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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... Turning like Blake and Richard - Allerdyce to the figure of the feminine creator , Miller employs the metaphor of ... turns to the pre - Oedipal configurations of object - relation theorists to provide insight into the " selves " of ...
... turn to the process described above as a relationship . We found it in Saussure's model , to my knowledge the best we have at our disposal , and we can ask ourselves in what manner this representation of the speech process may help us ...
... turn pro- voked brutal rages and canings from his mother . It was to the dissection of this " world of internalized libidinally excited bad - object relations " ( 457 ) that his analysis with Fairbairn was dedicated , and Guntrip de ...
... turn to the illustrative case included in " Creativity and Its Origins . " In this paper , Winnicott tells of a man who feared to be called mad for thinking himself a girl , to whom Winnicott responded : " It was not that you told this ...
... turns on the death of a brother . Unlike the brothers of Guntrip and Freud , however , Frank Engel , George's elder by five minutes , died not in early childhood but at forty- nine years of age . But this difference is of only secondary ...