Psychoanalytical Criticism

The book is the first monograph which examines the correspondences between the oeuvre of Jack Kerouac and the thought of Jacques Lacan, the two apparently incompatible worlds which prove to be complementary when taking a closer look. The study demonstrates a number of points. Firstly, with Jacques Lacan as a silent partner, it helps to better understand why psychoanalysis won Kerouac’s enmity in the mid-1950s. It also delves into Lacan’s reflections on spontaneous free-association to prove their convergence with Beats’ literary tactics. In its final part, by employing Lacanian theory, the book offers an extensive insight into Kerouac’s oeuvre to excavate the problematic status of the father figure, a crucial matter not yet given a rigorous critical attention.

Closing the "Dubliners" and the representation of the Irish capital and community setting at the turn of the century, "The Dead" is the longest piece, concluding the set of stories with a distinct message about life and intellectual fulfilment. From manuscript to print, the collection went through a seven-year saga of trial and error with various publishers, being finally published in 1914, after the entire first print-run was burned before it could reach the public, on 11 September 1912 (Fargnoli and Patrick 1995: 145). Charles Levin and Charles Shattuck looked at it as a series of 15 vignettes (1944: 30), linking the series to Joyce’s own confession in May 1906 to his publisher about the “paralysis” covering the whole collection and, then, explaining the stories as a journey focused on four main stages: “childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life” (Ellmann 1975: 83). While inspecting such contributions, this paper attempts to employ resources provided by psychoanalytic criticism and offer a wider interpretation about identity, love and death as illuminating topics in the Joycean universe. Earlier criticism focused on exploring links between Joyce’s life and his vision (Magalaner, Kain, 1956; Gilbert, Ellmann 1966; Tindall, 1959; Bowen, Carens, 1984; Bollettieri Bosinelli, Mosher 1998, Bloom 1999), his place in the twentieth-century Irish writing (Garrett 1986; Torchiana, 1986; Beja 1989; Henke 1990), while recent studies provide topical insights (Schwaber 2000, Fargnoli, Gillespie 2006; Sakr 2008, McArdle 2010; Oatley, Djikic et alii 2016, Olivares Merino 2016). As Patrick Parrinder notes in his study, in the years Joyce wrote and waited for Dubliners to come into print, symbolism “was a topical and widely discussed literary technique” (Parrinder1984: 51), yet Parrinder rejects the idea launched by Levin and Shattuck about the parallelism to the Odyssey. The final story of "Dubliners"  can be nevertheless discussed in the light of concepts such as Eros and Thanatos, dream and the use of symbols and metaphors. The main questions I address are: is the party described in the story a genuine communal gathering, or is it meant to foresee mental isolation and annihilation, placing the key protagonists at a huge distance from each other, despite their apparent love? And is snow, the final symbolic element covering the city, working as a hint to purification or merely suggesting a world reduced to silence by its own death? This paper employs psychoanalytic criticism for a close reading of the story, inspecting the construct in terms of primary drives, as well as the questionable actions and thoughts of the key protagonists.

This exploratory study uses critical hermeneutics to understand the phenomenon of post-modernism in Toni Morrison’s Jazz. The interpretative analysis discusses the strains of post-modernism; however the analysis offer an understanding of reciprocal relationship between form and content of the novel; both affecting and reflecting each other. A close reading of the text illustrates that the barrier between personal and collective time collapses as the author criss-crosses folklorist, almost mythical elements with circular patterns of temporal distortions and political content through evolving styles of composition. Findings reveal that Morrison is ahead of her age that not only follows traditional literary patterns but also subverts them.

Gestalt Therapy techniques are considered to be powerful tools for the remobilization of human growth and change. I will attempt to show that the power of these techniques lies in the fact that they are effective ways of dealing with our "internalizations". I will first briefly review object relation theory and then discuss gestalt techniques as they pertain to internal objects.

Poe’s "The Gold-Bug”: from the Reading of Madness to the Madness of its Readings seeks to establish a relationship between the scene of reading within Poe’s tale and the scene of the tale’s early psychoanalytic readings. By first following the function of interpretation within the text and subsequently moving to some of the characteristics of its critical interpretations, we aim to show how „The Gold Bug”, not only anticipates its misreadings, but also how it ultimately deconstructs them. One of the paper’s main objectives, therefore, is to bring into the foreground what Pierre Bayard calls „the paradoxical nature” of the literary text, by illustrating the way in which Poe’s short story invites a reading of madness, while simultaneously exposing the „madness” of its readings.

Using formalism and psychoanalysis theory, this paper intends to analyze the characteristics brought by Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The objectives are to describe the characterizations and psychological characteristic of Dorian Gray. This article use formalism and psychoanalytical perspectives or criticism for its theoretical framework. For psychoanalytical theory, the analyst applies the concept of defense mechanism as its specification. The method used is descriptive qualitative. The data for this analysis are taken from the events and dialogues within the novel. The results show that the protagonist character in this novel, Dorian Gray, whose physical appearance was eternal, has several different personalities before and after his mindset changes. Before poisoned by the idea of the glorification of youth, he was an innocent, shy, and frightened pretty boy. After changing, he was easy-swayed person, self-conscious, self-esteem, self-destructive, perfectionist, cruel, coward-hearted person, hypocritical, hedonist, great art tester, and drug addict. Some characteristics are collected through the analysis of Freud’s defense mechanism of repression, sublimation, denial, and projection.

This essay focuses on the unnamed narrator’s quest for self in the novel. And it tries to advocate that the novel unfolds its own gist, only when the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan are applied to the unnamed narrator’s story because his search for an identity is, indeed, a matter of purely psychological quest.

Our lack of awareness of Being results in bewildering experience. The intrinsic inner radiance, the inner light of Being arises out of primordial luminous spaciousness, the unbound openness of unbound pure potentiality. When this primordial ground of Being is veiled and obscured by the lack of experiential awareness, we can be locked into dualistic experiences, and consequently the non-dual nature of the field of Being is experientially foreclosed. The sense of indivisibility of all phenomena and awareness is experientially foreclosed. The capacity to see into, feel into and see through the lucidity of phenomena as the very field of Being becomes foreclosed and densified. We then live contained in mind alone. There is no experience of the field of Being. Without the field of Being we easily become things and objects both to our self and to others.

Characteristics of good and poor listeners were collected. The most frequent characteristics of good listeners (top 30) and poor listeners (top 28) were randomized and participants were asked to respond to each on a scale from male, somewhat male, true of both sexes, somewhat female, female. Most of the good characteristics were associated with females, while the characteristics of poor listeners were association with males. The crux of this study is the discussion that gives several possible reasons for the results and makes the argument that the results are mainly a result of stereotyping and the fact that participants seemed to assume an interpersonal context for the characteristics where women are perceived to have the listening qualities that are most effective. Although gender may not be the single most important influence on communication, it is so basic that it affects interaction in varied contexts.

FROM THE BACK COVER: What is the essential nature of meaning? . . . . . This book answers by examining interpretive theories from the past and present. It finds that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation, a struggle that reaches crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand, this crisis is mollified by Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which argues that we are always already in a meaningful relationship to the objects of the world. On the other hand, this crisis is exacerbated when phenomenology, structuralism, and aesthetic theory directly make meaning into an object of study. . . . . . . . . These historical developments culminate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose non-hermeneutical phenomenology delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Intriguingly, Lacan's work reveals meaning to be sexual in nature. By integrating his notion of sexual difference with his work in discourse theory and topology, this book demonstrates how the subject's struggle with meaning can be suspended.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GENERAL DESCRIPTION: Broadly speaking, the majority of books on Jacques Lacan focus on the earlier periods of his career. They also tend to target the psychoanalytic clinical community, or else discuss his work in various political, social, and cultural contexts. But in almost all cases these books refrain from a detailed exegesis of his actual texts. They instead prefer to comment on his theoretical apparatus as a whole before turning to its practical implications. . . . . . This book positions itself against this grain. Firstly, it closely analyzes some half-dozen key Lacanian texts. This analysis is organized under a single thematic – the question of meaning – in order to advance the reader's understanding of the trajectory of Lacan's thought across his entire career, as well as to promote the book's thesis that the field of meaning can be suspended. Accordingly, an initial chapter takes up the hermeneutical tradition from Flacius onward. This is then supplemented by a chapter which surveys phenomenological, structuralist and aesthetic theories of meaning and their differing methods of textual analysis. Together these two chapters provide a unique context for the sustained analysis of Lacan's texts which begins in the third chapter, an analysis that forms the bulk of the book's content. This contextualization potentially widens the book's appeal to any scholar wishing to explore his relationship to those textual objects he interacts with on a daily basis. And because this book assumes the reader has little to no familiarity with Lacan, the reader will find patient explanations of the basics of his theories before slowly being led up to the more difficult theories of his late years. Again the argument is that Lacan has something to offer all scholars. His work is not just reserved for psychoanalysts. . . . . . It is with his late theories that the serious student of Lacan will find the book's most original contribution. For in the fourth chapter a detailed account is provided of how Lacan derived his infamous formulae of sexuation from Aristotelian logic. These formulae are then extensively discussed against the backdrop of interpretive theory and textual analysis, showing how these formulae capture much more than just the difference between the sexes. Strikingly, this difference is also found to run through meaning itself, something the final chapter aims to demonstrate. It does this by amalgamating three key components of late-Lacan: sexuation, discourse theory and his use of topological spaces. This amalgamation is a first in the literature. But this amalgamation is not just useful in demonstrating the book's thesis. It further suggests how seemingly divergent aspects of late-Lacanian theory can be made to work together.

This thesis unveils what is abnormally appealing and distinctive to the readers that makes Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Novel Series so popular and well-read, what it is about the characters that makes the readers love them, what it is about the storyline that allows so many readers to dive into it and relate it to parts of their lives, all whys and wherefores to argue that literature stands able to absorb and highly recognize the values of novels that are obviously not written by the conventional standards that literary critics would seek. The thesis applies a Freudian psychoanalysis of the id and the super-ego to the mentalities and the behaviors of the main characters of the novels in order to achieve this goal.

This paper attempts to analyse the concept of the Indian theoretical approach of Aucitya (Decorum) followed in the shaping of characters and the themes in the selected short stories of JhumpaLahiri, namely, "A Temporary Matter," "When Mr.Pirzada Came to Dine," "A Real Durwan" and "This Blessed House" which are compiled in the book, Interpreter of Maladies. The paper further analyses the structuralist distinction between "langue" and "parole" and to reassure the arbitrary blending of both in expressing the semantic relationship which leads to the norms of conception intermingled with the aesthetics of Aucitya. The paper tends to express the above-mentioned theme along with the uniqueness of the Homo sapiens in the way they create a cognitive revolution in the unification of the humankind and the evolution of language. The book titled, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari is adapted to elucidate the theme. The characters are approached by throwing more light on Aucitya and structuralistprinciples.This analysis, thus, tries to understand how these theories, both Indian as well as European, change our understanding of the mentioned literary works. The process of understanding literature with the help of Indian literary theory of Aucitya brings out explicit pleasure in the research.

"ABSTRACT:
    This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology.
    Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity.
    Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning."

Abstract: This paper discusses Alice walker’s The Color Purple. Since
its publication in 1982 it has caught attention of critics and researchers.
It’s the story of a girl, Celie, physically and emotionally isolated,
victim, quiet and submissive in the beginning of the novel but she later
develops into a strong bold character. So this study works under the
subject, “From “being” to “becoming” and The Roles of Behaviors: A
Psychoanalytic Study of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Walker’s
own life is a turn from a self-conscious thought “For a long time, I
thought I was very ugly and disfigured” (Walker 2015) to an active
social worker, teacher and mighty writer.
The study aims at recognizing the psychological motivations by
specially focusing on patterns of behaviors, constructive and
destructive, that play major roles in Celie’s journey from her dead,
passive existence into her living bold, identified, and financially,
spiritually and emotionally independent life. In order to carry this out
the qualitative method of textual analysis is conducted with related
theoretical framework of Psychoanalytic Criticism. The study
investigates the primary text in terms of Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939)
concepts of psychology that behavior is determined by unconscious core issues. They work behind one’s acts and that the behaviors play
unavoidable part in building one’s true self-image (Tyson 2006, 14-15).
Besides, the study seeks to draw attention with its findings, on the
basis of textual analysis, to the fact that Celie’s mind and her journey is
in all way an output of behaviors, to the fact that they unquestionably
shape our spirit; and for such study Psychoanalytic Criticism befits
more intensely. For psychology has got the immediate and sufficient
goal of knowing individuals and groups by each researching specific
cases and forming general principles and for most it eventually aims to
help society through its findings (Types of behaviors 2014).

Keywords: Alice Walker, Psychoanalytic Criticism, Patterns of
behavior, Freud, Celie.

Le teorie psicoanalitiche della letteratura sono analizzate in questo volume in base a un'originale idea storiografica: l'ipotesi che il campo di queste teorie sia un campo ibrido, che si sia costituito attraverso il dialogo tra la psicoanalisi e le teorie letterarie di volta in volta ege-moniche. Un modello compiuto di questa ibridazione è indicato nel lavoro teorico di Francesco Orlando. Insieme a questa innovativa ipo-tesi storiografica, si analizza il problema della scrittura freudiana alla luce della narratologia contemporanea e della teoria dei dispositivi, il problema dell'intenzione d'autore in relazione all'analisi freudiana del Mosè di Michelangelo e si propone un'idea di letteratura che ricollega il sapere psicoanalitico al sapere originario e demonico del mito anti-co, in un serrato confronto tra le più recenti acquisizioni della teoria letteraria e della psicoanalisi contemporanea.

Alan Cumyn’s Man of Bone offers a powerful example of the traumatic impact that captivity and torture can afford on a human being. The novel narrates the nine-month-long period during which Bill Burridge, a Canadian diplomat, endures captivity and torture after a guerrilla faction kidnaps him on the imaginary South Pacific Island of Santa Irene. Hooded for most of the narration until his release, Burridge gives way to a wide range of responses, his narrative evoking the terror of uncertainty and life threat in its disjunctive presentation, hallucination, dream realm and stylistic fragmentation. Language narrows in on small details recorded in elliptical sentences, whose choppy structures convey suffocation and awe; to keep such devastating feelings at bay, the protagonist turns to repetitive patterns and flashbacks to distract his mind. Even when freed, Burridge persists with his fixation on details, dissociative flashbacks and exploitation of water imagery to convey the sense of distressed immersion, making it hard for the readers to determine the boundary between the real and the imaginary. His narrative keeps echoing his inability to disentangle himself from the obsessive thoughts that drive him outside himself and cause him to relive the experience in confused divided consciousness. The discussion of trauma from captivity and trauma will call on psychoanalytical theories of Michael Balint, Wilfred R. Bion, Frances Tustin and Judith Mitrani.

This book develops psychoanalytic music criticism in the field of postmodern music analysis. It offers psychoanalytic listenings of various musics; from a Romantic symphony to alternative country music, from piano miniatures to TV-opera. The musical rhetoric of melancholy, uncanny, acoustic mirroring, alienation and other subjectivity mechanisms are tracked in the music of Chopin (Nocturne C minor Op. 48), k.d. lang (Constant Craving, Save me), Nordgren (Alex), Schubert (Der Lindenbaum), Sibelius (Kyllikki), and Tchaikovsky (Symphony No. 6, Pathétique). The book also outlines the history and current state of psychoanalytic music analysis and theorizes music as a site of subjectivity.

Nancy Huston’s Instruments of Darkness illustrates how the narration of trauma has at once potentially redeeming and devouring powers. A joint literary-psychoanalytic exploration of the main characters’ childhood experiences and subsequent severed and severing links/bonds highlights how the text bears the mark of past traumas, rejecting the theories of LaCapra, Bion, D. W. Winnicott, Laub, Poland, and André Green. Following the multiple processes through which the protagonist of the framing narrative fights against her past while recording the loops of the protagonist’s life in the framed narrative, the novel engages in a therapeutic process counteracting the traumatic impact of a dead mother, whether physically or psychically.

Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding is considered by some to be one of the representative dramas of modernism. Reading it, however, with an eye on the real event that is said to have inspired it or the features of the cultural world it arises from, as some of the readers have tried to do leaves it hanging and unexplained in some of its phases. The work is read in what follows as a drama of consciousness in which we are looking at a specific dimension of the functioning of consciousness, namely the making of symbols. This is a need related to the creation of a centre of orientation. This need is ever present, but especially in the face of traumatic and inchoate experiences. Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms provides the tools applied here for the purpose of tracking the adjustments occurring in the consciousness of the Mother who is the chief sufferer of the traumas of this play, and who survives them in more than a physical way.

İnsanoğlu sosyal yaşamda sahip olduğu ve sorumluluğunu üzerinde hissettiği birtakım roller tarafından bölünüp çekiştirilmeye meyillidir. Kimi zaman bu roller birbirleriyle kayda değer bir çelişki göstermeden bir arada akıp gider; kimi zamansa bu çekişme, bireyin üzerine çullanıp onu boğarak büyük bir bunalıma sürükleyebilir. İşte, Berna Moran'ın da şu sözlerle ifade ettiği gibi, Huzur'un baş kahramanı Mümtaz'ın yaşadığı, yapıtın biçim olarak da onu en iyi anlatmak gayesiyle etrafında şekillendiği çelişki, yukarıda bahsedilen ikinci türden çelişkidir: "... birtakım değerler

Three cases of dependency, in analysands of C.G. Jung, are investigated. Their dreams, including their personal understanding, are examined. The article addresses difficulties in C.G. Jung’s personal convictions, which hampered his former analysands (my conjecture). These convictions remain a quandary in the school of Analytical Psychology. The principle of personal emancipation, so central to the spiritual teachings of all times, is underestimated in the modern era.

Keywords: dependency, quaternarian, trinitarian, C.G. Jung, Joseph L. Henderson, Marie-Louise von Franz, Wolfgang Pauli, Christian mysticism, analytical psychology, transference, individuation.

In his 1962 philosophical study L’espace humain, George Matoré claims that to overcome chaos, human beings control their lives by determining their position, others’ and that of objects around them; thus they escape the absurdity of life and secure an anchor for themselves by exploiting spatial language (Matoré ,1962: 13-28). This certainly applies to the extreme in the case of Edna Cormick, the protagonist of Joan Barfoot’s Dancing in the Dark, whose childhood cumulative trauma and subsequent social trauma lead to a psychotic apprehension of life favouring spatial seclusion. The novel consists of the diary entries she writes in psychiatric internment after murdering her husband; in them she maps her past and present lives in spatially reductionist terms that prove her self-erasure and inability to function in a wide frame. Illustrating her psychopathological response to trauma, the imagery, diction, and style that capture Edna’s behaviour, attitudes and thoughts highlight psychoanalytical theories, such as those of Dana Amir (2014), Michael Balint (1968), Ester Bick (1968 and 1986), Wilfred R. Bion (1959) and Judith Mitrani. Eventually, the readers end up debating her ability to build a bridge for posttraumatic growth.

There are passages in Wittgenstein where he compares his method to psychotherapy and one or two where he seems to suggest that the ‘patient’ has the last word on his ‘illness’ and ‘cure’.  This paper tries to take these seriously, especially in connexion with the idea that victims of philosophical confusion talk nonsense.

Philosophical accusations of talking nonsense made in a polemical spirit are bound to fail, since the only way one can effectively criticise another’s utterance is by attaching some meaning to it.  But if the other acknowledges the possibility that his puzzlement arises from his having been taken in by nonsense, then perhaps a co-operative investigation of this suggestion might be fruitful.  Indeed self-diagnosis ought in principle to be possible.  Ought it not to have happened at least once in the history of philosophy if philosophical nonsense has ever been exposed? 

But there are difficulties.  For example:
a) We must ask whether or not philosophical nonsense, when exposed as such, is supposed to lose all appearance of meaningfulness.  Either answer is problematic.
b) The acknowledged similarity of the methodology under investigation to that of psychoanalysis exposes it to many of the familiar objections to the methodology of psychoanalysis, especially those that draw attention to the misleading influence of suggestion by an authority-figure.
c) The proposal that relentless cross-questioning of a suspected nonsense-talker will eventually lead her to ‘dry up’ (if she really is talking nonsense) seems to involve a version of the so-called Socratic Fallacy.

With its reflections on the self caught between countries and languages, Nancy Huston’s essay Losing North leads itself to a psychoanalytical and textual exploration of loss and dis-orientation resulting from the experience of exile borne in part of a need to distance the self from childhood traumatic experiences, namely her mother’s walking out on the family, never to return. Based on the author’s experience of expatriation, the essay records, with humour, nostalgia and rationalisation alternately, a variety of emotions and dis/advantages to her condition that bring to mind the theories of Klein, Winnicott, Bion and Kristeva. With their focus on self-hate and guilt, lack of holding and continuity, false and true self, severed links and bond, disorientation, these theories help explain the likely sources of the text’s ruptures. Close reading and deconstructive approach, in turn, confirm the psychoanalytical theories as they highlight what Jacqueline Rose would consider writing that reveals unconscious phenomena. Indeed in its attempt to deconstruct the metaphor of losing north, the text loses ground increasingly while its voice remains continually floating, language drifting away from the speaker’s centre of self. Although the text clearly struggles to engage in a Derridian practice of word play to get beyond unitary meaning, the textual voice follows a unidirectional, indeed unidimensional thread, avoiding affective planes, erasing the feminine, thereby perpetuating its own entrapment. Losing North thus illustrates a particular exploitation of Derridian word play, fabricating associations while probing, and grappling with, meanings of disorientation to avoid letting trauma seep into it and particularly the emotions related to the maternal.

As a film thoroughly concerned with enjoyment and the body, Black Swan (Aronofsky, 2010) presents an opportunity to consider questions of psychoanalysis and embodiment in the cinema. This paper aims to pursue such a possibility by exploring both Aronofsky’s film and Lacan’s later work in terms of the concept of jouissance. Focusing particularly on the right hand side of Lacan's Graph of Sexuation and thus the question of feminine jouissance specifically, my goal is to develop a logic proper to the feminine as it is suggested by Nina’s dance and by Colette Soler’s theory of the body in extremis. Reading Black Swan, like reading Encore, must be pursued very carefully in order to avoid falling into the trap of relegating the feminine (in both instances) to absolute unknowability; instead, I argue that feminine structure should be understood – like masculine structure, but in an asymmetrical way – as a response to the unknowable that we might otherwise recognise as the sublime. To this end, I will read Nina’s dance as an embodied experience of an “immanent sublime”: the sheer (feminine) jouissance of the body.

Jon Mills is a prolific author with a penchant for philosophical clarity -a trait we might expect from a practicing psychoanalyst with a PhD in philosophy. In Conundrums, Mills outlines and criticizes recent developments in psychoanalytic theory, developments broadly known as "relational," and submits them to analytical and philosophical critique. Mills" criticisms underline both important developments and potentially problematic theses and practices associated with the relational theories.

This essay takes up the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan as a way to work through Beckett’s rejection of the humanist model of language, in which the capacity for speech is used to distinguish the human from the nonhuman. By displacing self-present modes of expression onto the order of the signifier’s living autonomy, Beckett’s postmodernism presents us with a paradox in which a life is projected onto and played out technologically through language at the very point that marks the subject’s disappearance into what Lacan calls “the real,” a radically desubjectified “beyond” of both language and human consciousness.

This paper examines the ways in which Beckett and O’Brien, as Irish authors unraveling a larger imperial narrative, make use of the motif of the bicycle as means to embody a post-humanist approach to literary creation.  As a moving image of the text’s own auto-production, the figure of the bicycle evokes the way in which, for Beckett and O’Brien, writing itself demands, to use O’Brien’s words, a kind of “atomization” or becoming Other of the author, a becoming technology.

One key source of our current conceptual diversity is a shift to an epistemology based on the radical idea that we can learn most about experience by studying experience itself rather than by looking for the causes of it. The resulting emphasis on experience-near, clinically based conceptualizations has left us awash in a pluralism of diverse, irreconcilable perspectives. The press in the field is toward ever-closer descriptions of our clinical work, to rethink anew our process without the encrustations of theory. In our attempts to describe process, we act on a necessary illusion. On one hand, our attempt to grasp the living moment of our clinical experience in tradition is an effort to preserve a vital activity for posterity. On the other hand, it risks calcifying creativity and belief into dogma. The resolution to this risk is a critical "humorous" acceptance of multiple perspectives from the open ground of an epistemological pluralism. The hope in our field is that it is grounded in a process that ever transcends our attempts to grasp it even as we discover, create and preserve the living act that we do.

The relationship between Catherine Lim and the state in 1994 is, in this article, carefully reconstructed and analysed using close reading techniques. This analysis is set within an account of Singapore’s recent political history, specifically in the context of critical moments when ideological work was at its busiest. By drawing on psychoanalytical perspectives, some of the more significant political actions and behaviours during this moment of crisis will be explained as symptoms of repressed anxieties and insecurities. Insights into the gendered nature of the relationship between the state and Catherine Lim – and more generally between the state and civil society – will be drawn from contemporary feminist theory, especially the ideas of Luce Irigaray.

Spanish abstract: Resumen comentado del artículo de Norman N. Holland "Unity Identity Text Self", un clásico de la teoría de la recepción literaria desde el punto de vista psicoanalítico. He reescrito el título original en mi propio título de una manera que clarifique más las relaciones que busca establecer Holland entre estos cuatro términos: unidad, identidad, texto y sujeto. ___________________________________________________________________________________
English abstract: A commented account of Norman N. Holland's paper "Unity Identity Text Self", a classic of the theory of literary reception from a psychoanalytic perspective. The original title has been rewritten in my own title so as to further clarify the relationships proposed by Holland between these four terms: unity, identity, text, and self.