters a territory, they may carry seeds to re-plot a local antagonism. Van Duppen and Feyaerts point to one such antagonism within phenomenological psychopathology, between the “ipseity disturbance model” (the idea that schizophrenia is essentially a disorder of the “minimal self”), as against approaches that suggest “whether the inter-subjective dimension would instead be a vital or ‘core’ aspect of psychotic disorders.” Van Duppen and Feyaerts find my article favorably weighted to one end of this antagonism, namely how there are “different reasons to consider the social dimension as essential to the phenomenology of psychosis.” Agreeable as this sounds to anthropological ears, I want to re-emphasize a different, prior problem that I suggest in my article, namely that with Cavell it is not a question of the subjectivity of one versus the inter-subjectivity of two or more. Rather, more radically, the difference between “intra” and “inter” subjectivity is not as commonsensical as it seems, even in “normal” consciousness, leaving aside for the moment schizophrenic pathologies and auditory hallucinations. This is not to say that the difference between one and many, and between “intra” and “inter” subjectivity is entirely dissolved. Rather, in Cavell’s unorthodox rendering of the history of reason and unreason, the modern “advent” of the investigation of skeptical doubt begins not with Descartes but with Shakespeare. Within Cavell’s counter-history of philosophy that moves through different forms of comedy and tragedy and poetry and film, the deepest “core” of the “intra” subjective may be vulnerable to and composed and undone or remade in relation to particular others. What if we were to re-plot the “social” versus “ipseity” as a misleading distinction, what concepts then, would we move towards? One way to rename the issue may be of “linking,” even to oneself. As such, many of the concepts of this article, pitch, tone, [End Page 285] intensity, and so on, are signposts, as much to the study of the “intra” (e.g., in studying the ebb and flow of “ruminations” and “mood alterations”, as with Shyam), as they are to “inter” subjectivity. In this vein, Van Duppen and Feyaerts rightly invoke Wilfred Bion’s “Attacks on Linking,” which may indeed be one among other possible resources for further thought in reconfiguring the intra/inter distinction, as with Bion’s invocation of the primitive breast or penis as the “prototype for all links” (1955, p. 125) that may compose or inform even the “minimal” self. Having marked this resonance, I also want to flag a different intuition of distance, leaving it open for future measurement. The ethnographic and literary instances I take up in this article are each also interpretable in psychoanalytic terms, as “Oedipal” (Vishal and Rekha), as expressing a “murderous superego” (Shyam and his upper caste neighbors), and as repetition compulsions (Mark and Karin). Guided by Cavell, I do not interpret them as such. Cavell offers an “anti-Oedipus” (in ways distinct from Deleuze and Guattari), namely, a proximity to, and sharp difference from psychoanalytic terms of interpretation, in ways yet to be explored. To reduce these current and future directions and antagonisms of thought to only the “social” dimension of schizophrenia would be to have banished the foreignness of the foreigner, much to our own loss. In what other ways might foreignness be received? After a generous opening summary of...

How difficult it is to think about uncertainty and perplexity

ABSTRACT The author has covered a range of issues to define concepts in psychoanalytic terms that are missing from psychoanalytic theory: the social, social subjectivity, the pain of the social, unpredictability, and uncertainty. First, she reconsiders social pain and social suffering from the perspective proposed by Freud in 1921 in terms of three psychic spaces – intersubjective, intrasubjective and transsubjective – which she considers to be different from one another, and she proposes that pain is manifested in different modes in each of these spaces. Second, she defines the concept of the social, separating it from the mass and proposing the concept of the collective as truly social. She emphasizes that the collective takes on its subjectivating potential when being together builds a “bond” (vínculo). Third, she considers that belonging to a “social” collective creates the illusion of being protected from uncertainty and unpredictability. She identifies uncertainty as a vínculo-regulating psychoanalytic principle that is manifested as perplexity. Finally, at the end of the paper, a section titled “A few situations” includes examples of daily clinical work with patients who have been tortured or who experience political threats or a threat to their lives due to losing their jobs and, as a result, their livelihoods. The final case, which describes an entire session, shows the dynamics of transference–countertransference in working with these situations.

Confusion of tongues: Chinese/English/German psychoanalytic dialogues

ABSTRACT Translation of psychoanalytic texts is notoriously complex, amplified by differences between Western languages/cultures and China. Freud labelled translation “traitorous”. A current challenge is the trend among some professional translators to diminish or eliminate hierarchies of accurate and inaccurate translations. We argue for accurate translation to transmit psychoanalytic concepts in Mandarin Chinese. The English Standard Edition involved unfortunate choices to “Latinize” key Freudian terms; for example, Es, Ich and Überich were rendered as Id, Ego and Supergo, instead of more experience-near common language equivalents in English, “it, I and over I.” Similarly, some recent translations of German and English psychoanalytic terms into Mandarin Chinese have also tended to perpetuate intellectualized distancing from Freud's original vivid words. Here, we focus on seven critical terms for core psychoanalytic concepts: Ich/I, Es/it, Überich/superego, Transference (Übertragung), Countertransference (Gegenübertragung), Psyche/Soul (Psyche/Seele), psychoanalysis and (surprisingly) schizophrenia. We suggest that the currently popular oral-aural translations from English into Mandarin perpetuate distancing and lead to mis-translations that obscure our foundational concepts. We propose alternative Mandarin translations for some terms and discuss the broader cultural challenges involved in transmitting the heart (and soul) of psychoanalysis with Chinese colleagues.

The Passion of the Space Jockey: Alienated Sentience and Endosymbiosis in the World of H. R. Giger

Abstract The “biomechanoids” of the Swiss painter H. R. Giger (1940–2014) depict the sadomasochistic bondage of humans and machines. Although Giger’s art has commonly been interpreted in psychoanalytic terms as representing some past trauma connected with origins and birth, I argue that it also encodes a distinctly gnostic warning about the trajectory of consciousness in relation to technology, a “fall of spirit into matter” that may lie ahead of our species rather than behind. With the help of the endosymbiosis theory of biologist Lynn Margulis, I decode the dark warning transmission in Giger’s work, especially the iconic “Space Jockey” Giger designed for Ridley Scott’s 1979 blockbuster Alien—a fossilized star pilot fused to its ship. As a vision of the more disturbing possibilities of cyborgs or human-machine symbionts, the Space Jockey contrasts sharply with optimistic dreams of Singularities and “spiritual machines.” It suggests a posthuman future in which distinctly nonspiritual machines find it useful to coopt or exploit spirit (human or otherwise) for their own ends.

Bureaucracy and Desire: Franz Kafka’s Accident Report

In as much as accidents are a malfunction, an interruption and even a source of horror, they also offer inexhaustible discursive potential. As an inevitable negative consequence of technological and industrial progress, accidents remind us of the contingent occurrence of disorder: they become an immaterial threat and yet they also fascinate, and create possibilities for narration.1 In the attempt to grasp, register and regulate them, accidents become cases for insurance and are transformed into data in statistical analysis. The question of guilt and liability is, thereby, replaced in the insurance system by the category of risk.2 As such, the bureaucratic and legal aspects of accidents became relevant aesthetic and narrative considerations for several modernist authors, including Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.3Franz Kafka, in his dual occupation as literary author and professional writer, a so-called concipist(responsible for writing legal documents or signing documents written by his superiors) towards the end of the Habsburg Monarchy, seems to be the ideal candidate to observe all these developments in insurance and accident prevention. In the following first section of this essay, an example from Kafka’s Travel Diariesgives an idea of his own poetics of accidentin the making (Wagner: 2007): Kafka’s 1911 report of a car accident provides us with key insights in the interrelation between the factual and the fictional world. In the second section, the function of reports and files in his 1926 institution-novel The Castleshows the possibilities of literary writing and narration in a milieu, where lifeand institutionintervene in each other (Campe: 2005).4 Finally, and against this background, I explore how the fundamental psychoanalytic term of desire is shaped in a pursuit for institutional and official recognition, so that a specific kind of official desire – in German Amtsbegehren – emerges (Wolf: 2018).5

Glimpses of Id Domination and Abreaction in Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites

First Love, Last Rites, a collection of short stories by Ian McEwan was published in 1975. This was the first work written by McEwan that consist eight short stories with estranged and perplexed themes. Ian McEwan received a mixed reaction of criticism as well as appreciation by the readers. The stories are usually of fifteen to twenty pages with the following titles – “Solid Geometry”, “Homemade”, “Last Day of Summer”, “Cocker at the Theatre”, “Butterflies”, “Conversation with a Cupboard Man” and “First Love, Last Rites” and “Disguise”. The author has also included a short story named after the title of his collection. There are numerous aspects in the stories where either the narrators or the protagonists talk about their suppressed emotions or fulfilled desires without being concerned about the societal norms and environment around them. This paper will analyse eight short stories of McEwan in light of the psychoanalytical terms, ‘Id Domination’ and ‘Abreaction’.

“One that Returns”: Home, Hantu, and Spectre in Simone Lazaroo’s The Australian Fiancé (2000)

SummaryThe Eurasian writer, Simone Lazaroo, has lived most of her life in Australia. Her fiction seeks to reconnect with a cultural heritage to re-establish a sense of home and belonging, a move that is both a return – in that Lazaroo situates her narratives in the Asian contexts of her birth in Singapore and her paternal connection with Malaysia – and an origin because it “begins” by “coming back” (Derrida 1994: 10). In Spectres of Marx, Derrida writes that just “as Marx had his ghosts, we [too] have ours, but memories no longer recognise such borders; by definition, they pass through walls, these revenants, day and night, they trick consciousness and skip generations” (1994: 36). I explore this site of penetrable boundaries, between the “ghost” that haunts in the West – accountable in philosophical and psychoanalytical terms – and the seemingly unaccountable “hantu” in the Singaporean context. Instead, I work with Derrida’s idea of the “absent presence” or the “visible invisible” to raise questions about the female body, both spectral and Eurasian. I also explore spectrality in the motif of the photograph.

Candido e Freud: fragmentos do vivido em Boitempo I

Antonio Candido, no artigo “Poesia e ficção autobiográfica”, enfoca a questão da memória em autores mineiros, centrando-se, sobretudo, em Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Murilo Mendes e Pedro Nava. A leitura aqui pretendida rastreia sua proposta analítica relacionada ao primeiro poeta, mais especificamente a seu livro Boitempo I, sublinhando os fragmentos do vivido, capturados a partir de “cenas, casos e emoções da infância” do poeta. Candido destaca a construção de tais traços pelo eu lírico adulto, ou seja, a forma pela qual o presente atua no passado, ressignificando-o literariamente e sem ignorar diferentes olhares interpretativos, inclusive citando Freud, ao retomar J. Guilherme Merquior, incorporando, portanto, o apoio teórico da psicanálise. Na esteira da crítica, o ensaísta reafirma – e vai além – a presença do humor mais leve em Drummond, algo distinto do conjunto de sua obra e mais voltado para a “trama do mundo como espetáculo”, ideia fulcral vinculada a uma associação entre o eu e a cultura, mas também a um “dar a ver”, que pode ser pensado em termos psicanalíticos. Como na maioria de seus textos, Antonio Candido sintetiza finas reflexões que, desmembradas, abrem aos leitores vários caminhos interpretativos. É um deles que se intenta trilhar aqui.

The inspiration of the ancients: Ceres and Proserpina from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. Infant observation meets the classics

ABSTRACTThis paper makes a link between classical literature and psychoanalysis by way of a parallel in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Infant Observation. The writer uses Ted Hughes’s translation of the tale of Ceres and Proserpina to link the myth of the seasons’ renewal with the psychoanalytic development of the baby seen in psychoanalytic terms. The story told by Hughes is seen as an illuminating version of the infant’s farewell to life at the breast, the dawning of anal and genital stirrings and the dramatic appearance of the Oedipal configuration. Pluto ravishes Proserpina away to Hades and she has to be half yielded up by her mother Ceres; while in the end both darkness and light, grief and happiness, winter and summer are seen as a complementary part of the human condition just as after the surmounting of weaning comes the advent of depressive feelings.

Heroes and Representations of Masculinity in Thai Action Films

This paper contextualises a cultural construction of hegemonic masculinity and discusses ways in which Thai action film heroes in historical and Muay Thai films are represented. Traditionally, the quality of nakleng is desirable for Thai action heroes along with having mastery in a particular skill. In the moral realm, the idea of gratitude or khwam-katanyu in Thai, is prioritised and highly regarded to be the inevitable requisite for good men, which includes action heroes. This sense of gratitude extends to one’s ideological obligations to one’s motherland or matuphum, which is often thematically portrayed in Muay Thai and historical films through the struggle of the hero. Based on a reading of the two exemplar films, Ong Bak (Muay Thai Warrior 2003, dir. Prachya Pinkaew) and The Legend of King Naresuan: The Elephant Duel (2014, dir. Chatri Chalerm Yukol), the different social backgrounds of the two heroes, their hegemonic masculinity, autonomy and lack can be explained in relation to the discourse of Buddhist spirituality. In addition, the ways in which the two heroes are differently depicted is a cinematic device with the aid of which, in addition to the observance of filmic verisimilitude, the representations are designed to cater to segmented subject/citizen audiences. In psychoanalytic terms, each hero from the two films is similarly made to acquire autonomy and experience ‘lack’ in different realms of the symbolic order.

Freudian Slip? The Changing Cultural Fortunes of Psychoanalytic Concepts.

It is often argued that psychoanalysis has declined in prominence since its ascendance in the mid-20th century. To assess this claim we examined the trajectory of psychoanalytic concepts from 1900 to 2008 in the massive Google Books database. The changing relative frequency of a sample of English-language psychoanalytic terms was explored and compared to a sample of terms in French. The frequency of the English terms was further explored from 2008 to 2017 using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The English terms rose steeply from the 1940s and declined steeply from the early 1990s. In contrast, the French terms rose steeply from the 1960s and plateaued from the 1970s. In addition, psychoanalytic terms were markedly more prominent in French since the 1960s. The findings are discussed in the context of historical trends in the reception of psychoanalysis in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds.

Before Laboratory Life: Perry, Sullivan and the missed encounter between psychoanalysis and STS

This article explores the potential fruitfulness of an encounter between psychoanalysis and science and technology studies (STS) by examining Perry’s (The Human Nature of Science: Researchers at Work in Psychiatry, The Free Press, New York, 1966) book, and its intellectual and socio-cultural background. From his close observation of experimental LSD therapy in a psychiatric research center in the USA, Perry seminally claimed—a decade ahead of similar claims in STS—the social construction of scientific theory. His work, being idiosyncratic as a hybrid of STS and psychoanalysis in terms of both his research subject and research framework, later sank into complete oblivion. Examined here, first, is the parallel development of the reflexivity concept in both STS and psychoanalysis: Harry S. Sullivan’s pivotal role in introducing sociological reflexivity into the latter is detailed. Second, the predicament of mental institutions in the post-war USA is identified as the important milieu that allowed such diverse approaches as Erving Goffman’s Asylums. The highlighted potential of Perry’s work vis-a-vis contemporary STS is its reflexive ethnography that combines research ethics with emotional dynamics in situ. This contribution is contrasted with its limited applicability to large-scale social issues, another lesson we learn from this historical reflection.

Post-Truth, Hegemonic Discourse and the Psychoanalytic Task of Decentering

This paper offers a psychological definition of truth and construes subjectivity as evolving from dynamic tensions between conflicting truths that inhabit and structure the psyche. Exploring the epistemic multiplicity of the mind in philosophic and psychoanalytic terms, psychic malaise and hegemonic discourse are formulated in terms of the domination of particular truths at the expense of the repression and dissociation of others. In this context the concept of “post-truth” is discussed in terms of hegemony, discourse and a regressive tendency to grant truth a single definition that is consequently imposed on the psyche. A clinical vignette illustrates the creation of a transitional truth-space that reverses the exclusion of particular truths and engages in a truths dialogue on both inter- and intrasubjective levels.

The attachment control system and computational modeling: Origins and prospects.

From his first attempts to explain attachment phenomena in the 1940s through his Attachment and Loss trilogy (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980), John Bowlby reformulated the theoretical underpinnings of attachment theory several times. He initially attempted to explain attachment phenomena in psychoanalytic terms. Then he invoked ethological theory in the explanation of how and why people behave as they do in close personal relationships. The mature theoretical framework that he presented between 1969 and 1982 in the attachment and loss trilogy retained strengths and insights, ultimately situating them within an overarching control systems framework. This article describes key stages in Bowlby's theoretical development, with particular emphasis placed on the emergence of control systems theory as a cornerstone of the mature theory. It also compares Bowlby's control systems approach to contemporary cognitive science approaches. It concludes by suggesting how Bowlby's control systems formulation could evolve along the path opened up by contemporary work in computational modeling and how it could benefit by doing so. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Samuel Beckett's ‘Psychology Notes’ and The Unnamable

This essay reexamines Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable by treating his ‘Psychology Notes’ as part of the genetic dossier for this text. By developing a parallel between The Unnamable and ‘textbook’ psychoanalysis in terms of a shared obsession with abjection, the essay will demonstrate that some of the symptoms and obsessions suffered by the unnamable voice (‘prison psychosis’, ‘coprosymbolism’ and ‘genital discharge’) are traceable to the Notes. At the same time, the commitment to cure, control and explanation in psychoanalysis is resisted, and Beckett's text ultimately stages a failed talking cure. The genetic identification of these intertextual connections is enhanced by the availability of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP). Using the same scholarly tool, the essay also examines some of the variations between the English and the French versions of the text, in order to shed further light on the significance of the Notes to the manuscript corpus of L'Innommable/The Unnamable.

«Se mi ascolti e mi credi». In ricordo di Giorgio Antonucci (1933-2017). Nota introduttiva

Dopo un nota introduttiva di Eugenia Omodei Zorini - in cui viene presentata la figura di Giorgio Antonucci (1933-2017), psichiatra di Firenze che fu attivamente impegnato, accanto a Franco Basaglia, nella lotta per i diritti umani dei malati mentali e nella lotta antimanicomiale in Italia - vengono ripubblicati un breve scritto di Giorgio Antonucci e la poesia iniziale della sua raccolta "Sono nata sotto un sole nero (Giulia)", che uscirono nel n. 2/1974 di Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane.

¿Ha muerto Dios? Una perspectiva lacaniana

La “muerte de Dios” apenas si ha sido considerada en términos psicoanalíticos. A partir de algunos planteamientos lacanianos, este artículo intenta aclarar si tal fenómeno debe entenderse como el fin de toda divinidad o más bien como una transformación radical en la relación con ella. Asimismo, el artículo busca determinar las raíces históricas de esta “muerte” y sus efectos sobre la vida anímica de los pueblos occidentales. Como se verá, con esa expresión se enuncia el declive —en nuestra época— de la capacidad inventiva vinculada con el deseo.