Author Archives: PsyArt

By: Jonathan F. Bassett Abstract: This paper explores existential themes as presented in the 2014 film The Amazing Spider-Man 2. An initial argument is presented in support of the claim that contemporary audiences are drawn towards superheroes for the same reasons people have historically been compelled by traditional religious beliefs – a desire to transcendContinue reading “(Super)Heroism as a Response to the Awareness of Death:Existential Lessons From The Amazing Spider-Man 2”

By: Daniel Brennan Abstract: This paper explores the strikingly similar use of psychoanalytic imagery in the films Psycho and The Lady in the Van. The paper argues that the latter film is a deconstruction of the former’s political aims. Where Psycho uses psychoanalytic imagery to warn of the danger that strong female autonomy poses toContinue reading “The Lady in the Van and the Challenge to Psycho; On the Political Uses of Psychoanalytic Imagery in Film”

By: Elise Denbo Abstract: Most psychological approaches interpret Shakespeare’s Hamlet within aLacanian/Oedipal revenge narrative. This paper, however, explores Shakespeare’s Hamlet through theories of Julia Kristeva, who develops a term called ‘the imaginary father,’ which she revisions from Freud’s ‘father of individual prehistory.’ The notion of an archaic/imaginary father as a hybrid locus (a mother-father amalgam)Continue reading “‘Alas Poor Yorick!’: Hamlet and Kristeva’s Imaginary Father”

By: Nicholas O. Pagan Abstract: Early in this essay I unearth a similarity between Norman N. Holland’s reader-response theory and responses to literature by the English essayist William Hazlitt, and I briefly trace some similarities and differences between Holland’s approach and that of David Bleich and Stanley Fish. Drawing attention to a shift in Holland’sContinue reading “The Evolution of Feeling-dominated Response in Norman N. Holland’s Theory of Literature”

By: Mary A. Bricker Abstract: My essay concerns the literary and visual expression of the archetype dual descent in North American children’s remakes of the Brothers Grimms’ tale, Iron Hans. Theremakes were published within a fourteen-year span following Robert Bly’s bestseller, Iron John: A Book About Men (1990). Bly’s study of the Grimms’ wild manContinue reading “Literary and Visual Expression of Dual Descent in Iron Hans”

By: Munir Mohamed Al-Aghberi Abstract: Examining the Jewish-American novel written in the postwar era, the present paper attempts to understand the relationship between the writers’ recurrent use of the theme of the double and the psychological problematics to which the protagonists are always prone. It contextualizes the over-repeated tension between primary ego and alter egoContinue reading “Agents of Anxiety and Disintegration: The Double Motif in the Jewish-American Discourse”

By: Alan G. Gross Abstract: Literary critic Frederick Crews is self-deceived in asserting that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience; philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum is self-deceived in arguing that it is a failed natural science. Because both have made a category mistake, because, as Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur contend, psychoanalysis is in essence a hermeneuticContinue reading “Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: A Defense”

By: Yael Greenberg Abstract: Freud likened Lady Macbeth and Rebecca West to patients destroyed by success due to guilt. In my paper, I show that these masculine women feel overwhelming guilt for the deaths of their respective fathers, and commit suicide in order to expiate this guilt. Lady Macbeth feels as if, by instigating theContinue reading “Lady Macbeth and Rebecca West: The Masculine Woman’s Oedipal Complex”

By: Alexander Venetis Abstract: In her seminal work “Modern Fiction” (1925) Virginia Woolf asserts that the most interesting and fruitful way for the modernist novelist to proceed is to appropriate what she calls “the dark places of psychology” into literary writing. The image of “dark places”, especially when put into the context of the psychologyContinue reading “Jamesian and Freudian Rhetoric and Themes in Virginia Woolf’s Literary Manifestos”

By: Rachel Youdelman Abstract: Whimsical, anthropomorphic taxidermy of the Victorian era has been dismissed as marginal novelty. Yet why do we feel it also to be, in some undefined way, emblematic of Victorian visual culture? Anthropomorphic works—such as studious rabbits intent at their desks in a rural village schoolroom, athletic toads playing a frenetic gameContinue reading “Iconic Eccentricity: The Meaning of Victorian Novelty Taxidermy”