AMERICAN IMAGO最新文献

{"title":"\"Anything of Note\": Recovering \"Lost Life\" in the Psychoanalytic Archive","authors":"Vanessa Smith","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932376","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932376","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay engages with the hitherto embargoed letters, drawings and case notes of Stella Coomber (\"Susan\"), the subject of Marion Milner's case history <i>The Hands of the Living God</i>. Using these documents as a starting point, I decode the identities of medical staff, institutions, and contacts whose names are disguised in Milner's book, and reconstruct some of Stella's life behind the scenes of, and after, <i>Hands</i>. The letters disclose her project of writing an autobiographical companion volume to Milner's, a project which was never realized. In later letters Stella is increasingly despondent about her failure to write this book, feeling that her life has been wasted, for she has not produced \"anything of note.\" The essay suggests that there is a way of reading her \"notes\" as themselves both autobiography and counter case-history. I approach Stella's correspondence as a piece of life writing: not a traditional narrative, but one whose fragmentary form gives expression to her complex and exemplary experience.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720908","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis ed. by Vera J. Camden (review)","authors":"Murray M. Schwartz","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932382","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932382","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis</em> ed. by Vera J. Camden <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Murray M. Schwartz (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis</em>, edited by Vera J. Camden. <p>As readers of <em>American Imago</em> know, literature and psychoanalysis have been companions since Freud recognized that the strategies of the mind shared intrinsic features with forms and insights embodied in literature and art. From his earliest writing, Freud told and composed stories to show how apparent chance could be made meaningful. A master stylist himself, he recognized creative writers as his allies in the service of a new science that embraced all cultural forms, including \"the science of literature.\" But, like the course of true love, the relationship has not always been smooth. Constant companions may be fellow travelers or, as etymology and an older meaning has it, \"messmates,\" sharing sustenance, but Freud's valorization of Shakespeare and other writers contained elements of rivalry and ambivalence as well as identification. The paratactical \"and\" doesn't specify a particular relation either of mutuality or hierarchy.</p> <p><em>The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis</em> offers contemporary examples of the \"synergy\" of the two fields, with almost uniform success. Camden recounts in her introduction how, particularly in the United States, the status of clinical psychoanalysis was diminished by the 1970s in favor of medical psychiatry, even as \"high theory,\" mostly conveyed by the writings of celebrated French thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, ascended in academia. This is true enough, but not the whole story, as the excellent chronology of important works at the beginning of this volume attests. In the academic world, by the 1970s much-maligned ego psychology (in Lacan's rewriting of Freud's concept of the ego) was already yielding spaces for other French analysts, British <strong>[End Page 279]</strong> object relations, self psychology, and D. W. Winnicott's central concepts, as the academy provided humanities education for future psychoanalysts like Christopher Bollas and Adam Phillips, whose influence is prominent in these essays. At the same time, it was not accidental that the theoretical assault on the ego as a \"bounded\" defensive structure coincided with the emergence of the Holocaust, trauma studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, as the American and British academies sought theories that mirrored these concerns and innovations.</p> <p>Overdetermined forces were at work in both fields, including economic pressures on both humanists and psychoanalysts. Within psychoanalysis, the proliferation of new theories challenged orthodoxies and fostered competing ","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nietzsche, Roquentin, and Suicide","authors":"Eric v.d. Luft","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932379","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932379","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Sartre's character Roquentin seeing his hand as a crab is analogous in some ways to Nietzsche dreaming a toad on his transparent hand. Examining both of these envisioned animals as metaphors reveals that each represents some sort of physical or psychological disease or pestilence, that each profoundly disturbs the status quo, and that each point in a different way toward suicide, but at the same time that each signifies or symbolizes a deepening of self-knowledge. Both Nietzsche and Roquentin rejected suicide, but for different reasons: the former because he wished to remain in control of his life by consciously accepting his fate, no matter how repulsive it might be; the latter because he was too apathetic and despondent to care whether he lived or died. The purpose of this article is to suggest why depressed, suicidal people might reject suicide.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Freud and Marie Bonaparte's Correspondence (1925–1939): An Intimate Relationship","authors":"Francis Baudry","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932377","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This paper explores the correspondence between Freud and his patient Marie Bonaparte over the course of 14 years and illuminates their complex personal and professional relationship. The letters expose Freud's therapeutic challenges in balancing the theoretical concept of transference and its actual management in Freud's work in the late 1920s and 1930s.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720909","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies by Judith Harris (review)","authors":"Dawn Skorczewski","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932383","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932383","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies</em> by Judith Harris <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dawn Skorczewski (bio) </li> </ul> <em>The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies</em> by Judith Harris <p>The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies by poet and critic Judith Harris contributes to studies of the elegy as a genre and to psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. Harris, a poet with a Ph.D. in literature who has published three impressive collections of poetry and a critical volume Signifying Pain (2012), is a rigorous and innovative reader. She addresses the usual suspects in her study: William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath, as well as lesser-known voices such as Jane Kenyon, Edward Hirsch, and other contemporary poets. This volume is intelligent, probing, and elegant. Harris teaches us to appreciate the poems on the level of genre and line and highlights the theoretical contribution to literary and psychoanalytic studies.</p> <p>Central to the book is the concept of interiority, particularly the question of the grieving speaker's inner life and its external representation in the container of the poem. She questions how the elegy as an externalized form can provide its own source of inner consolation and whether the poem can attest to the relationship between speaker and beloved. Harris also ponders the elegy's extension to the collective experience of loss. In each chapter, Harris explores a distinct psychoanalytic theory, discussing a new poet (or poets) and introducing a novel perspective each time. Her style of writing is clear and engaging, and the depth of her analysis and theoretical arguments is impressive. Throughout the volume, Harris manages a remarkable balance between explication and theory.</p> <p>The introduction explores psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Lacan to Derrida and argues for understanding the elegy as a form that interrogates interiority and interconnection. She questions how the elegy can serve as a form of consolation for those who refuse it. For Harris, the elegy moves in three directions: the first allows the speaker to define themselves <strong>[End Page 297]</strong> through the relationship with the deceased, the second permits the speaker to remain with the deceased through the power of words, and the third serves as a vehicle for the speaker's separation from the beloved via mourning. This tripartite paradox of the elegy as coalescence, container, and conduit animates the volume.</p> <p>In chapters on Wordsworth and Keats, Harris explores the tension between coexistence, container, and conduit and shows that it is inherently religious. These elegies vacillate between the potential of transcendence in the present moment of a poem and the belief that the departed transitions to life in Heaven, leaving th","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Understanding the Phenomenon of Negative Myths","authors":"Agnes Szajcz","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932380","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932380","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article delves into the exploration of negative myths, examining their prevalence in both ancient and modern times. I focus on the psychoanalytic understanding of collective and group narratives, particularly within the context of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Drawing from Levine's two-track model of psychoanalysis, this study investigates how negative myths function as containers for processing unrepresented unconscious content. Through case vignettes, the characteristics of negative myths are illuminated, revealing them as distorted and dysfunctional containers of psychic material. I argue that negative myths emerge in response to dread and fear, serving as reflections of societal anxieties.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Psychoanalysis and Poetry: A Dialogue about Emily Dickinson's \"'Hope' is the thing with feathers\"","authors":"Dawn Skorczewski, Andrea Celenza","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932381","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Psychoanalysis and Poetry:<span>A Dialogue about Emily Dickinson's \"'Hope' is the thing with feathers\"</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dawn Skorczewski (bio) and Andrea Celenza (bio) </li> </ul> <p>\"Hope\" is the thing with feathers – (314)</p> <blockquote> <p><span>\"Hope\" is the thing with feathers -</span><span>That perches in the soul -</span><span>And sings the tune without the words -</span><span>And never stops – at all -</span></p> <p><span>And sweetest – in the Gale - is heard -</span><span>And sore must be the storm -</span><span>That could abash the little Bird</span><span>That kept so many warm -</span></p> <p><span>I've heard it in the chillest land -</span><span>And on the strangest Sea -</span><span>Yet - never - in Extremity,</span><span>It asked a crumb - of me.</span></p> </blockquote> <em>Celenza</em>: <p>Is this my favorite poem? What a thing for me to say … like Freud's papers—there are so many! And yet, I can say at this moment (and many moments in the past), this is my favorite poem. Reading it today, though, I take special notice of the sensory images that Dickinson evokes—like contemporary writing in psychoanalysis, there is a poignant noting of the body, the way emotions emerge, make themselves felt, in the tingling of fingertips and queasiness in our stomachs … \"the thing with feathers\" obliquely rendering the trite 'butterflies' we all know and dread. <strong>[End Page 275]</strong></p> <em>Skorczewski</em>: <p>When you chose this poem, I immediately started to think about the fact that the words \"hope\" and \"thing\" and \"feathers\" all appear in the first line, which is a sentence, a declaration. She mixes a feeling, an unnamed object and the part of a bird that helps to keep them warm. How can hope be a thing? How can a thing have feathers? Then she places it in the soul, singing a tune without its words, endlessly. So by the end of stanza one we have a position. We are listening to a soul's song. Suddenly I had a memory of my analyst saying to me, on a day when I felt so depressed, \"I am holding on to the hope.\" It was very important to me that she felt there could be another life for me.</p> <em>Celenza</em>: <p>Isn't what your analyst said at the heart of it all? To hold the hope when our patients cannot access it. We see beyond the immediate and can envision a future, a psychic future, that our patients cannot (or dare not) imagine. As if we know what that might be—but we don't know the specifics, yet we dare to trust that something will emerge—without words, without asking, we trust that some shape will form and arise from within the soul. I love the way you said, \"We have a position. We are listening to a soul's song.\"</p> <p>The poets have said it all! We are mere tradespersons trying to put their insights into practice. Poetry does the thing it writes about, providing an experience of di","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nabokov and Freud: Solus Rex vs Oedipus Rex","authors":"Igor Kolmakov","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a932378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a932378","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>The enigma of Nabokov's lifelong enmity with Freud perpetually attracts research attention. In this article, the author analyzes the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov's demonization of Freud by surveying previous explanations of this phenomenon and proposing an alternative explanation of Nabokov perceiving Freud not as a \"father figure\" or a \"precursor,\" but as a dangerous and influential rival within the field of psychology as opposed to literature. The author asserts that Nabokov's feud with Freud is centered on the question of the soul. In particular, Nabokov strives to position himself within the realm of \"soul interpretation\" or \"soul fiction\" as a \"subject supposed to know\" and to establish himself as a superior hermeneutical authority. Finally, the author draws a parallel between Nabokov's attitude to Freud and Freud's approach to Nietzsche.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141720910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Freud's Aphasia Book and Spielrein's Destruction Paper: A Shared Fate, To Be Ignored and Restored","authors":"Frank Marchese","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a923506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a923506","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article discusses the early fate and subsequent revival of interest in Freud’s 1891 book, <i>On Aphasia</i>, and Sabina Spielrein’s 1912 <i>Destruction</i> paper. Early on, these authors shared a similar fate: a failure of recognition of the aforementioned works at the time of their initial publication. In Freud’s case, the number of books sold was minimal and the rest were shredded; it remained mostly unread and overlooked in discussions of neurological problems, although regarded as a classical contribution to the field of neurology. As for Spielrein, her paper, following its initial appearance in German, was not published until 80 years later in English! Although Spielrein had a profound impact throughout her mature career as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and developmental child psychologist, she remained unacknowledged during her lifetime and was virtually forgotten after her death. This article demonstrates that, although the importance of their seminal works was overlooked, recent developments in neuroscience have revived interest in <i>On Aphasia</i> and, in Spielrein’s case, her contributions to psychoanalysis and developmental psychology have become classics in these fields.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Men Under the Microscope: The Gaze of Other Men, \"The Subject Who Is Supposed to Know,\" and the Pursuit of Wholeness","authors":"Elizabeth McManaman Tyler","doi":"10.1353/aim.2024.a923507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2024.a923507","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>While numerous Men and Masculinities scholars discuss how men “perform” or seek to “prove” their masculinity to other men, a psychoanalytic investigation into the structural relations of this dynamic—especially with regard to young American high school- and college-age men—is needed. Using Peggy Orenstein’s <i>Boys and Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity</i> (2020) as a source text, I draw on the Lacanian concept of “the subject who is supposed to know” to elucidate the homosocial nature of masculinity. A Lacanian reading of <i>Boys and Sex</i> suggests that American high school and college men’s desires are incited by the ostensible enjoyment, or jouissance, they witness other men experiencing when engaging in “masculine” behaviors. Orenstein’s adolescent and young-adult interviewees demonstrate how “what one wants” is inextricably bound with what one sees (or interprets) other men wanting. While Men and Masculinities scholars argue that performances of masculinity are enacted to avoid ostracism and humiliation, a Lacanian account centers on the psychic pursuit of (illusory) wholeness. Lastly, Lacan’s notion of “traversing the fantasy” offers a path toward reclaiming agency despite the sway of cultural ideals and the gaze of Others.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140323289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}