By: Walter Schönau Professor Emeritus, German Literary HistoryUniversity of Groningen AbstractSigmund Freud held an ambivalent stance toward philosophy. While as a young man he briefly aspired to become a philosopher himself, his later views were marked by skepticism and even disdain. As a medical doctor and a child of the Enlightenment, he sought to operateContinue reading “Freud, Reluctant Philosopher”
Author Archives: PsyArt
Blurring the Lines of Reality and Fiction: A Crisis of Authenticity, Memory, and Identity in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Fiction
By: Marcia A. Newton University at Albany AbstractBritish writer Antonia White sought to find a balance between writing a personal testimony of traumatic experiences she had suffered in her life and appealing to literary aesthetic values. From a literary scholar’s perspective, this is a challenging undertaking. How much stock can readers place in autobiographical novelsContinue reading “Blurring the Lines of Reality and Fiction: A Crisis of Authenticity, Memory, and Identity in Antonia White’s Autobiographical Fiction”
Nothing Left but the Core of Murmurs? Attacks on Linking as
Communication in Beckett’s The Unnamable
By: Paavo Manninen Abstract: Literary studies have usually interpreted Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1959) to reflect an area void of meaning and inaccessible to representation. The present article, by contrast, argues that Beckett experientially communicates archaic psychic reality where certain contents develop in an interpersonal relationship. The article offers psychoanalytical close readings of a fewContinue reading “Nothing Left but the Core of Murmurs? Attacks on Linking as
Communication in Beckett’s The Unnamable”
God’s Own Guinea Pig: The Book of Job and Secularization
By: Marietje Kardaun Abstract: One of the most unlikely showdowns of world literature is the one between YHWH, creator of heaven and earth, and his humble creature Job. The latter has lost his children, his possessions, and finally his health. He is covered with sore boils and, sitting among the ashes, he tries to cureContinue reading “God’s Own Guinea Pig: The Book of Job and Secularization”
The Oresteia and the Act of Revenge: of Desire and Jouissance
By: Dana Tor Abstract: In 2005, Jean Clair curated a grand exhibition dedicated to melancholy. Theexhibition encompassed an array of the copious representations of melancholythrough a historical prism, and included various spectacular images of skulls, dolefuleyes, ticking clocks and ample images of the posture most identified withmelancholy— figures leaning their heads on their hands. MelancholyContinue reading “The Oresteia and the Act of Revenge: of Desire and Jouissance”
“Soul in a Vase” (Savant Syndrome and Autistic Art)
By: Ivett Rozgonyi Abstract: The expression of autism through a visual medium, the emergence of visual creativity stemmingfrom it, and the exploration of its inherent attributes, can be considered t o be among the lessresearched fields of study. This research aims to investigate the realm of creative autism, with a particular focus on the exceptionalContinue reading ““Soul in a Vase” (Savant Syndrome and Autistic Art)”
Counting by Threes: Sounding the Maternal in Shakespeare’s As You Like It
By: Elise Denbo Abstract: This paper opens with Mary Beth Rose’s question, “Where are the mothers in Shakespeare?” Although Shakespeare’s plays often dramatize the emotional bonds between fathers and sons or fathers and daughters, mothers are generally presented as threatening, dangerous, or remarkably absent. Although there are no mothers in As You Like It, embeddedContinue reading “Counting by Threes: Sounding the Maternal in Shakespeare’s As You Like It”
Editorial Introduction by Samir Dayal: Special Issue on Lacanian Perspectives (Guest Editor, Jerry Aline Flieger)
By: Samir Dayal Abstract: This special issue on Lacanian Perspectives, guest-edited by Jerry Aline Flieger, is focused on aspects of the work of Jacques Lacan, who famously elaborated on the nature of the Freudian Thing—la chose freudienne. Recently there has been a resurgent theoretical interest in ”things”—reflecting a variety of approaches ranging from a focusContinue reading “Editorial Introduction by Samir Dayal: Special Issue on Lacanian Perspectives (Guest Editor, Jerry Aline Flieger)”
How to Make Sense of Lacan’s Rings and Straight Lines.
By: Robert Silhol Abstract: What is, for psychoanalysis, in 1975, a subject ? Such is the question asked by Jacques Lacan at the opening of his weekly “seminar,” a question to which for a year, 1975-1976, that is to say for ten one and a half hour sessions, he will attempt to give an answer.Continue reading “How to Make Sense of Lacan’s Rings and Straight Lines.”
Psychic Space as the Structure of Unconscious Fantasy
By: Virginia Blum and Anna Secor Abstract: Authors’ note: Our contribution to this Lacanian issue of Psyart intends not to foreground a specifically Lacanian reading of our film examples, but rather to serve as an example of how Lacan’s highly topological theory may be integrated in the larger field ofpsychoanalytic discourse, both because his topologiesContinue reading “Psychic Space as the Structure of Unconscious Fantasy”