Unconscious Desire Research Articles

Cartes-de-visite: el inconsciente óptico del siglo XIX

This essay explores the role of nineteenth-century studio photography, in particular the popular genre of cartes-de-visites, as a repository of the unconscious desires and apprehensions of modern Latin American societies in formation. Reflecting on the methodological challenges and new possibilities that access to digitized Latin American visual archives present, the article re-evaluates a common assumption in nineteenth-century photography scholarship: that a tension exists between the impulse in democratization of mass-image production and the force of market and consumption homogenization. Arguing for an analysis not at the level of the individual portrait but in those previously unrecognized or neglected visual documents of the work carried out in photographic studios, the essay highlights the critical potential of these new archives as an expression of the material expansion of the visual field, where new forms of subjectivity sought social and political recognition.

Aesthetic A Priori and Embodied Imagination

This paper discusses the modern idea of imagination and its various transformations in the phenomenological conceptual frameworks of Edward Casey, Mikel Dufrenne (1910-1995), Max Scheler (1874-1928) and Vasily Sesemann (1884-1963). I would like to raise and critically assess questions regarding the role of imagination in our consciousness: whether imagination is a productive or reproductive activity; and how, if at all, aesthetic expression limits the imagination. Casey criticizes Dufrenne for his attempt to unite imagination with aesthetic expression. He argues for the autonomy of the imagination but leaves the question of the relationship between the imagination and perception unanswered. Dufrenne partially shares his theory of imagination with Sesemann. Both philosophers claim that imagination is a reproductive activity rather than a productive one in the sense that it is limited by the forms of the material a priori. In other words, aesthetic expression has to obey the principle of correlation between percipiens and perceptum. Creativity becomes possible when the creator is able to reproduce in his expression another subject’s possible perceptivity. Max Scheler emphasized the correlative connection of spiritual activity with the world. He linked the concept of imagination to the practical being in the world. In Sesemann’s aesthetics the role of embodied imagination in artistic creation and the perception of aesthetic objects were also considered. Both authors argued that the connection between imagination and the essential modes of the world’s givenness is guaranteed by the mode of embodied imagination. Both acknowledged that imagination is related to unconscious desires and drive. Both authors stated that the schematisms of imagination express the style of the perception of the world. The fact that imagination is an embodied phenomenon is illustrated by the way it exists in the world, since imagination is essentially a free activity restricted only by “the style of the world’s horizon.”

Motherhood in Wordsworth: A Psychoanalytic Study of his Poetics

By definition, the Romantic ego is a male; the creator of language which helps him to establish “rites of passage toward poetic creativity and toward masculine empowerment.”1 The outlet for a male quest of self – possession in Romantic poetry is women. For the Romantic poets , the “true woman was emotional, dependent and gentle –a born flower”2 and “the Ideal mother was expected to be strong , self- reliant , protective and efficient caretaker in relation to children and home.”4 With emphasis on the individual in Romantic literature and ideology, mothers are depicted as good when they are natural or unnaturally bad. In the Romantic period then, women’s maternal function equals the “foundation of her social identity and of her sexual desire.”5 Consequently, “convinced that within the individual and autonomous and forceful agent makes creation possible”, the Romantic poets “struggle to control that agent and manipulate its energy.”6
 In a number of William Wordsworth’s (1770-1850) poems, this creative agent who possesses the powers of creation and imagination becomes a female character who is also often a mother. Nonetheless, when critics examine mothers in Wordsworth’s poetry, they also explore the child/poet’s relationship. Events in Wordsworth’s life surely influenced his attention to mothers. From a psycho-analytic perspective this interest might be an unconscious desire to resurrect the spirit of his dead mother Ann Wordsworth who died when the poet was almost eight. Thus in his poetry, the mother is the counterpart of the genuine faculty of the imagination of the poet and has a strong and felt presence within the poet’s poetic system.
 In The Prelude, Wordsworth acknowledges his mother’s deep influence on him. He associates her death with the break within his own poetic development; a sign that the poet relies upon in his creative power .It is through her that the young poet came first in contact with the genial current of the natural world. Nevertheless, without his mother, the male child’s connection to nature not only stands, it grows stronger:

Uterine imaginaries, geopolitical economy, and the maternal/unconscious

This commentary brings geopolitical economic sensibilities about sexual difference, possession, and the Machine into conversation with Lewis’ cyborgic uterine to make three analytical points. First, transcalar uterine thinking has long existed, seasoned by geopolitical economic circumstance. Uterine thinking in nonmechanized agrarian contexts has circulated primarily through imaginaries of maternal fertility, the material expanse of which exceeds the limits of biological mother and child. The Machine gained authority over the agrarian by feeding off, and replacing, the maternal, of which the uterine is only part. By addressing geopolitical economic difference, Lewis’s analysis would be enriched by an abundance of gestational thinking that operates beyond the Machinic cyborg. My second and related analytical point has to do with how Lewis locates the uterine as a gestational prize that anyone should be able to have; as long as the uterus remains rooted in sexual dimorphism, the male-born body is potentially unfree. Thus, even as she speaks of how gestation need not be contained by a real uterus, she considers its absence in the biological male body a source of potential deprivation that, for freedom’s sake, would best be undone. This undoing would limit the geographical possibilities for queering the maternal. My third point emerges out of the second and has to do with how unconscious desire has historically geographically depended on sexual dimorphism, not the uterus. I’m not sure, but it seems that the interiorized cast of Lewis’ cyborgic uterine makes it difficult to theorize relational attachments—her ‘holding and letting go’.

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

How to think the world? Achille Mbembe on race, democracy and the African role in global thought

Dermatitis artefacta

Dermatitis artefacta, also known as factitial dermatitis, is a condition whereby self-induced skin damage is the means used to satisfy a conscious or unconscious desire to assume the sick role. It is particularly common in women and in those with an underlying psychiatric diagnosis or external stress. The diagnosis is one of exclusion, and it is often difficult to confirm, with patients rarely admitting their role in the creation of their lesions. Treatment can be challenging, and management should adopt a multidisciplinary team approach composed of dermatologists and mental health professionals. We present a literature review of dermatitis artefacta, highlighted by a case report of a patient with bilateral ulcerations to the legs, which after thorough investigation represented dermatitis artefacta.

One question on ritual and religion

ABSTRACTAs a postscript to this special issue, the author reflects on the difference between religion and ritual by drawing a comparison with culture and nature. In the same way that culture and nature are entangled yet distinct, so too religion and ritual are best understood as a paradoxical configuration of spiritual deliberation and unconscious desire. It is argued that religion and ritual exceed and depend on each other in equal measure as the organism explores new modes of living.

Working through Resistance to Resistance in Anti-racist Teacher Education

This paper grapples with the idea that challenging racism in teacher education opens the landscape of racial melancholia by psychoanalytically exploring the author's affective reaction to white teacher candidates’ resistance. Drawing on critical multicultural education classes at a university in a mid-Western rural state in the US, the author, an Asian American teacher educator contends that she must negotiate the loss of idealised objects during critical race dialogues for her to better serve containing function in supporting teacher candidates’ encounters with race work. While the author cannot see what it is that has been lost, the powerful emotions that at times display aggressive impulses signal toward wounded subjectivity and her desire to hold onto intrinsically ambivalent lost objects. Following Freud's assertion that the unconscious desire can be mediated only through efforts to symbolise and Bion's assertion that the containing mind involves active process, the author attempts to investigate what racial melancholia may represent for herself as a teacher educator. In the final section, the author interprets the manifestations of racial melancholia as an effect of racialised society and concludes that while the conscious meaning cannot exceed the unconscious, by working through the state of racial melancholia, she is able to create new meanings for her affective responses and make better sense of teacher candidates’ resistance and their anxiety.

Unconscious Desires in “The Collector Cleans His Picture”

This paper examines both Hardy’s writing process and his vision of how man’s desires might engender mistaken impressions. I will mainly focus on the poem “The Collector Cleans His Picture”, whose central issue is the “gaze”; the gaze being a reflection of man’s desires.Here, the narrator, a rural parson (and antiquarian) collects works of art. However, the main focus in the poem is the painting itself – the very point of attention which mesmerizes the collector.Gradually, the “cleaning” and “rubbing” of the picture will reveal illusive desire(s) in the parson. Indeed, there are inner contradictions within the poem between the biblical quotation, after the poem’s title, referring to Ezechiel’s “desiderabile oculorum” and, in the painting evoked in the poem, the goddess Venus, who turns out to be only an old hag. The painting is blasphemous with regard to the biblical quote, for the picture belongs to a different sort of context than the Judaeo-Christian world. The man’s gaze on his picture reflects his unconscious, his desires, which seem to be mere illusions, a “lure”.

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?

O DILACERAMENTO DA FAMÍLIA TRADICIONAL ATRAVÉS DA CONSUMAÇÃO DO DESEJO EM O CASAMENTO, DE NELSON RODRIGUES

Em 1966, no auge da ditadura militar no Brasil, Nelson Rodrigues teve o seu romance, O casamento, publicado há apenas um mês, censurado. Através de uma portaria assinada em 12 de outubro por Carlos Medeiros Silva, ministro da Justiça do marechal Castello Branco, veio a determinação da apreensão do romance rodriguiano das livrarias brasileiras, sob o argumento de que a dita narrativa era portadora de discursos com “torpeza nas cenas descritas e linguagem indecorosa”, um verdadeiro “atentado contra a organização da família” (RODRIGUES, 2016, p. 264). Passados mais de cinquenta anos da publicação do único romance assinado com o nome de batismo do mais conceituado dramaturgo brasileiro moderno, notamos como os temas apresentados em O casamento continuam a afrontar o moralismo do Brasil vigente. Ao representar uma família tradicional nos preparativos para o matrimônio de um dos seus membros, Nelson Rodrigues expõe, como corrobora Alexandre Pianelli Godoy (2012, p. 106), o paradoxo entre “o sentimento de descrédito da instituição familiar dentro da própria família” e a inversamente proporcional valoração ideológica, por parte dos mesmos parentes, de dogmas conservadores, patriarcais. Nesse sentido, objetivamos, neste trabalho, analisar como as personagens do romance em tela negociam com a normatividade paterna, autoritária, religiosa, misógina e homofóbica, tão em desacordo com seus desejos conscientes e/ou inconscientes de masoquismo, sadomasoquismo, exibicionismo, voyeurismo, homoafetividade, adultério, incesto e abuso sexual. Montado o drama da família tradicional burguesa, dividida entre a regularização e a secularização, compreenderemos as tensões dos desejos de “moralidade” contra os de “imoralidade” com base na Psicanálise freudiana, através de obras como Totem e tabu (2012), O mal-estar na civilização (2010) e Os três ensaios sobre a teoria da sexualidade (2016), as quais problematizam a construção das proibições sociais relacionadas ao sexo, o sacrifício da pulsão de desejo individual em detrimento da harmonia da coletividade e o modo como a sexualidade vem a ser organizada, respectivamente. Conforme apontaram Edmundo Gómez Mango & J-B Pontalis (2013), bem como Jean Bellemin-Noël (1978, p. 19), acreditamos ser a teoria psicanalítica fundamental no processo de decifração do criptograma em que se transforma, “sem o saber nem querer”, o texto literário. Ao lado da bibliografia psicanalítica, também contribuirão, para os nossos aprofundamentos, as pesquisas desenvolvidas no âmbito da crítica literária por Sábato Magaldi (1992), Jean-Marie Thomasseau (2012), Alexandre Godoy (2012), Victor Pereira (2012), Ângela Dias (2013), dentre outros. Nas considerações desse artigo, apresentaremos achados que desembocam os desejos das personagens de O casamento em condições punitivas, sentimento de culpa, hipocrisia, crime, morte, tragédia e deterioração da instituição familiar, revelando ser o próprio título da obra a representação de um modelo organizacional que põe em xeque o que pode haver de mais controverso na essência humana: o erotismo e a sexualidade.

Aberrant Narcissisms in Dolto, Lacan, and Fanon: Notes on a Wounded Imaginary

In radical Lacanian cultural critique, affirmations of unconscious desire and the reinvention of the symbolic order are frequently founded upon dismissals of the imaginary ego and its paranoid obsessions with meaning, coherence, and identity politics. By bringing Lacan’s theorization of the schizophrenic imaginary into conversation with the work of French psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto and the Martinican psychiatrist and militant philosopher Frantz Fanon, this essay challenges the hierarchical organization of the real, symbolic, and imaginary registers in dominant Lacanian critique. Simultaneously, the essay rethinks the very definition of imaginary narcissism through historically specific contexts of psychic fragmentation under colonial and postcolonial capitalism, offering a differential and material account of the production of identity politics that is at once decolonial and psychoanalytic. Contesting ahistorical accounts of imaginary plenitude underpinning theoretical rejections of identity, the essay insists on the need to see imaginary identitarianism and its symbolic and real consequences in terms of heuristic and situated “narcissistic wounds” that expose the profoundly unequal logic of equivalence subtending global capitalism.

O sujeito barrado do inconsciente: O sujeito do pensamento e do desejo

Neste artigo, abordamos o conceito de sujeito do inconsciente na Psicanálise. No seu interior procuramos demonstrar que o inconsciente deve ser definido como pura lógica relacional, isto é, como produto da articulação dos significantes em cadeia. Efeito do significante e da falta que ele engendra, o sujeito do inconsciente constituindo-se a um só tempo como sujeito do pensamento e do desejo inconsciente. O sujeito do inconsciente é o sujeito barrado da linguagem,constituindo-se como falta-a-ser, considerada por Lacan como o cerne da experiência analítica. O artigo opera ainda um cotejamento entre as teses de Freud e Lacan a respeito do inconsciente, bem como da estrutura do fantasma, definido como construção metafórica sobre o ser e cuja função é de acobertar a falta de sujeito na estrutura da linguagem. Na conclusão do artigo, tecemos elaborações acerca da travessia do fantasma efetuada pelo sujeito ao término de sua análise, concluindo que o confronto com a versão imaginária construída com relação ao seu ser e a elaboração da castração simbólica que daí decorre, abre ao sujeito a possibilidade de reinventar-se.

Першорядність “мовчазного” персонажа у прозі Михайла Коцюбинського

Formation of modernist aesthetics in Ukrainian literature at the turn of the twentieth century is connected with changes in aesthetic consciousness, overcoming stereotypes, and search for new expressive means. This enables us to trace “conflicts” and contradictions that allows us to speak about qualitative changes, search of new resources, points of view, and reading “voices” in a work of fiction. These “voices” reveal to a different degree both surface and concealed layers of text. We can trace certain co-references of these “voices” within historical and cultural epoch, and in the works of an author or based on a text. At the same time it is important that the author may not have wanted to reveal, open something, but the text itself can reveal it. Ways to relveal these may have some significance for revelation of certain characteristics or stylistic peculiarities of author’s works as a whole. The texts of Ukrainian classic writer M. Kotsiubynsky allowed critics to speak of “aesthetism” and „spiritual aristocracy” inherent to the writer, but realisation his own marginal position provoked him to unconsciously pay attention to his secondary role. Here we have conscious attempt not so much as being silent as concealing one’s own voice. At the same time conscious “concealment” confirms unconscious desire to be heard. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to highlight the problem, make it the major one to understand M. Kotsiubynsky’s texts. An important role is provided to character’s voices. But to counterbalance the voice of the main or secondary character, there is silence that we should treat as an anthropological phenomenon. It is the analysis of the function of silence is the key to reading Kotsiubynsky’s fiction, along with the function of non-silence where the first rate role of a narrator is lost. The foreground is occupied by the second rate that assumes the status of the first ratedness.

Unconscious Desire of Contact Projected in Connecting City

Unconscious Desire of Contact Projected in Connecting City

September 11th, an attack at the limits of thought

Translations of summaryThe paper deals with imagination and its failures from a psychoanalytic perspective. We offer a definition of imagination failures and suggest how they can be interpreted as an opportunity to learn from experience. In order to show that the topic has a concrete and not only speculative significance we consider the public report on September 11 as a case study. The report was published by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States after a long investigation of the facts and circumstances relating to the September 11 attacks. The document has been the object of strong criticisms, as we argue in the paper. Both the document and some of the critiques that it received focus, however, on significant aspects of the debate about imagination, such us the fragility of imaginative thought, its dependence on unconscious desires and its plurality of outcomes: a plethora of imaginaries can in fact be developed at any time, from the same set of information about reality. We comment on these aspects and reinterpret them from a Bionian perspective. The concepts of ‘unthinkability’, ‘imagination failure’ and ‘depressive position’ are used to inform the necessity of dealing with an evolving and conflictual geopolitical scenario. Particular attention is paid to the proposal of ‘routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination’ within the institutions that deal with National Defense. This possibility is discussed in depth in order to suggest how it may be concretely implemented. In conclusion, a strong case is made for the usefulness of psychoanalytic reflection in the arena of relationships among countries, with particular emphasis on the new terrorist challenges.

Transatlantic Translations: Surrealist Modes of Advertising in France and the United States of America

While Surrealism began as a European artistic movement with the power to defy bourgeois cultural norms, the movement's dissolution has frequently been blamed on commercialization. With its late 1930s arrival to the United States of America, the language of Surrealism was easily absorbed and reinvented as a vehicle to appeal to the unconscious consumerist desires of buyers. This article reconsiders the standard narrative of Surrealism's commerce-induced impotency through a comparison of advertisements in French and American fashion periodicals of the late 1920s. French advertisers during this time had little to no interest in American modes of psychologically infused advertising and moreover these advertisers saw the threat that Surrealism posed to the space of the magazine. When advertisements using Surrealist visual strategies did appear within French magazines, they acted not as empty signs of novelty but rather as vital disruptions that troubled the invisibility and naturalization of capitalist consumption.

Photography in the Szondi Test: ‘The Analysis of Fate’

Léopold Szondi invented a projective test using photographs of people with mental pathologies to determine the unconscious, ancestral illnesses (or aptitudes) of his subjects. Szondi’s images were garnered from psychiatric textbooks published around 1900. Such photographs presumably revealed unconscious thoughts, desires, and destinies in the course of a test session. If a patient responded positively to a photo-portrait of a diagnosed ‘hysteric’, for instance, this indicated that the subject herself had unconscious, inherited hysterical traits. Szondi’s reasoning was predicated upon two commonly held fallacies: first that an individual’s physical appearance is the external marker of mental life, and second that photography is a transparent means of revealing true facts. In spite of (or maybe even because of) such problematic assumptions, Szondi’s use of photographs can be located historically in a tradition of reading human character from portraiture. The test was widespread, and was even administered to Adolf Eichmann at the time of his trial in Jerusalem – an ironic cultural development as Szondi himself would have been among the thousands of Jews deported from Hungary directly to Auschwitz by Eichmann had the Szondi family not been rescued by the Kastner train of 1944.

The deeper self: an expanded view of consciousness.

As science continues to explore the mysteries of the unconscious, two critical questions remain. First, can unconscious impulses, desires, and feelings be willfully raised to the level of the conscious self?, and, if so, would the unveiling of unconscious mechanisms lead to genuine self-knowledge or empowerment? Second, can we methodically tap into the unconscious to gear ourselves along more creative lines? If the unconscious is a source of intuitive and creative inspiration, how might a more expansive understanding of consciousness help us to flourish? How can we harness the intuitive parts of ourselves to think "outside the box," transcending the limitations of preconceived categories? And along those same lines, how would an expanded view of the unconscious frame our spiritual experiences or offer spiritual nourishment? Writer Siri Hustvedt, historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani, and neuropsychologist Mark Solms will tackle everything from noetic experiences and the role of intuition to the phenomenon of peak experience and Jung's "collective unconscious."

Acto poético <> Acto psicoanalítico: literatura, retórica y nonsense

El psicoanálisis intenta captar el deseo del sujeto “al pie de la letra”: literatura y psicoanálisis comparten el hecho de que se crean nuevos mundos a partir de la palabra. Este artículo vincula algunos puntos de encuentro y también de desencuentro entre la creación poética y la producción psicoanalítica en tanto ambas privilegian el poder del lenguaje y los atolladeros del deseo inconsciente, a partir de su relación con algunas de sus formaciones inconscientes, a saber, el chiste, el lapsus y el nonsense.