Search results
Not only did Sigmund Freud know literature intimately, and quote liberally from literatures of several languages, he has also inspired twentieth-century writers and philosophers, and created several schools of criticism, in literary and cultural studies. Freud was not just practising psychotherapy on his patients, helping them in difficult situations, but helping them by studying the unconscious as the basis of their problems. This book deals with Freud and psychoanalysis, and begins by analysing the 'Copernican revolution' which meant that psychoanalysis decentres the conscious mind, the ego. It shows how Freud illuminates literature, as Freud needs attention for what he says about literature. The book presents one of Freud's 'case-histories', where he discussed particular examples of analysis by examining obsessional neurosis, as distinct from hysteria. It analyses Freud on memory, in relation to consciousness, repression and the unconscious. Guilt was one of his central topics of his work, and the book explores it through several critical texts, 'Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', and 'The Ego and the Id'. The book discusses Melanie Klein, a follower of Freud, and object-relations theory, while also making a reference to Julia Kristeva. One of the main strands of thought of Jacques Lacan was the categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, as well as paranoia and madness, which are linked to literature here. The book finally returns to Freud on hysteria, and examines him on paranoia in Daniel Paul Schreber, and the psychosis of the 'Wolf Man'.
unconsciously in its mind’ (‘The Unconscious’, SE 16.285, see also SE 17.140–1, 19.221). The ‘Copernican revolution’ means that psychoanalysis decentres the conscious mind, the ego, showing that it acts not according to rational principles which it has thought out, but because of the unconscious, which in some ways is unknown, but which overrules the conscious mind. The unconscious
mentor’s ‘first principle’: ‘Le cinéma apparaît comme l’achèvement dans le temps de l’objectivité photographique’ (Cinema appears as the completion in time of photographic objectivity) (Rohmer 1984 : 153/ 1989 : 97). This thesis of film’s mechanical, objective character, which Bazin first proposed in a landmark essay of 1945 on the ‘ontology’ of the photographic image, heralded in Rohmer’s view a Copernican revolution, for
and clung to the notion of a geocentric universe until his dying day. 9 In Shakespeare’s England the Copernican revolution was a Continental event dimly perceived (if at all) by the everyday English. But it was of cosmic consequence to the wiser sort. In 1576 mathematician Thomas Digges (1546–95), whose son contributed a ghastly doggerel to the forepages of the First Folio, first published in English
argues that 56 Thomas Pynchon towards the end of the eighteenth century a fundamental change occurred in both philosophical ideas of perception and the vocabulary used to explain the processes of poetic composition: The change from imitation to expression, and from the mirror to the fountain, the lamp, and related analogues, was not an isolated phenomenon. It was an integral part of a corresponding change in popular epistemology – that is, in the concept of the role played by the mind in perception. … The Copernican revolution in epistemology – if we do not restrict
[…] is politics by other means’.8 Lubar devised different types of social relationships mediated by machines: social and class-oriented loyalty to machines, on the model of Marx and Sorel (see sections 4.1 and 4.2a); totalitarian aestheticisations of politics and body politics within a Copernican revolution shifting masses from countrysides to metropolitan industrial centres (see section 1.4); colonial expansion in aggressive capitalist and Imperialist fashion appropriating the primitive under a modernist umbrella (see sections 1.5 and 5.4); development of networked
solved, was the problem of appearances. This Copernican “revolution” was not simply an explanation for what the universe was, both in appearance and reality, but it also acted to dislodge those theological arguments that had relied on the geocentric narrative; the replacement of the divine with human understanding. What Copernicus allowed was an explanation of celestial patterns despite appearances, that
really were abolishing the past behind it. They all take themselves for Attila, in whose footsteps no grass grows back. They do not feel that they are removed from the Middle Ages by a certain number of centuries, but that they are separated by Copernican revolutions, epistemological breaks, epistemic ruptures so radical that nothing of the past ought to
’s ‘unconscious’ is socially formed, not simply personal. Following the ‘Copernican revolution’, thought has been decentred, and thinking follows tracks, codes of reference whose authority is laid down as undetectable ideological structures. Living inside those at least partially unconscious structures of thought, we misrecognise what we see, under the power of bourgeois ideology in Marxist terms (Althusser
philosophy based on the cogito: i.e. the system of René Descartes (1596–1650), which starts with the subject who says ‘I think, therefore I am’ ( cogito ergo sum). In that way, he follows Freud’s Copernican revolution. The opposition which Lacan has to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) is apparent: Lacanian psychoanalysis does not presume the presence of an early ego, a founding subject, hence his hostility to