Recently added articles from PSYART:
A Post-Kleinian Model for Aesthetic Criticism
Jan 01, 2008; ... This paper presents a piece of writing by the Kleinian art critic Adrian Stokes as a model for aesthetic criticism in general. First the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation are considered, with regard to the definition of an 'art symbol' made by the philosopher of aesthetics Susanne Langer ....
At a Loss for Words: Writer's Block in Britten's Death in Venice
Jan 01, 2008; ... Based on Thomas Mann's story about an aging novelist's fateful obsession with an adolescent boy, Benjamin Britten's opera Death in Venice artfully dramatizes Mann's story of repressed sexuality masked as creative inhibition. Aschenbach's introductory monologue, beginning "My mind beats on and no ...
The Dramatic Presentation of Inner Turmoil: Shakespeare and John Berryman's Dream Songs
Jan 01, 2008; ... This paper examines John Berryman's Dream Songs from a psychoanalytic perspective. The paper formulates a means of discussing three factors that impinge on Henry's construction of himself: the heteroglossic nature of thought one's relationship to power and one's relationship to the metaphysical ....
Franz Kafka's « The Metamorphosis » : A case study
Jan 01, 2008; ... After reviewing the central strategies of psychoanalytic literary criticism, this paper engages in a detailed textual analysis of the German language of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," showing how the language of the story reveals unconscious fantasies about the body and about family relationships ...
Nachträglichkeit
Jan 01, 2008; ... In this paper, I show that Derrida is indebted to psychoanalysis as the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit (translated into English by Jones as 'deferred action) is central to Derridean concepts, such as 'Différance'. To do so, I first define the notion of Nachträglichkeit through its ...
Like two skins, one inside the other": Dual Unity in Brokeback Mountain
Jan 01, 2008; ... By focusing on the specific language of Annie Proulx's story - with some references to the Ang Lee film - I speculate that the sources of imaginative production (writing) and popular reception (reading) lie in memories and evocations of early (infantile) emotional life. Using concepts from ...
Poetic Conventions as Fossilized Cognitive Devices; The Case of Mediaeval and Renaissance Poetics
Jan 01, 2008; ... In mediaeval and Renaissance poetry the use of genres is conventional. The first person singular is frequently regarded as a rhetorical device rather than as evidence of personal experience. We should not, therefore, take for granted that we have explained the poet's subjective experience by the ...
Swiss Cows and an English Poet: Empathic Nostalgia in a Sonnet of Wordsworth's
Jan 01, 2008; ... The traditional Swiss cowherds' melody called the "Ranz des Vaches" has been famous for centuries for its uncanny ability to evoke extreme nostalgia. This paper analyzes a sonnet of Wordsworth's about his encounter with the "Ranz" in Switzerland in 1820. It examines both the statement and the ...
That Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Boy: An Amazing Psychoanalytic Journey
Jan 01, 2008; ... Freud pioneered psychoanalysis as his method for investigating the conscious and unconscious psychic apparatus. Psychoanalysis is an avenue by which the analyst can explore the individual's compromises and conflicts in adaptation to the demands of social order. Freud, in his analyses of Jensen's ...
Time, Memory, and the "Uncertain I": Transtemporal Subjectivity in Elizabeth Bowen's Short Fiction
Jan 01, 2008; ... Key to the psychological realism of Elizabeth Bowen's short fiction is her insight into human subjectivity via depictions of what I term "transtemporal subjectivity": the destabilized "I" as existing in a fluid realm comprised simultaneously of past (memory), present (experience), and future ...
Arabic Poet Al-Mutanabbi: A Maslovian Humanistic Approach
Jan 01, 2007; ... This paper is concerned with the Maslovian "real self" of al-Mutanabbi, a great poet of the Abbasid period (750-1258 AD). I have made an effort to discover the deeper aspects of al-Mutanabbi's personality, which constitute an important aspect of his artistic expression. The study I've undertaken ...
Caravaggio and the Physiology of Schizophrenia
Jan 01, 2007; ... Caravaggio has long enjoyed a reputation as an anti-social and tempestuous individual. The following argues that Caravaggio was in fact suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Following Wilhelm Reich's argument that schizophrenic symptoms and delusions are the result of the projection of ...
Holden Caulfield as Castrated Hero
Jan 01, 2007; ... TThis essay discusses Catcher in the Rye as a vehicle for Holden Caulfield's psychological session with the reader, as well as the latent signs this analysis reveals. Using Freud's own interpretations of dream objects, the reader can unveil the psychological basis of Holden's obsessions. Holden ...
Literature and Happiness
Jan 01, 2007; ... It has become a commonplace to insist that literature has an evolutionary value in allowing us to try out solutions to life situations. Or that literature allows us to empathize with other humans. Or that literature makes us better morally. Or wiser. I maintain that we do literature because it ...
Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Creative Art-The Case of Paul Gauguin
Jan 01, 2007; ... The personal excesses of Paul Gauguin are relatively well-known. This paper argues that Gauguin was suffering from a disorder known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder and that this directly impacted his creative work, particularly in the later years. Gauguin's narcissism is readily apparent ...
On the Aesthetic Structure of Sublimation: Re-reading Marcuse v. Brown through The Birth of Tragedy
Jan 01, 2007; ... This essay will reread the debate between Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown in terms of each author's conceptualization of the aesthetic structure of the psychoanalytic process of sublimation, using as a starting point Brown's association of sublimation with the figure of Apollo and his ...
Poetry as Right-Hemispheric Language
Jan 01, 2007; ... Though the brain's left hemisphere is commonly believed to be the "seat of language," the right hemisphere processes a number of subtle linguistic functions. This paper will argue that the degree of right-hemispheric involvement in language is what differentiates "poetic" or "literary" from ...
Resituating Freud's Hamlet
Jan 01, 2007; ... Hamlet's inner conflict, though rich in oedipal imagery, is dramatized as the product of his immediate situation rather than of childhood trauma. It revolves around the old chivalric code of blood revenge and honor-at-all costs, and is implicit in the text, hence not "repressed" by the ...
The Waters of the Mind: Rhetorical Patterns of Fluidity in Woolf, William James, Bergson and Freud
Jan 01, 2007; ... At the beginning of the 20th century, writers such as Virginia Woolf and thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, William James and Henri Bergson were trying to give a novel account of our inner and psychological life. The aim of this article is to compare Woolf's metaphorical recreation of the workings ...
"This Petty Reasoning Mind": Pauli, Jung, and Psychic Fission in The Physicists
Jan 01, 2007; ... While set in a sanatorium and figuring a psychologist who corresponds with Jung as a major character, Dürrenmatt's The Physicists has surprisingly never been methodically examined from a Jungian perspective. This paper explores the previously unrecognized significance of Gustav Jung's analysis ...