AMERICAN IMAGOPub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0021
Sarah H. Nooter
{"title":"Socrates and the Voice that Says No: Listening to Plato's Apology","authors":"Sarah H. Nooter","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"In Plato’s Apology, Socrates describes himself as being guided by a voice (phônê) that prevents him from doing the wrong thing. This voice is also a “sign” (sêmeion), whose absence is “proof” (tekmêrion) of correct action. Moreover, it is a “divine” (theion) and “spiritual” (daimonion) phenomenon (see Apology in Fowler, 1966, 31c–d, 40a–b).1 In contrast to scholars who refer to this phenomenon as Socrates’s daimonion (“spiritual thing”) or as a “sign” that implicitly signifies something else, in this article I suggest that it is not truly a signifier, but is rather better understood as a sign that resists symbolization.2 In other words, I aim to take this “voice” seriously as a voice: one that is irreducible to language (it says nothing), representative of no one (its speaker is not identified), non-dialogic, acousmatic, and unknowable except by the act of negation or the nonperformance of this act. In these features, it resembles the negative capability of Jacques Lacan’s object a, and, in a similar way, dwells almost outside of social existence, the symbolic order, a trace of the Real, as defined here:","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49176827","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0023
Abigail Akavia
{"title":"Listening in Sophocles: The Sounds of Empathic Dialogue","authors":"Abigail Akavia","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how listening sounds in Sophoclean tragedy. Engaging with insights from the work of psychotherapists and philosophers of sound and voice, I offer an understanding of listening as an active form of vocalization—a manifestation of empathy. By focusing on metric structures and other poetic effects making up the vocal soundscape of Sophocles, I explore how such listening is sonically performed between characters as they engage in sung dialogue, and how such dialogues may offer a possibility of healing during or after extreme suffering. Musical passages in particular bring together the protagonist and the chorus, a collective body of listener-witnesses, in moments of great distress and heightened emotionality. Three sung dialogues are examined in detail: one from Oedipus Tyrannus and two from Oedipus at Colonus. The exchange between the chorus and Oedipus the King immediately following his act of self-blinding already suggests the possibility of mitigating and making sense of suffering through empathic resonance. The first dialogue at Colonus exemplifies the chorus's refusal to empathically listen to Oedipus, an interaction that magnifies his traumatic experience; the second demonstrates the subsequent development of choral listening and the radical therapeutic potential of a reciprocally empathic vocal exchange.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46830045","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0020
Leora Bilsky, Vered Lev Kenaan
{"title":"Silent Witnesses: The Testimony of Objects in Holocaust Poetry and Prose","authors":"Leora Bilsky, Vered Lev Kenaan","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49529527","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0026
Anat Tzur Mahalel
{"title":"\"Singing Like an Echo of an Echo in a Shell\": H.D.'s Search for the Feminine Voice in Tribute to Freud","authors":"Anat Tzur Mahalel","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper suggests a reading of H.D.'s Tribute to Freud as the daughter's quest for the maternal language. This distinctive memoir has commonly been read either through the daughter's Vatersehnsucht, desire for her father, or through the feminist lens of the woman poet confronting the authoritarian Freud. Here I offer the quest of the daughter for the maternal as an obscure dimension of the text, yet one that is crucial in the formation of the feminine voice. It is created through allusions to Goethe's Wilhelm MeistersLehrjahre (1795) and, most distinctly, to the enigmatic figure of Mignon in that novel and to the maternal absence that formed her distinct character and poetic voice. H.D. offers her translation of the maternal as a language of echoes, curly structures, and spiral-like meandering. The maternal dimension of the feminine voice is presented as an impossible yet inevitable work of translation that embodies a continuous struggle of becoming.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46508000","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0025
Dana Amir
{"title":"The Experience of Voice in Analytic Listening","authors":"Dana Amir","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Discussing the experience of voice in analytic listening, this paper describes the central role of the voice in psychic development as well as in the therapeutic process, focusing on two psychopathologies: the vocal adhesive identification, which is characteristic of autistic states, and the psychotic split between voice and meaning. Pointing to the difference between these two vocal phenomena both in terms of its origins and in terms of its enactment in the therapeutic relations, two modes of therapeutic intervention are suggested: interpretation of the voice and interpretation through the voice.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48776264","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0027
S. Butler
{"title":"Farewell, Freud: Orphic Trans/formations of Voice","authors":"S. Butler","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In search of a new way out of the bind of Freud's conception of sexual difference, this article turns its ears to a voice, one that echoes along the upward slope from the Underworld, as Orpheus and Eurydice climb toward an escape only one of them will achieve (and only temporarily). As we shall see, this is an echo that resounds across texts, times, literatures, and languages. But what is it trying to tell us? Plunging into ancient and modern versions of the story, we find at its center a primal scene arguably more eloquent than that of Oedipus, one that seems to conjure not just the thinking of Freud, but that of other major thinkers of the last century (Lacan, Derrida). But all the while, this echo continues, unsettling the foundations of analysis, blurring without obliterating difference, including sexual difference, conjuring the possibility of a psyche predicated not on this or that imago, but on vox.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43053287","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0029
P. Rudnytsky
{"title":"Correcting the Record: Karen Maroda on Mutual Analysis","authors":"P. Rudnytsky","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Nothing is more important to me in my scholarly work than to be fair even to those with whom I disagree. I am therefore grateful to Karen Maroda for bringing to my attention that I have misrepresented the views expressed in her paper “Why Mutual Analysis Failed” (Maroda, 1998) in my book on Ferenczi’s mutual analysis with Elizabeth Severn (Rudnytsky, 2022). There, quoting the following sentence from the opening paragraph of her paper, “‘The years he spent conducting a highly unorthodox treatment with her, climaxing with their adoption of mutual analysis, cast a shadow not only over Ferenczi’s clinical judgment, but also his sanity,’” I asserted that this statement by Dr. Maroda “repeats a libel originating with Ernest Jones” (p. 3). Thanks to a personal communication from Dr. Maroda, I now understand that what she meant is that Jones’s allegation “cast a shadow” over Ferenczi’s reputation in the history of psychoanalysis, not that the mutual analysis itself cast a shadow over Ferenczi’s sanity. Here is the opening paragraph of her paper in its entirety:","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45837256","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 : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1353/aim.2022.0024
L. Lachman
{"title":"The \"Acoustic Mirror\": Reframing the Maternal Voice in the Hebrew Lullaby","authors":"L. Lachman","doi":"10.1353/aim.2022.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aim.2022.0024","url":null,"abstract":"What leads to sleep has the shape of rhythm, of regularity and repetition. . . . The only processes that belong to sleep are those of respiration and circulation. . . . When it goes to sleep, the body is rocked to the rhythm of its heart and lungs. . . . Rocking movements put us to sleep because sleep in its essence is itself a rocking, not a stable motionless state. Lullaby: one charms, one enchants, one puts mistrust to sleep before putting wakefulness itself to sleep, one gently guides to nowhere—swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.","PeriodicalId":44377,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN IMAGO","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43870047","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}