AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0034
R. P. Wheeler
{"title":"“Must I Remember?”: A Just-So Story about Shakespeare and His Mother","authors":"R. P. Wheeler","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Somewhere behind the dramatic power that gathers around psychological themes in Shakespeare’s plays traceable to a mother’s role in a child’s experience is the lived mother–child bond of Mary Arden Shakespeare and her oldest son. I will construct a model of Mary’s contribution that I think is consistent with what we know of the circumstances of her life, with what we have learned from psychoanalysis about mother–child bonds, and with the shape of Shakespeare’s artistic development as I understand it. Mary Arden Shakespeare, born to a strong Catholic family, was pregnant and gave birth to William after the deaths in infancy of two daughters, as the most deadly plague of the 16th century made its way toward Stratford, and as Catholic beliefs and ritual traditions were forcefully set aside by Queen Elizabeth’s protestant reformation. The crisis circumstances of Shakespeare’s earliest maternal experience, the later prolonged crisis of his father’s disgrace, and the plausible impacts of these crises on the mother-child bond, suggest a range of infantile and childhood experience consistent with, and reimagined in, the development of Shakespeare’s drama.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45856543","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0030
J. Cook, Melissa Skepko, Rosemary Davies, Murray Schwartz, Richard P. Wheeler, Christopher Miller, Rose Howell, Jeffrey Meyers, Chad Alan Goldberg, Deepti S. Sachdev, David Pickus, Dawn Skorczewski, Timothy Sawyier
{"title":"Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David B. Diamond (review)","authors":"J. Cook, Melissa Skepko, Rosemary Davies, Murray Schwartz, Richard P. Wheeler, Christopher Miller, Rose Howell, Jeffrey Meyers, Chad Alan Goldberg, Deepti S. Sachdev, David Pickus, Dawn Skorczewski, Timothy Sawyier","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Somewhere behind the dramatic power that gathers around psychological themes in Shakespeare’s plays traceable to a mother’s role in a child’s experience is the lived mother–child bond of Mary Arden Shakespeare and her oldest son. I will construct a model of Mary’s contribution that I think is consistent with what we know of the circumstances of her life, with what we have learned from psychoanalysis about mother–child bonds, and with the shape of Shakespeare’s artistic development as I understand it. Mary Arden Shakespeare, born to a strong Catholic family, was pregnant and gave birth to William after the deaths in infancy of two daughters, as the most deadly plague of the 16th century made its way toward Stratford, and as Catholic beliefs and ritual traditions were forcefully set aside by Queen Elizabeth’s protestant reformation. The crisis circumstances of Shakespeare’s earliest maternal experience, the later prolonged crisis of his father’s disgrace, and the plausible impacts of these crises on the mother-child bond, suggest a range of infantile and childhood experience consistent with, and reimagined in, the development of Shakespeare’s drama.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45932480","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0043
Timothy Sawyier
{"title":"A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis by Fred Busch (review)","authors":"Timothy Sawyier","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"At a book talk at the University of Chicago’s Seminary Co-op Bookstore a few years ago, an eager student asked Professor Jonathan Lear, “Why does psychoanalysis take so long?” Lear replied, “Well, if I just tell you what’s wrong with you, it’s only going to make you mad, especially if I’m right.” Lear’s response was an efficient and very amusing introduction to the clinical quandary of resistance, to which Fred Busch’s latest book, A Fresh Look at Psychoanalytic Technique, also addresses itself. Aptly appearing on the eve of the centenary of The Ego and the Id (1923), A Fresh Look elaborates what Busch sees as the unmined clinical implications of Freud’s structural model and 1926 revision of the theory of anxiety,2 in particular striving to integrate the concept of unconscious resistances into a coherent theory of clinical technique. In papers spanning the past 30 years, newly collected here, Busch’s book offers an erudite examination of the clinical ramifications of the shifts in Freud’s theorizing during the 1920s, while it also evinces some limitations of adhering to a century-old model of the mind. Busch seeks to address the “developmental lag” between theory and technique identified by Paul Gray (1982): the widespread persistence of a clinical stance based on Freud’s topographic model and committed to uncovering unconscious content, despite the greater clarity Freud provided with the structural model and second theory of anxiety. In Freud’s topographic model, forbidden wishes are censoriously repressed, yet continually striving for expression, resulting in a damming up of libidinal impulses that ultimately gives rise to psychic pressure and symptoms. According to this picture, the therapeutic task is to bring repressed wishes into the light of consciousness so BOOK REVIEWS","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43403676","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0038
C. Goldberg
{"title":"Eros and Trumpism: A Marcusean Interpretation","authors":"C. Goldberg","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0038","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:An explanation for Donald Trump’s political appeal is developed, drawing mainly on Herbert Marcuse’s study Eros and Civilization. Trump does not represent the authority of a strong father-leader so much as filial rebellion. His rebellion against the father-rule, now transmuted into an impersonal “rigged system,” permits and even encourages the explosive release of suppressed sexual and aggressive drives. However, this release does not constitute the liberation of Eros that Marcuse envisioned. Instead, Trumpism explodes suppressed sexuality within the institutions of the performance principle, gives sadistic expression to the sexual drive, conditions the abolition of sexual taboos on the creation of new objects of humiliation, and turns a collectivized sense of guilt “against those who do not belong to the whole, whose existence is its denial.” In sum, Trumpism was a betrayed revolution from the beginning; what it really represents is the political utilization of sex and aggression to reinforce social domination.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45720735","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0032
R. Davies
{"title":"Murdered Father, Dead Father and Other Work by Rosine Perelberg (review)","authors":"R. Davies","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0032","url":null,"abstract":"“Tommy, go and clear up your toys now,” Jake barked at his three-year-old son. Seemingly unmoved by his father’s order, Tommy shifted closer to his mother and asked, “Mummy, when is Daddy going to die?” Encapsulated in such a simple if dramatic encounter are the complex derivatives of Freud’s Oedipus complex. As outlined by Rosine Perelberg in her work over the last decades, these complexities cover “the murder of the father, identification and super ego, the setting up of the ego ideal, castration complex, desexualization and sublimation” (2016, p. 126). In one of her three books of selected papers, Murdered Father, Dead Father (2016), she counters what she sees as a drift away from a recognition of the primacy of the Oedipus complex. It is a compelling endeavor, placing little Tommy’s psychic construction of the world center stage. Perelberg’s prolific psychoanalytic writing is characterized by an invitation to absorb complexity but also to associate freely. In her clinical practice demonstrated throughout her work by clinical accounts, she describes how there is no place for the omnipotent analyst, but rather the analyst inaugurates a process (Perelberg, 2016, p. 76). Clinical work is characterized by such things as the open interpretation, the special form of listening, and a scrupulous and compassionate attention to the patient’s lived experience. My contribution to a wider knowledge of Perelberg’s work is offered in the context of “inaugurating a process.” Perelberg provides a rigorously argued psychoanalytic theory, never too far away from the consulting room. Throughout her work, Perelberg (2020) interrogates the centrality of what she calls the myth of origins, how can one be made of two:","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43952222","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0033
Murray Schwartz
{"title":"Editor’s Note: A Farewell and an Introduction","authors":"Murray Schwartz","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46478287","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0042
Dawn Skorczewski
{"title":"The Age of Perversion and The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis by Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco (review)","authors":"Dawn Skorczewski","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0042","url":null,"abstract":"Two recent books by Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco offer fascinating perspectives on the nature and consequences of a dramatic shift in the sexual landscape in recent decades. Clear and analytical, but also profoundly complex, these volumes investigate how conceptions of gender and sexuality exist in relation to radically shifting ideas about sex, self, and culture in the digital world. Perhaps most significantly, they investigate how radical changes in sexual attitudes accompany the ever-increasing uses of virtual reality for sexual pleasure. The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture (2017) argues that the concept of perversion, which has often been defined as at the edge of human experience, aptly captures many individual, social, and sexual practices today. Online pornography sites, sex dolls, online dating, sexting, and various forms social media shape the modern subject. But how do patients speak about their involvement in various forms of digital technology? What sense of themselves as human subjects do these technologies produce? These questions animate the volume. The authors first define the concept of perversion today as a cultural phenomenon. Perversion is that which navigates away from the norm and what is considered normal. The book does not offer a precise definition, but that is perhaps for the best, as the term does not mean one thing, but rather a set of relationships. They argue that the digital world itself has produced a culture of perversion which humanizes objects and dehumanizes individuals, who thereby push the concept of the human far beyond existing boundaries. Historicizing the concept, the authors chart the essence of perversion as a disavowal of the human relationship. It is perverse to treat other","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44344452","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0039
Deepti S. Sachdev
{"title":"University as a Temple: A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Caste and Education Rituals","authors":"Deepti S. Sachdev","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In the vision of modernity, older religious sites that imparted education have been replaced with the University as the new temple of learning. These ‘temples’ house countless dreams of finding and fulfilling one’s potentialities and securing a prosperous future. In a highly iniquitous society, the University is singularly invested with the objective of enabling access to success and a life of dignity via education. Yet, in reality, the space is highly fraught for students coming from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. The paper employs the psychoanalytic perspective to understand the complex interplay of the social divisions of caste hierarchy operating within the context of the University. Using a case vignette and everyday observations set in a Department of Psychology in a University in Delhi, the paper explores the unconscious anxieties and defences that circulate among students and teachers unwittingly promoting forms of othering. Understanding these defences is crucial for deconstructing the resistance to learning that comes from different caste locations and for actualizing the vision of emancipatory education.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46385769","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0036
R. Howell
{"title":"“Internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are—”: Dickinson’s Animate Poetics","authors":"R. Howell","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0036","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper, a psychoanalytic, vitalist, materialist investigation, uses a new critical lens and takes up Emily Dickinson’s poetics as the active, irreducible labyrinth of the psyche itself. Specifically, it argues how four defining psychical features—the presence of contradiction and predicament, movement, process and passage, and unconscious forces—are also the distinguishing elements of Dickinson’s work, in content and practice, both aesthetically and ontologically.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46107082","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}
AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-12-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0037
J. Meyers
{"title":"Daddy’s Girl: Incest in Life and Literature","authors":"J. Meyers","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Eric Gill wallowed in his depravity and didn’t care about the terrible effects on the young girls in his family. Djuna Barnes was permanently wounded by her double trauma. Diana Arbus supposedly felt no guilt, but killed herself. Sappho Durrell, psychologically damaged, also committed suicide. In the literary works, the brother-sister incest ranges from doubly tragic in John Ford to mythically and musically elevated in Thomas Mann. It is idealized, even glorified, despite the tragic consequences, in Jean Cocteau and his follower Lawrence Durrell. Incest is elusive and merely hinted at in Barnes, disastrous and tragic in Scott Fitzgerald. All these works contrast the evil curse of incest with its perverse delights, and never resolve the eternal conflict between passionate nature and repressive morality.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43755263","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}