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Trauma realities defy easy access to comprehension and thus require alternative discourses to understand them. This article looks at Pat Barkers employment of the Gothic tropes in the examination and explication of war trauma in her Regeneration trilogy. More pertinently, it scrutinizes the complex relation between Gothicized landscapes and trauma by analyzing three specific sites – Craiglockhart War Hospital, trenches and England as ‘Blighty’ – in the Regeneration trilogy. This article shows traumas destabilizing impact by examining how landscapes become imprinted with trauma. The physical disempowerment of landscapes is further complemented by a psychological disempowerment by examining traumatized patient-soldiers mindscapes and dreamscapes. It further examines how Barker employs tropes of haunting, dreams and nightmares, staple Gothic emotions of fear, terror and horror, Freuds Unheimlich to dispossess the owners control and locates trauma realities lurking therein. Thus Barkers Regeneration narrative bears witness to the phantom realities of war trauma by privileging the uncanny personal histories of traumatized soldiers.
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'.
Ranging from Horace Walpole to Angela Carter, this essay contributes to an emergent theory of the Gothic. Its argument is that ‘Gothic’ is the name for the speaking subjects experience of approaching what Jacques Lacan has termed ‘the Thing’, and that the processes of sublimation and abjection are what structure the experience of that approach.
Puzzling out the fathers: Sibylle Lacan’s Un père: puzzle Sibylle Lacan’s text Un père, published in , bears the subtitle ‘puzzle’, a term which the author describes as referring primarily to the fragmented nature of her writing.1 However, it applies equally well to the subject of her text: the question of what kind of father Jacques Lacan represented for her is a puzzle wrestled with throughout the text. Behind this puzzle lies another. Is her text also primarily a testimony to her father’s intellectual legacy? In taking up her pen, is
(London: Routledge, 1997 ). 41 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection , (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 12. 42 Ibid ., p. 29. 43 Ibid ., p. 29
between Henry’s traumas and the listener’s perception of the tinnitus can be illuminated by drawing on Mladen Dolar’s idea of the acousmatic voice and Jacques Lacan’s concept of the objet (petit) a, which is often referred to as ‘object-cause of desire’ (Žižek, 1989: 53). The objet a is described as a leftover or placeholder, which also carries elements of wholeness. Slavoj Žižek argues that it is ‘objectively nothing, though, viewed from a certain perspective, it assumes the shape of something’ (1991: 12). Lacan explains that ‘objet a is something from which the
of Freud’s most exciting followers, Melanie Klein (1882–1960), and object-relations theory; here also I make reference to Julia Kristeva; this chapter has most to say about the role of the mother in psychoanalysis. But there is plenty of Freud in this chapter, too, most notably his discussion of the Fort! Da! game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . Chapters 6 and 7 discuss Jacques Lacan (1901
Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (London: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 127. 7 Lacanian psychoanalysis is best accounted for in the following texts: Miller (ed.), The Four Fundamental Concepts , Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection , (London: Routledge
the mature phase of Jacques Lacan's thought will be helpful for analysing the model of visuality employed by Wallace. In Lacan's formulation the ‘gaze’ does not concern the subject's vision but pertains to the way the object looks back at the viewer. This encounter with the gaze dismantles the rationalist sense of mastery of the subject postulated by Cartesian perspectivalism. From a philosophical standpoint the decentring of the fixed subject position of Cartesian perspectivalism also acts as a way out of the self-reflexive game of the neo-capitalistic ideology
movement, Jacques Lacan. Humanism and holism, 1935–45 Influential French intellectuals of the 1930s approached humans – or rather, ‘Man’ – holistically, as a complex physical, psychological and spiritual being. This thinking, drawn from philosophy, psychology, theology and the wider social Catholic movement, spread to scientists, engineers, technocrats, politicians and industrialists, a number of whom inclined to right-wing political sympathies. Such thinkers attempted to instrumentalise holism to develop