Strange Condition Research Articles

The Archetype of the Anima and the Phenomenon of Anima Projection in Wilkie Collins’s Basil

First published in 1852, Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel Basil offers a very fascinating portrayal of anima projection through the story of an aristocratic young man against the backdrop of Victorian England. The protagonist of the novel falls head over heels in love with a mysterious dark lady called Margaret after a chance encounter on an omnibus. Following a hasty marriage with strange conditions, he spends a whole year in her company – neglecting his own family – until he discovers that he was deceived by Margaret who had been having an affair with her father’s clerk Mannion. This article argues that the intensity of the connection Basil feels for Margaret can be attributed to what the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung called anima projection. Jung defined the archetype of the anima as the feminine element in a man and suggested that it was knowable only through projections that contained our own psychic contents. When we project our anima or animus on to a person, our perception of that person is fundamentally altered. As Basil’s case aptly illustrates, when the anima is projected, it is almost impossible to recognize it in us since it appears outside of us, embodied in another human being. Drawing on insights from Jungian psychoanalysis, this article will examine the archetype of the anima and the phenomenon of anima projection in Wilkie Collins’s Basil.

"The Terror of Death Began To Stalk Him": The Mysterious Fistula of Charles the Wise.

For 23 years, Charles V "The Wise" of France suffered from a mysterious fistula on his left arm that continuously drained pus. For all this time, he believed that as soon as the fistula ceased to weep, he would have a mere 15 days before death followed. His death in 1380, at the young age of 42, seemingly proved this assumption correct. This paper explores the possible explanations from arsenic poisoning at the hands of his longtime nemesis Charles II, as many of his contemporaries believed, to an undiagnosed case of hidradenitis suppurativa, to an underlying tuberculosis infection, to the possibility that his condition was entirely self-inflicted. While it is impossible to determine a definitive cause, it is highly unlikely that Charles II "The Bad" of Navarre had anything to do with his rival's strange condition.

Female Freedom and The Neapolitan Novels (Part 2)

AbstractPart 1 of this essay began to develop a philosophical interpretation of The Neapolitan Novels by grounding a vision of the work's moral psychology in the tradition of Italian difference feminism, particularly as it is expressed in the texts of the influential Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. Part 2 advances the interpretive argument by presenting a more detailed literary analysis of the character of Lila Cerullo. After motivating the interest of various aspects of her symbolization by connecting them to important motifs in feminist philosophy and literature, I present evidence of Lila's special status in the work, and the puzzles this status raises. I advance a reading of Lila as a brilliant woman capable of playing the superior role in a hierarchical relationship of entrustment—and of The Neapolitan Novels as a sympathetic yet critical exploration of the viability of such relationships and their connection to female friendship and female freedom. In support of this reading, I give an account of Lila's strange condition of smarginatura (“dissolving margins/boundaries”), the import of her perplexing earthquake speech in which this condition is explicitly addressed, and Elena Greco's troubling reactions.

Female Freedom andThe Neapolitan Novels(Part 1)

AbstractThis essay begins to develop a philosophical interpretation of Elena Ferrante'sL'amica geniale, a work of fiction that is known in English asThe Neapolitan Novels. My ultimate aim is to explore the work's ambitious moral psychology, and particularly its subtle conceptualization of women's path to freedom. I begin by reconstructing some of the main ideas of Italian difference feminism as they are expressed in the texts of the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective—texts that are controversial milestones of Italian social theory, yet are relatively unknown outside of Italy. I then show how these ideas provide a useful frame of reference for interpreters of Ferrante's novel. This discussion sets up a more extended analysis (in part 2 of this essay) of the special status of Lila Cerullo, her strange condition ofsmarginatura(“dissolving boundaries”), and the import of her puzzling earthquake speech.

A Study on the Pathology of Schizophrenia

Often mistaken as ‘paranormal’ some mental disorders can indeed be intimidating. People claiming that they hear voices or that they could see people who other people don’t could actually point towards a very strange mental condition called ‘schizophrenia’. People suffering from the disease show a broad range of symptoms that makes it difficult to get diagnosed. The exact causes of the disease could not be known but it is believed to be a result of the combined effect of many factors that include environmental conditions and genetics. This paper covers the symptoms, causes, and treatment of the disease and portrays its history and steady evolution.

Stephanus Bisius (1724–1790) on mania and melancholy, and the disorder called plica polonica

ABSTRACT Stephanus Bisius (1724–1790) was a physician of Italian descent and a graduate of the University of Pavia. He was invited to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the early 1760s and became head of the Faculty of Medicine at Vilnius University in 1781. In 1772, Bisius had authored the first original study on nervous and mental diseases in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In his 35-page booklet, written in Latin and Polish, Bisius characterized mania and melancholy as diseases of the brain, explaining that the organs that feed the human soul are affected, not the soul itself. He introduced the principles of humoralism and solidism to readers, and recognized that autopsies had failed to reveal reliable findings concerning mania or melancholy. Bisius also described the origins of the challenging disorder called plica polonica, a strange condition associated with tufts of matted hair. As a physician during the medical Enlightenment, Bisius criticized metaphysical speculations in medicine and stated that plica was only a result of superstitions. Even though he proposed antiphlogistic treatments for patients with mania and melancholy, he maintained that time and faith in God might help some patients overcome their infirmities.

The Long Run of Victorian Theater

It's March 2020 as I write this, and the theaters are closed. Broadway is dark, and the Globe is once again shut due to a plague. Perhaps “self-isolation” is a strange condition under which to be thinking about crowded Victorian playhouses. As I make dates to watch movies with friends hundreds of miles away on the Netflix Party app, the media environment in which I pursue entertainment has perhaps never felt more dissimilar to that of nineteenth-century theatergoers. But, then again, maybe the photos of empty auditoria and deserted streets are the best demonstration of the space that public culture has taken up in our lives. The vacuum shows us that what's missing mattered. And if scholars of Victorian theater have shared a primary goal, it's to insist on how deeply the collective experience of playgoing influenced the everyday practices and beliefs of the period—even when theater and drama may not always appear on Victorian syllabi or conference programs. This essay considers three recent studies in Victorian theater—The Cambridge Companion to English Melodrama(2018), edited by Carolyn Williams;The Drama of Celebrity(2019), by Sharon Marcus; andEveryone's Theater: Literature and Daily Life in England, 1860–1914(2019), by Michael Meeuwis—to register the force that theatrical performance exerted on Victorians and to explore how that force could change our sense of the field. By dwelling with archives and objects that might otherwise get classed as cultural “ephemera,” these studies push us to acknowledge that the run of Victorian theater hasn't ended. In the collective pause before a moment of intense feeling, or in a contradictory attachment to a public figure who is both imitable and extraordinary, they find a repertoire of spectator behavior from which many of our own modes of attention derive.

Colour Texture Analysis of Face Spoof Detection using CNN Classifier

The emphasis on analysis of various research schemes of non – intrusive software based face spoofing detection is now a days gaining reputation in image and video processing tools. The analysis on luminance(Y)data of the various face images which provides the discrimination of forged faces from genuine faces by removing the chroma component. Here the work provides an innovative approach that perceives spoofed face using texture analysis (colour)by exploiting combined colour texture information from various channels such as luminance and chrominance. This helps to exploit joint information by removing degraded feature metaphors from dissimilar colour models.Precisely the featured histograms are figured over all images that obtained from the YCrCb colour model band distinctly.The concatenation of testing and training by using Neural Network for classification of spoofed images by the concept of blending of images gives the best possible outcomes. Wide-ranging researches on face data bases is most interesting target datasets paves the way for best processing face spoofing results than state of art. The proposed method gives stable performance when compared with the most unlike methods that conferred in the literature survey. The promising outcomes of evaluation suggests that facial colour texture depiction is added steady strange conditions associated to gray-scale complements.The favourableoutcomeswereattained using these CNN(Convolution Neural Network)designs for face antispoofing in diversesituations.

Optimal Reconfiguration of Electrical Distribution System by Whale Optimization Algorithm

The prime motto of the electrical power system is to provide the good and high quality power to the consumers. As the life in the society is expanding hugely, hence the need of the electrical power is additionally expanding suggestively. In this manner expanding the power generation as well as beating the significant issues in the electrical distribution system has turned into a test. The strange conditions can't be normal however when happened; the recuperation ought to be made as quickly as time permits. In this work, a modern artificial intelligence based algorithm is implemented for the reconfiguration of an electrical radial distribution network. This algorithm helps to bring down the active power loss and intensify the voltage profile of the network. This paper has proposed a nature-based guided metaheuristic Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA). WOA is motivated by the smart foraging approach of the humpback whales. To ratify the efficiency of the proposed approach, WOA is successfully simulated on IEEE standard 69 bus and 119 bus system.

Diagnóstico de neurolinfomatosis como complicación tardía de linfoma no Hodgkin por 18F-FDG PET-CT

La neurolinfomatosis (NL) es una condición poco frecuente que se caracteriza por la invasión de células B en los nervios craneales y las raíces nerviosas periféricas y generalmente está vinculada con leucemia o linfoma no Hodking (LNH). En el presente reporte se destacará la importancia de la sospecha diagnóstica en este grupo de pacientes y la importancia de 18F-FDG PET/CT en el diagnóstico diferencial con otras entidades causantes de síntomas similares. Se presenta el caso de una mujer de 63 años con diagnóstico de linfoma difuso de células B grandes, quien, en el tercer ciclo de quimioterapia DA-EPOCH-R, refiere dolor de tipo neuropático en miembro superior derecho, progresivo en severidad y en extensión con compromiso de la extremidad contralateral, convulsiones y parálisis facial periférica.

17c dir. by Annie-B Parson

Reviewed by: 17cdir. by Annie-B Parson Drew Lichtenberg 17c. Conceived and directed by Annie-B Parson. Co-directed by Paul Lazar. Choreographed by Annie-B Parson and Big Dance Theater. Philadelphia FringeArts. 09 8, 2017. To dedicated fans of Restoration marginalia, devotees of London's Great Fire, and nerds of theatre and dance history, the fondness for Samuel Pepys is a seemingly inexplicable quirk. Despite being a Member of Parliament and the Academy of Sciences during the reign of Charles II, the foppish Pepys led a relatively undistinguished life. He has long been known, however, as an unparalleled diarist, his personal writings offering a uniquely compelling glimpse into not just late-seventeenth-century English manners, but the mysterious whirlpool of consciousness itself. Bereft of metaphor and frequently allergic to allegory, Pepys's artless prose nevertheless lays bare the strange condition of the human mind better than many novelists. As likely to complain of a gallbladder infection as brag of an audience with the king and to vainly undertake a diet or go to the theatre and complain about bad Shakespeare, Pepys's diaries convey the nonhierarchical highs and lows, the lulls and eddies of daily existence with a clarity that pricks the right reader with a sudden shock of self-recognition. He is the ur-blogger, the proto-postmodernist, his digressive imagination anticipating Sterne's Tristram Shandyby almost a century and his catalog of daily minutiae the nonfiction quafiction of Karl Ove Knausgård by 350 years. In her thrilling 17c, a fleet yet comprehensive theatrical bricolage of the entire thousand-plus-page, million-and-a-half-word corpus, Annie-B Parson and Big Dance Theater bridged this wide gap of time. Employing the full range of Brechtian "literarizations" of the theatre, Parson amply made the case for Pepys's charms, while shining a bright light on his depressingly familiar faults. In ninety minutes that seemed to glide by, Parson's excavation was above all an attempt to see and hear the historical lacuna to whom Pepys devoted so much of his life and to whom the diaries return with obsessive regularity—Elizabeth, his wife. Fittingly for such an un-introspective subject, Parson worked from the literal outside-in. The evening began with company member Cynthia Hopkins reading Pepys on the topics of his "yards" (erections) and "electuaries" (enemas). Whereas his wife had been bothered by the former, she tells us, his "butthole … unable to fart nor to go to stool" has need of the latter. Bits of effluvial trivia were similarly cataloged with glee over the course of the show by the "Annotators"—a millennial Statler & Waldorf hosting a livestreaming webcast devoted to Pepys, itself inspired by the lively message boards at www.pepysdiary.com. On January 9, 1663, one Annotator told us gleefully, Pepys gave himself a nasal infection by "over-rubbing"; later, the other says, Pepys masturbated with a skeleton in a church, exclaiming with a note of triumph, "and he records it!" The Annotators served as a dramaturgical key to Parson's adaptation, allowing her the freedom to toggle in and out of the text, simultaneously footnoting his prose and commenting on it, while organizing an otherwise narrative-resistant litany of dates into scene-like thematic clusters. Standing at a desk and addressing the camera in the manner by-now ubiquitous to YouTube testimonials, they provided a modern-day "here" to which Parson repeatedly returned from the abstracted "there" of Pepys's seventeenth century. The Annotators also provided much needed moral mitigation, offering a modern-day perspective that pinpointed precisely the qualities that make Pepys so uniquely alluring and alarming. Peeling the layers of the Pepys onion back methodically, Parsons moved steadily toward the curious abyss at the figure's center. Starting from erections and enemas, the first thirty minutes commenced to Pepysian self-fashioning, at prayer or in [End Page 383]leisure, shopping or dancing, always significantly returning to the conjoined subjects of wife and property. "Blessed be God" Pepys writes in his very first entry, "I live in Axe Yard havingmy wife Bess. … My own private condition, esteemed rich but indeed very poor and uncertain." In each of the...

The Ends of Humans: Anthropocene, Autonomism, Antagonism, and the Illusions of Our Epoch

This essay explores the political efficacy of the concepts of autonomy and antagonism in the contemporary milieu of anthropogenic climate change and toxicity. It stages this examination through an imaginary colloquium attended by Italian members of the autonomist movement, geological proponents of the Anthropocene, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, and the indigenous members of the Karrabing Film Collective. The essay asks, even as anthropogenic climate change and toxicity have created revolutionary ethical, political, and conceptual problems and antagonisms, what if the concepts of antagonism and autonomy no longer capture the strange condition of contemporary human and nonhuman existences? What if there is no human, or even any humans, but merely regionally more or less densely compacted forms and modes of existence, one component of which has been abstracted out and named “the human”? And what if these regions of existence are off-gassing in such a way that they are producing themselves as their own waste products?

Dorsolumbar Parasitic Rachipagus Twin, Case Report

Background Data: Siamese twins are joined by a part of their body at birth and the causes of the merger are often unknown. When the merger is on the spine it is rachipagus. It is an extremely rare and strange condition, andthere are only a few documented cases in the literature. We present one additional case of parasite rachipagus on the dorsolumbar level. Purpose: Our aim is to describe a girl with a parasitic twin attached to her lower back, combined with a spina bifida and a lipomyelomeningocele. Study Design: Case report and review of the literature Patient and Method: In September 2014, a female baby from North Sinai was referred to Suez Canal University Hospital. She was 1 month old and had an extra well developed parasitic twin attached to her back. She was surgically treated in the Neurosurgery and Pediatric Surgery Departments. Results: A rare example of rachipagus conjoint parasitic twinning in a newborn girl is described. A lipomatous mass, a rudimentary intestinal loop with an attached atrophic pelvis and hind limb were found adherent to the dorsal vertebral arches of the autosite in the thoracolumbar region. Surgical excision of the parasitic twin, excision of the dorsal lipoma, repair of the cord and wound repair were done Conclusion: Parasitic rachipagus is a rare embryogenic malformation with a good surgical prognosis on the autosite in the absence of associated congenital anomalies. (2016ESJ111)

Malignant Melanoma of Oral Cavity, A Case-Based Review of the Literature

Introduction : Primary Mucosal Malignant Melanoma is an aggressive cancer, especially when there is a late diagnosis. The mortality is low in early stages but in advanced stages is less than a 30% on a 5-years following. Only a 0.5% to 3% of Melanomas are Mucosal Melanomas. Among them, the Mucosal Malignant Melanoma of oral cavity is a rare tumor, with an extremely aggressive behavior at diagnosis. Case Report : 51 years old male, consult on April 2015, at Centro de Salud Familiar Flor Pedreros Parra, Trehuaco city, Chile, for dark blue round tumor, 1.5 cm wide, placed near the tooth 1.3, compromising the gum. The patient refers previous consultations with a smaller and flat lesion. He reveals important everyday sun exposure, without proper UV protection. One month later, the tumor grows and becomes indurate, consequently the patient was transferred to Herminda Martin Hospital of Chillan City, where incisional biopsy concludes “Mucosal Malignant Melanoma with infiltration of surroundings tissues”. Chemotherapy is realized with poor results. Last control with Odontology in August 2015, the tumor evolves to a black nodule, 4 cm wide, compromising the upper maxilla, right eye and mouth opening, concomitant to multiple black satellite papula. Computed Tomography showed skull base infiltration, cervical lymphatics and other zones of head and neck. The patient was transferred to palliative care and died before a year from diagnosis. Discussion : The primary Mucosal Malignant Melanoma of oral cavity it’s a very strange condition. It has variable presentations, sometimes like a little maculae with different colors or like a highly pigmented tumor with ulcers or hemorrhage, with a high growing rate. It has an important metastatic potential and a poor prognostic. This is the reason why early clinical suspect and diagnosis is extremely valuable.

The Thermodynamics of Time Travel

The concept of time travel captures the imagination of scientists and nonscientists alike. Though theoretical mathematical treatment of the issue in the realm of physics has offered potential means, albeit, wormholes requiring some rather strange conditions such as negative energy, what does thermodynamics suggest for the potential of time travel? Examination of the thermodynamic state functions of enthalpy and entropy from the Gibbs free energy relationship suggest that the final enthalpy after travel will be greater than the initial enthalpy before travel. The final entropy after travel will be greater than the initial entropy before travel. Transfer of mass from one multiverse to another would seem to violate various mass energy conservation laws, as well as strictures on the Second Law of Thermodynamics for the originating and a target multiverse.

Premedicated humor: Jest for the health of it

It is ironic that the humor in hospitals, emergency departments, and doctors’ offices—usually some of the scariest places—can be exceedingly hilarious. The giddy ghost of Mrs. Malaprop haunts medical halls and application forms, where we discover all manner of strange conditions, such as swollen asteroids (adenoids), an erection (anorexia) nervosa, shudders (shingles), corroded (carotid) arteries, and migrating (migraine) headaches. All the malappropriate terms in this contribution were miscreated by anxious patients or hassled doctors and nurses.

“Astonishment Is Thinking”: Graphic Metaphor and Its Philosophical Consequence in Mahler’s Poèmes and Lemieux’s Stormy Night

“Astonishment Is Thinking”:Graphic Metaphor and Its Philosophical Consequence in Mahler’s Poèmes and Lemieux’s Stormy Night Andrea Schwenke Wyile (bio) “[O]ne of the worst snares of the study [of metaphor is] the assumption that if we cannot see how a metaphor works, it does not work.” (I. A. Richards qtd. in Zwicky 65 RIGHT)1 “Many have learnt the word ‘see’ and never made any such use of it.” (Wittgenstein, Last Writings 4) The force of a graphic metaphor can momentarily wipe one’s mind clean, leaving it blank for a fleeting instant before the import of what one is looking at comes rushing in to fill one’s head with sparks, flashes, or fireworks of ideas. This combination of loss or insensibility and amazement or wonder found in the meaning of the word astonishment may seem like a strange condition to equate with thinking. However, the notion of being stunned mentally as a means of initiating a thought process is a useful one because it draws our attention to the need for pause, evident in the familiar phrase, “it gave me pause for thought.” Michèle Lemieux’s Stormy Night (1999) and Nicolas Mahler’s Poèmes (2007) are deeply philosophical and unusual books that challenge our assumptions about picturebooks due to the astonishing juxtapositions of the verbal and the visual on their page openings. These juxtapositions spur philosophical thinking on existential matters. Metaphor rather than narrative is the driving force in these books. The metaphors are line drawings that present us with surprising images which, like good [End Page 277] poetry, make us see the world and life anew. As Victor Shklovsky argues in “Art as Technique,” “Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. … And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’” (20). Lemieux’s and Mahler’s books astonish us into thinking by defamiliarizing various aspects regarding the dominant, and thus nearly invisible, metaphor of the journey of life. The books, which are collections of aphorisms in the form of graphic metaphors, also defamiliarize our notion of story. In a point similar to Shklovsky’s regarding the power of poetic speech “to remove the automatism of perception” (27), Ludwig Wittgenstein notes that a common impediment to understanding is “the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see” (qtd. in Zwicky 115 RIGHT). Whereas Shklovsky claims that sometimes we are blind due to automatism, Wittgenstein suggests that sometimes we willfully misread the signs in front of us. Poèmes and Stormy Night surprise us out of our habitual modes of seeing not only through their graphic metaphors, but also through the absence of an overt plot. The books push us toward a new kind of reading, one in which the force of individual graphic metaphors or their combinations result in philosophical reflection and inquiry rather than story. While Mahler’s and Lemieux’s books are stylistically and thematically similar, they are structurally distinct. Stormy Night is presented in the form and shape of a sketchbook and thus shares with Poèmes a similar ethos of page design. The page offers room for the eye to rest and for the mind to contemplate, encouraging a pause for thought at every turn. Page openings are designed to present a dialogue, be it between a word or sentence and an image, or just an image that adds to a previous spread. In both books the use of white space is integral to the force of their graphic metaphors, and the look of the page and its contents is integral to the experience of reading and meaning-making. Poèmes (La Pastèque, 2007) is a series of twenty-one “graphic poem” pairs that rely in some degree on conceptual binary opposition to convey their meaning, such as night and day, air and water, curiosity and stupidity, solitude and company. The collection is framed to suggest the course of a lifetime, beginning with the pairings birth and...

A right hemisphere safety backup at work: Hypotheses for deep hypnosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, and dissociation identity disorder

Problem theory points to an a priori relation between six key problems of living, to which people have adapted through evolution. Children are guided through the problems one by one, learning to switch between them automatically and unawares. The first problem of raising hope of certainty (about the environment), is dealt with in the right hemisphere (RH). The second of raising hope of freedom (or power to control), is dealt with in the left hemisphere (LH). Here adventurousness and ignoring the goodness of outcomes potentially create recklessness. When uncertainty rises the RH activates a backup with an override that substitutes immobility, takes over sensory inputs, but allows obedience to parental commands, and a cut-out that stops new work on the freedom problem. Support for the use of the backup by infants is found in the immobility that precedes the crying in strange conditions, and in childhood EEGs. The hypothesis that the backup is active in deep hypnosis imposes accord on findings that appear contradictory. For example it accounts for why observations during deep hypnosis emphasize the activity of the RH, but observations of responsive people not under hypnosis emphasize the activity of the LH. The hypothesis that the backup is active in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is supported by (a) fMRI observations that could reflect the cut-out, in that part of the precuneus has low metabolism, (b) the recall of motionlessness at the time of the trauma, (c) an argument that playing dead as a defence against predators is illogical, (d) the ease of hypnosis. With dissociative identity disorder (DID), the theory is consistent with up to six alters that have executive control and one trauma identity state where childhood traumas are re-experienced. Support for the cut-out affecting the trauma identity state comes from suppression of part of the precuneus and other parts of the parietal lobe when the trauma identity state is salient and a general script about a trauma is listened to. Support also comes from the ease of hypnosis. The cut-out acts independently of the override. It is linked to low metabolism at the same point in the left precuneus by evidence from all three conditions, hypnosis, PTSD and DID. The concept of dissociation is not required with any of the hypotheses.

A Strange Condition of Things: Alterity and knowingness in Dickens’ David Copperfield

It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of the paradox, is to risk knowingness: a condition which, appearing to challenge our alterity but in fact often confirming it, holds an ambiguous place in the ‘ethics of belief’ and has largely escaped philosophical attention. Like alterity, knowingness can only be approached indirectly. Charles Dickens, in David Copperfield, is exemplary in the way he handles these themes.

Dr and Mrs

Dr and Mrs