Compromise Formations: Current Directions in Psychoanalytic CriticismVera J. Camden These essays are collected from the Fourth International Conference on Literature and Psychology held at Kent State University, 7-9 August 1987. In selecting the essays for this first collection to emerge from the varied conferences now being sponsored by the Kent State University Center for Literature and Psychoanalysis, Vera Camden has brought together representative contributions from two major contemporary schools of psychoanalytic criticism: object relations and Lacanian theory. These essays define the questions which emerge when both schools are brought into the kind of association engendered by this conference, offering not so much a resolution to opposing positions as a fuller articulation of the space each occupies and a fluidity of discussion which has characterized psychoanalysis since Freud's earliest discoveries. Each contributor is concerned with the place of the unconscious in the determination of the human subject and its representations. Whether the approach is primarily clinical or literary, each identifies and analyzes the anguish of the incomplete self--a sell which looks to construct, identify, regain, or even deny meaning. A crucial difference emerges among these authors as to how the experience of human alienation and the quest for identify is to be analyzed. Some would suggest, after Jacques Lacan, that the task of analysis is to recognize the illusion of the unitary self and to reconcile the individual to that state. Others would contend the task of analysis is to recover, by the transference relationship, the lost unity missing in childhood and reflect in adult object-relations. These essays range from clinical perspectives in psychosis and creativity to critical readings of Joyce and Shakespeare to recent applications of brain research to traditional psychoanalytic notions of the human subject. The richness and variety in this collection bear witness to the continuing impact of psychoanalysis on literary and cultural studies. |
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... beginning of the XIXe century , in France ] is therefore at once a sound and a relationship . " ) 9. Strictly speaking , it is not a model of interpretation , and Freud here is mostly con- cerned with regression in dreams . But I think ...
... beginning , for the first time , to remember the events of the period before his brother's death . In " Dreaming , Fanta- sying , and Living " ( 1971 ) , Winnicott makes the unexpected point that " dreaming and living have been seen to ...
... beginning . By addressing the hid- den anxiety in the Piggle's question , Winnicott was in the most tactful way preparing her for not only for the eventual termination of her treatment but also for his own death , which indeed occurred ...
... beginning as the " Oedipus complex . " The connection between literature and psychoanalysis thus starts out on an extensive and auspi- cious development . It took its origin from the introduction of the Oedi- pus complex by example , as ...
... beginning have tried to draw from literature for both the under- standing and the communication of their enterprise , when they felt the need for the psychoanalytic mot juste . The reference to literature , the quotation , might ...