Author Archives: PsyArt

By: Suneel S. Mehmi Abstract: In this article I argue for new meaning and critical importance to be given to Dahl’s short story in his most successful collections Someone Like You, Kiss, Kiss and Switch Bitch by systematising and accounting for its portrayed violence. I first outline the history, importance and contemporary significance of Dahl’sContinue reading “Understanding the Significance and Purpose of Violence in the Short Stories of Roald Dahl”

By: Stuart Joy Abstract: Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this article considers writer/director Christopher Nolan’s treatment of trauma in the context of The Prestige (2006) by analysing the film’s narrative structure and thematic content. I argue that the film communicates trauma through a process of thematic, technical and visual repetition that is linked to the subjectContinue reading “Looking for the Secret: Death and Desire in The Prestige”

By: Heddy Shait Abstract: Married Life, by the Austrian Jewish author and poet David Vogel, was a provocative novel for Hebrew literature at the time of its publication in 1929. The story is one of sexual pathology in a relationship between a masochistic victimized Jewish man, a writer at the start of his career, andContinue reading “Freud’s “Uncanny” (Unheimlich) in David Vogel’s Married Life: Impressionism and Expressionism in a Belligerent Relationship”

By: James J. Fiumara Abstract: This article positions William Godwin’s 1794 novel Things as They Are; Or The Adventures of Caleb Williams as anticipating a modern theory of consciousness (the “self”) found in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cognitive psychology that argues that we do not have reliable access to the workings of our own minds (letContinue reading “Paroxysms of the Mind: Narration, Consciousness, and the Self in William Godwin’s Things as They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams”

By: Maria S. Kardaun Abstract: It is well known that in Plato’s utopian ideal state there is no room for free artistic expression: artists are mistrusted and art works heavily censored. Less known is that, once they are properly selected and purified, art works are particularly valued by Plato. However, Plato completely disapproves of aContinue reading “The Philosopher and the Beast: Plato’s Fear of Tragedy”

By: John J. Marinan Abstract: Identity formations inscribed in language are rhetorical constructions. A cultural artifact exemplifying this idea is the movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and its main character, Lisbeth Salander. She displays evidence of “difference” in her onscreen behaviors, although in many instances her difference is a strength, not a weakness.Continue reading “More than Tattoos: Rhetorical Discourse and Autism in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

By: Thomas R. Frosch Abstract: The Book of Thel concerns an adolescent girl, whose voyage to adulthood is cut short by a flood of new sensations that sends her fleeing back to a protected world. This article studies her experience in the light of Freud’s stimulus barrier, its revisions by Mahler, Shapiro and Stern, Esman,Continue reading “Blake’s “Book of Thel” And the Stimulus Barrier”

By: Inma Civico-Lyons Abstract: Pedro Almodóvar creates a cinematography that represents the sacrifice of the subject in its becoming a subject-of-language. Having been labeled the representative of Spanish idiosyncrasies, Almodóvar´s films also express universal post-modern concerns. The director makes use of destabilizing, dissonant, and dissident discourses that question the illusory coherence of the supposedly unifiedContinue reading “Disruptions of the Real in Almodóvar’s Films: The Psychological Perspective in Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) and Matador (1986)”

By: Mark A. Elliot Abstract: In addressing this topic, the article will firstly give an introduction to the life and work of Francis Bacon, this is followed by a discussion of the meaning of distortion in a general sense, and then with specific reference to Bacon’s art. Prior to analyzing Bacon’s motivation to distort itContinue reading “Snarling into the Abyss: An analytical account of the psychological meaning of distortion in Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) portraiture”

By: Emilia Halton-Hernandez Abstract: This article explores views of the mother-infant relationship and how it reveals conceptions of the self in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. William Wordsworth’s theory of the development of the self and mind in infancy in his 1799 Prelude (published 1850) is very much ahead of its time, anticipating twentiethContinue reading “Wordsworth’s prescient baby: Conceptions of the mother-infant relationship in the development of the Self 1790s-1890s”