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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... earliest experiments . The collected essays are not , there- fore , grouped according to strict methodology but rather along a chain of association linking one essay into the next . Such an ordering pre- serves , I hope , the dynamic of ...
... early object relations ; his " real self show [ s ] through the crev- ices " of his presentation in the novel . Morbid and obsessive , he recog- nizes the despair of human existence in nature . The self of Father Time is , like ...
... early research in " A Project for a Scientific Psychology , " which proposed an understanding of the psychological through a dissection of the somatic . " We will , " Holland argues , " be able to trace psychological concepts as ...
... Early in 1971 Guntrip learned that Winnicott had had a flu attack and so dropped him a line . Winnicott called soon afterwards to thank him for his note . Two weeks later Winnicott's secretary called with the news that he had died ...
... early childhood but at forty- nine years of age . But this difference is of only secondary importance . The Engels ' father , like Frank , died unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of fifty - eight . Though already forty years of ...