Rise Of Psychoanalysis Research Articles

Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880–1914 by Oliver Tearle (review)

Reviewed by: Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880–1914 by Oliver Tearle Ágnes Zsófia Kovács Oliver Tearle. Bewilderments of Vision: Hallucination and Literature, 1880–1914. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic, 2013. 207 pp. $53.32 (hardcover). For Jamesians, Bewilderments of Vision rings with the echo of Strether’s transforming adventure in Paris. In The Ambassadors bewilderment means an experience that forces one to reconsider one’s former notions of his relations to others, his place in the world. One pauses to review different possible interpretations of a sequence of impressions before making a decision on how to interpret them publicly. Bewilderments of Vision has nothing to do with Strether per se, as it maps out how five mostly little known authors used hallucination in their short stories between 1880 and 1914, but the title phrase is borrowed from James (25). “Bewilderment” is relevant here in a general sense: the book links hallucination to the experience of hesitation between different interpretations of a visitation by ghosts, so hallucination becomes a trope for a bewildered sense of ambiguity. From the perspective of Jamesians, then, the issue of hallucination in ghost stories will be linked to the problem of individual perception and experience James was engrossed with in other genres of fiction as well, as has been discussed lately in and on account of Henry James and the Supernatural (Reed and Despotopoulou 5, Pahl 8). Although authors other than James were writing similarly ambiguous ghost stories that also relied on established devices, such as the meta-text of Gothic fiction and the haunted house, they have not received sustained critical attention. Bewilderments of Vision explores little-known ghost stories from before 1914 in which hallucination appears as a narrative ambiguity to be resolved. The book traces the rise and fall in the popularity of the theme with the help of contemporary documents. By the 1920s, the ghost story was an unpopular nineteenth-century genre, while hallucination had spread out of the ghost story and “infested” literature: Modernist literature and art would be its new home. As Virginia Woolf comments on ghost stories by Henry James in 1921: [t]he stories in which Henry James uses the supernatural effectively are, then, those where some quality in a character or in a situation can only be given its fullest meaning by being cut free from facts. Its progress in the unseen world must be closely related to what goes on in this . . . [so] the ghost story, besides its virtues as a ghost story, has the additional charm [End Page E-15] of being also symbolical. . . . Henry James’s ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts—the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin with us. (52–53) The question arises why the ghost story and the theme of hallucination were so popular in the nineteenth century, and exactly what kind of experience hallucination carried when it was transferred to the Modernist text. According to Tearle, hallucination is linked to the psychological aspect of the ghost story, which has not been sufficiently studied before. How did Robert L. Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Henry James, Arthur Machen, and Oliver Onions explore the potential of hallucination for representing psychological content before Modernism? The study answers this question in part by contextualizing the literary issue of hallucination, introducing the contemporary scientific discourse of hallucination the stories rely on. Tearle argues that the falling popularity of psychic science and the rise of psychoanalysis in the early decades of the twentieth century coincided with the decreasing interest in fictive ghosts and hallucinations. The argument starts out by discussing late-nineteenth-century scientific definitions and uses of hallucination. The most important theorist of apparitions, Edmund Gurney, published his volume Phantasms of the Living in 1886, in which he analyzed real cases of hallucinations and proposed the possibility of hallucination among the sane. Gurney recognized the scientific need to find the blurred line between ordinary perception and abnormal perception (hallucination) and defined it as “a percept which lacks, but which can only by distinct reflection be recognized as lacking the objective basis which it suggests” (Tearle 10...

Postpsychoanalytic Proust

A la recherche du temps perdu, the last great pre-Freudian novel of the mind, has attracted much attention from psychoanalytic critics since its publication. This article explores the analysis of Proust’s novel by critics, with a particular focus on the representation of the conscious and unconscious mind. It follows the history of such criticism through the rise of psychoanalysis in the humanities to the waning of its influence in the early years of the present century. The article argues that our postpsychoanalytic present is the ideal moment to reexamine the parallels and divergences between Proust’s and Freud’s understandings of consciousness and to measure them against the rival philosophical and psychological theories developed during the twentieth century. The current pluralism in the humanities’ approach to analyzing representations of the mind allows the literary author’s implicit understanding of mental life to assert itself more clearly.

The History and Development of the Rorschach Test in Turkey

The history of Turkish psychology, the cultural changes, and the rise of psychoanalysis have accompanied the development of Rorschach in Turkey. Yani Anastasiadis, the Turkish Rorschach pioneer, perceived Rorschach as “the radiography of human spirit.” So the history of the Rorschach begins in 1943, and it became widely utilized in hospitals and clinical settings. Although in the 1950s statistical evaluation ruled, Anastasiadis continued his research and presented several articles at conferences and published many written articles. Today other approaches such as Exner’s Comprehensive System and the currently used psychoanalytically oriented Rorschach, highly influenced by French schools, have emerged. The psychoanalytically oriented Rorschach system and the development of psychoanalysis in Turkey in general occurred at the same time, which is not a coincidence. The spread of psychoanalysis as well as the Rorschach test has been helped by a number of associations. The Society of Rorschach and Projective Tests was formed in 2003. Today, there are standardized Turkish norms of adults and adolescents, and several books have been published.

Neuropsychiatry in the UK: planning the service provision for the 21st century

Some believe that Cartesian dualism of mind and body in the 19th century and the rise of psychoanalysis by the turn of the 20th century was what led to the separation of neurology and psychiatry. More recently, conceptualisations of the mind/brain paradigm have helped rediscover the relationship between the mind and the brain, bringing renewed synergy between neurology and psychiatry (Cunninghamet al, 2006). However, division is still apparent in current service planning and provision in the UK for individuals whose presentation lies in the no-man's-land between these two historical domains.

The Return of Negation: The Doppelganger in Freud's "The 'Uncanny'"

by Jean Paul in his novel Siebenkiis, published in 1796. Authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Alan Poe exemplify the originary narratives of the motif and theme of the Doppelgainger.1 Doppelgainger characters tend to be associated with evil and the demonic; thus one can infer that the Doppelginger presents a notion of the subject/subjectivity that is defective, disjunct, split, threatening, spectral. With the rise of psychoanalysis, such epithets are taken to indicate a tendency toward a sense of failure or loss in the self. Thereafter, the Doppelgainger has been commonly viewed as an aberration, the stencil of a symptomatology of the self. In what follows I will challenge such a Doppelginger as the construct of a content-based understanding of fictional motifs and themes, couched in psychoanalytic terminology. To this end, I will re-evaluate the history of the relation between the Doppelginger and psychoanalysis. Admittedly, psychological symptoms or forms of subjective failure can be inferred in the literary instances of the Doppelgainger. However, the Doppelgainger retains the potential to be articulated in positive terms. But this can only come to light by questioning the unproblematic equating of content either as the plot of the story, or as the history of a self with a stable and retrievable origin. When the notion of origin is no longer a simple content, then the Doppelgainger can be allowed to make a contribution toward an ontology of the subject. The subjective ontology that the Doppelginger introduces should not be seen as positing an originary substance or essence. On the contrary, its formal openness allows for its own interruption. At the same time, that openness is impossible without the interruption. The Doppelginger, then, is a form of relationality that is not only a condition of possibility, but also a reflection of and on that condition. In this way, the Doppelganger is aligned to a notion of modernity as interruption.2

Decline and Rise of Psychoanalysis

To the Editor.— From its historic beginnings to the present day, psychoanalysis has had to deal with views such as those of J. H. Conn in Decline of Psychoanalysis (228:711, 1974). As a psychoanalyst and as chairman of the Committee on Public Information of the American Psychoanalytic Association, I have had occasion to respond to misconceptions about psychoanalysis on a number of occasions. Conn published similar comments on Rise and Decline of Psychoanalysis in Psychiatric Opinion (10:34-38, 1973). My response at that time is, again, appropriate. First, let me present some facts that should help raise some questions about what Conn sees as a decline. The American Psychoanalytic Association is the largest organization of psychoanalysts in the United States, with a membership of 2,050 psychoanalysts, 32 affiliated societies, and 23 training centers all over the country. In addition, there are some 800 psychoanalysts-in-training and some 600 who are

Decline and Rise of Psychoanalysis

To the Editor.— As a practicing psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, my own experience does not support Dr. Conn's conclusions as to the current status of psychoanalysis. Local, national, and international society membership and meeting attendance suggest quite the opposite. Statistics from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, compiled a little over a year ago, indicate that of the roughly 250 graduates, two thirds hold academic appointments in medical schools, ranging from lecturers to department heads to medical school deans. I have no reason to believe that other psychoanalytic training centers have not also made equivalent contributions to the training of future physicians and psychiatrists. How can such statistics be squared with the statement that psychoanalysis is on the way out? Psychoanalytic theory continues to evolve. It has not stopped, as Dr. Conn implies, with the reification of the id, superego, and ego, nor is it content with increasingly questioned energic metaphors of

Letter: Decline and rise of psychoanalysis

Letter: Decline and rise of psychoanalysis

Decline and Rise of Psychoanalysis

To the Editor.— Dr. Conn's Procrustean sonnet is neither truncated nor stretched to fill the analytic couch. It is a collage-assemblage of quotations and references more appropriate to a stockmarket analyst quoting the priceearnings ratios of the Dow-Jones stock list. The fact that everyone and his cousin is now involved in mental health hardly signifies an end to an era. More accurately, it shows the impact of psychoanalysis on all disciplines. To obscure its basics and substantialities under synthetic revisions and blenderized versions is to deny the patrimony of a singular genius. Dr. Conn forgets too quickly the days of wet sheets, padded cells, and straightjackets. The plethoric spawnings that litter the landscape today did originate from the time that Freud paid his patients the supreme compliment of listening to them seriously. At the beginning of this century, some medical schools, diploma mills, and cultist fads were unsavory. Regulation and