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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'.
Recent killings of unarmed black citizens are a fresh reminder of the troubled state of racial integration in the United States. At the same time, the unfolding Black Lives Matter protest movements and the responses by federal agencies each testify to a not insignificant capacity for addressing social pathologies surrounding the color line. In order to respond to this ambivalent situation, this article suggests a pairing between the work of James Baldwin and that of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. I will argue that we cannot fully appreciate the depths of what Baldwin called the “savage paradox” of race without the insights provided by Klein and object relations psychoanalysis. Conversely, Baldwin helps us to sound out the political significance of object relations approaches, including the work of Klein and those influenced by her such as Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion. In conversation with the work of Baldwin, object relations theory can help to identify particular social settings and institutions that might allow concrete efforts toward racial justice to take root.
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
This collection of essays seeks to question the security of our assumptions about the fin de siècle by exploring the fiction of Richard Marsh, an important but neglected professional author. Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857–1915) began his literary career as a writer of boys’ fiction, but, following a prison sentence for fraud, reinvented himself as ‘Richard Marsh’ in 1888. Marsh was a prolific and popular author of middlebrow genre fiction including Gothic, crime, humour, romance and adventure, whose bestselling Gothic novel The Beetle: A Mystery (1897) outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Building on a burgeoning interest in Marsh’s writing, this collection of essays examines a broad array of Marsh’s genre fictions through the lens of cutting-edge critical theory, including print culture, New Historicism, disability studies, genre theory, New Economic Criticism, gender theory, postcolonial studies, thing theory, psychoanalysis, object relations theory and art history, producing innovative readings not only of Marsh but of the fin-de-siècle period. Marsh emerges here as a versatile contributor to the literary and journalistic culture of his time whose stories of shape-shifting monsters, daring but morally dubious heroes, lip-reading female detectives and objects that come to life helped to shape the genres of fiction with which we are familiar today. Marsh’s fictions reflect contemporary themes and anxieties while often offering unexpected, subversive and even counter-hegemonic takes on dominant narratives of gender, criminality, race and class, unsettling our perceptions of the fin de siècle.
This collection of nine new chapters investigates how the late medieval household acts as a sorter, user, and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on established work on the noble and royal ‘great household’, as well as on materialist historiography on rural and bourgeois domestic life, Household Knowledges considers bourgeois, gentry, and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. Arguing that the relationship between the domestic experience and the forms assumed by that experience’s cultural expression is both dynamic and reciprocal, the chapters in this volume address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, agricultural and estates management literature, devotional and medical writing, household music and drama, and manuscript anthologies. Contributors develop a range of methodologies, drawing on insights generated by recent manuscript scholarship as well as on innovations in affect theory and object relations theory; their chapters reconsider the constitution of the late-medieval urban and gentry home by practices of writing and reading, translation and language use, and manuscript compilation, as well as by the development of complex object–human relations and the adaptation of traditional gender and class roles. Together, the studies compiled in Household Knowledges provide a fresh illustration of the imaginative scope of the late medieval household, of its extensive internal and external connections, and of its fundamental centrality—both as an idea and a reality—to late-medieval cultural production.
This chapter participates in an ongoing reassessment of the late-medieval household book that sees such manuscripts less as testaments to an aspirational mindset among their readers—that is, as part of an attempt to assume the lifestyles and prestige associated with some of the texts that they compile—than as part and parcel of the complex ethical universes constituted by individual medieval homes. Drawing on affect theory and object-relations theory, Seaman shows how the particular configuration of people, animals, and things in The Hunting of the Hare (compiled in Advocates 19.3.1), Sir Corneus, and The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools (both compiled in Ashmole 61) generate new lessons on the spirit of empathy and tolerance as well as on the sense of shared responsibility on which the success of the household must depend. Thus, rather than offering a brief escape from the moralising and devotional works alongside which they are compiled, these comic works offer a route towards the renovation of the home and of the complex assemblage of agents that it comprises.
variety of critical writing on Gould, briefly locates his work in the contexts of European and North American avant-gardes (Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan), and summarises materialist criticism of Gould’s radio work before offering a more phenomenological approach to the studio as a way to bridge aesthetic and political readings of counterpoint. The second section listens closely to ‘A Glenn Gould Fantasy’ to locate the studio as a space of fantasy in the sense that object-relations theory understands that concept. 2 The studio, I argue, offered a
simultaneously presented for the reader to contemplate: ‘How does adolescence come back most vividly to you?’ (M, p. 71) the older Chris asks, inviting an appreciation of life’s changes, its losses and gains: its object relations. Object relations theory is a branch of psychoanalytic theory that argues for the importance of a dynamic process of psychic development in the subject in relation to others, both real and internalised. ‘Object’ here therefore refers to significant others, beginning with one’s earliest care giver but encompassing other
Object-relations theory (based on the work of Melanie Klein, an Austrian-British psychoanalyst) was also useful in combining a psychoanalytic account of human development with an analysis of environment. Rather than focusing on the relatively autonomous development of one individual, object-relations theorists argue that development happens in the context of a social and psychic relationship. The nature of the mother-infant relationship is most important, although contacts with other developmental figures are significant. Since the mother-child link is a social
universes constituted by individual medieval homes. Drawing on affect theory and object-relations theory, Seaman shows how the particular configuration of people, animals, and things in The Hunting of the Hare (compiled in Advocates 19.3.1), Sir Corneus, and The Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools (both compiled in Ashmole 61) generate new lessons on the spirit of empathy and tolerance as well as on the sense of shared responsibility on which the success of the household must depend. Thus, rather than offering a brief escape from the moralising and devotional works