Psychoanaliterature, or, how the American relational move made Are You My Mother? and The Argonauts (original) (raw)
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The Products of the Imagination: Psychoanalytic Theory and Postmodern Literary Criticism
The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2000
This article considers some of the affinities between postmodern literary theory and the psychoanalytic theories concerned with intersubjective phenomena. Postmodern literary theory is described briefly, and it is argued that one of its major concerns is the nature of, and the political and cultural influences on, subjectivity and identity. Despite that, postmodernism generally, and literary postmodernism in particular, can be said to lack a theory of the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of the experience of self. This article contends that the more relational schools of psychoanalytic theory can provide an example of the construction of selfhood that is of importance to contemporary and postmodern literary criticism. The academy has, to a considerable extent identified ‘psychoanalysis’ with the work of Jacques Lacan, but since the 1980s the work of such theorists as Jane Flax and Jessica Benjamin, building on the work of Nancy Chodorow, have increasingly opened up the possibilities of relational and object relations theory for literary studies. The relational psychoanalytic theories operate in the same epistemological universe as postmodern literary criticism, congruent with the postmodern idea of ‘truth’ as constructed and relational, and selfhood as shifting, contingent, and always-in-process. Particular attention is paid to the work of Wilfred Bion, whose understanding of self provides an account both of the failure of meaning, and of the development of mind. Some examples of a relational approach to literary analysis are provided.
Vital Lines Drawn From Books: Difficult Feelings in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother?
This article examines the representation of a transnational archive of queer books in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative function in the portrayal of Alison’s lesbian identification and its complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West. KEYWORDS lesbian, Alison Bechdel, Fun Home, Are You My Mother?, books, graphic memoirs, feelings, cultural politics, family, queer history
Psychoanalysis and American Fiction: The Subversion of Q.E.D
Studies in American Fiction, 1981
On board ship to America to deliver a series of lectures, Sigmund Freud turned to his companions and remarked, "We are bringing them the plague."1 Although many Americans probably did and still do agree with Freud's gloomy characterization, Americans accepted psychoanalysis so readily that we might question, as Freud himself did, our understanding of its implications. Certainly psychoanalytic practice has flourished here more so than in any other country, and Freudian concepts have influenced a host of related disciplines, including literary criticism. Today, however, that initial enthusiasm is being tempered, not so much by external resistance to its application, as by a period of what Geoffrey Hartman calls "constitutive doubt,"2 a doubt from within the field that both informs and enriches psychoanalytic practice.
Hypatia Reviews Online
In Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity, Alison Stone considers the idea that the rejection of the maternal is integral to the development of subjectivity. She argues that to become a modern subject has meant to be an autonomous, independent agent, largely free of dependency on others, and therefore separated from one's mother. This means that maternal subjectivity has arisen in the paradoxical position of needing to both create and reject a maternal identity. Her analysis is situated within the contemporary context, considering the impact that culture has on psyche. She draws primarily from psychoanalytic theory, from the classical to the contemporary feminist.
Straddling Two Worlds: The writer and the psychoanalytic psychotherapist
The autobiographer tells her story for many reasons, including the wish to communicate to others what it is like to be in her shoes. The psychoanalytic psychotherapist on the other hand, keeps her story to herself in order to make a space for the therapy. This is an ideal only. In practice, therapists reveal things about themselves directly and indirectly but it is important that such direct revelations not occur gratuitously and not without reference to their meaning for the person in therapy. In December 2008 I presented a paper to an audience of psychoanalytic colleagues on the topic of narcissism, autobiography and what happens when the therapist writes a memoir. The fall out from this presentation – marked polarisation of views on whether or not I had violated professional boundaries – is still under debate. In this paper I aim to explore the complexity of my audience’s response in the context of the autobiographical elements that may have triggered it, particularly my references within the paper to childhood sexual abuse. Incest is not merely an intrapsychic experience, nor simply a narrative construction. Historically and up to the present day, it continues to be problematic in the telling, as incest narratives are deemed unreliable. There is uncertainty about what actually happened and also difficulty in securing an empathic audience. To this extent, the power of incest lies in the persistent belief that incest happens to other people – the poor, the coloured, the unworthy – not to us. To talk about incest therefore as an event in the life of the therapist is to add a dimension that goes beyond a mere breach in the rules against therapist self-disclosure, into the realm of taboo. This resonates within the history of the psychoanalytic professional family, Freud’s efforts to set clear guidelines and the inevitable transgressions and boundary violations that have followed. When the therapist is also a writer of autobiography and her writing enters the public sphere and is therefore potentially accessible by her patients, an added dimension enters the work, especially in the telling of incest, which I consider in light of further developments both in the therapeutic field and also in autobiographical theory. This paper addresses the collision of these two worlds, of autobiography and therapy, in the telling of incest, when the witness, is both writer and therapist and there follows an immediate call to be silent.
2019
This thesis is an exploration of representations that revise perceptions of motherhood and gender through the concept of rejection of traditional maternal ideals in American novels written between the 1970s and early 21st century. Themes of voluntary childlessness, postpartum depression, child abuse and infanticide are explored through representations that narrate alternative and nuanced perceptions of motherhood and gender. Shifts in the perspective of representative maternal characters revise perceptions of motherhood and disrupt the discourse structuring the maternal ideal. Theorized by Lisa Baraitser in Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2008), the maternal ideal is deconstructed through the concept of interruption to the mother’s perception of herself as a maternal subject. Concepts like maternal ambivalence, revealed through the portrayal of interrupted transformation into the maternal subject, revise the discourse about the potential mother in every female which...
This paper examines a form of interpersonal relationality that takes the form of a speech event in which one participant produces a spoken turn that exhibits a poetic relationship to a co-participant's unspoken thoughts or unarticulated mental imagery. This examined in relation to an earlier analysis of a speech error during therapy which appeared to reflect some form of telepathic communication between patient and analyst. Drawing from sociological studies of the organization of everyday social interaction, I sketch some ways in which a sociological approach can contribute to psychoanalytic reflections on telepathic experiences between patient and analysts.
From Freud to Poststructuralism: A Journal of a Re-authoring Self
In the last two decades North American and European cultures have seen a consistent rise in the number of random mass shootings uniformly committed by socially isolated white males. This paper hypothesizes the source of white male violence and locates it in the details of the parental relationship with the son, focusing on the quality of the father’s response to the son’s normative attachment needs. To this end the author begins by recounting his experiences in graduate and post-graduate programs, fore-grounding the final two years of a psychotherapeutic training program in which his initial interest in Psychodynamic theories is tempered with the Poststructuralist ideas of Michel Foucault as they are described by Stephen Madigan in his Narrative Therapy (APA Press, 2006). In Part One, the author recounts his early application of Freudian theories to contextualize his childhood dominated by the Patriarchal abuse enacted by his father, eventually expressed in graduate research through a psychoanalytic critique of depictions of child characters in 19th century fiction. This criticism aspired to advocate for the rights of traumatized children through the creation of a liberatory critical narrative, as the Postcolonial critique has done for people of color, as the Feminist critique has done for women, as Queer Theory has done for homosexual men and women; it questioned the nature of white male power at the heart of each of these discourses’ complaints by asserting male aggression is not inherent but is rather learned within the first social system of the family. Following the rejection of his ideas in the English literature program he brought his research interests to a post-graduate psychotherapeutic program grounded within the Structuralist frame of Freudian theories. In Part Two, the author details the restrictive sense of self narrated into existence by the Freudian theories of his program trainers who pathologized his choice to refer openly to his childhood history of domestic trauma, which he advocates all adults who were abused as children be allowed and encouraged to do. His psychotherapeutic trainers’ aggressive rejection of his ideas led to his dismissal from this program; consequently, his sense of becoming a subjugated docile body is revisited through elaboration of Freudian theories, yet his self-narrative later evolves into a revitalized subjectivity in the Poststructuralist frame becoming reanimated and re-authored through Narrative Therapy techniques.
In this paper, we will look at two important voices in contemporary psychoanalysis, Didier Anzieu and Christopher Bollas, who from a theoretical perspective have tried to devise new genres to express their thinking. The result of this is hybrid texts that com‐ bine autobiography, essay, case study, fiction, comedy and poetry. In their theoretical work, Anzieu and Bollas have examined creativity and processes of thinking, predomi‐ nantly from the perspective of object‐relations psychoanalysis, although both are known as eclectic thinkers, who do not belong to just one school of psychoanalysis. A trend in recent psychoanalytic writing is the rise of creative forms of writing. One of the most popular psychoanalytic writers is Irvine D. Yalom, who fictionalizes the psychoanalytic therapy, for instance by staging an en‐ counter between Breuer and Nietzsche. In France Jean‐Bernard Pontalis has been steadily working on an essayistic oeuvre since the 1980s and Julia Kristeva published several detective novels/autobiographical romans à clé. Bruce Fink recently published a volume of Lacanian detective stories and