Freud and the Scene of Trauma

Freud and the Scene of Trauma
Author: John Fletcher
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0823254615

“This book will reward scholars across a number of disciplines: literary studies, trauma studies, psychoanalysis and psychology, and philosophy.” —Choice This book argues that Freud’s mapping of trauma as a scene is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients’ symptoms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients’ lives. This attention to the scenic form of trauma and its power in determining symptoms leads to Freud’s break from the neurological model of trauma he inherited from Charcot. It also helps to explain the affinity that Freud, and many since him, have felt between psychoanalysis and literature—and artistic production more generally—and the privileged role of literature at certain turning points in the development of his thought. It is Freud’s scenography of trauma and fantasy that speaks to the student of literature and painting.

Freud and the Scene of Trauma

Freud and the Scene of Trauma
Author: John Fletcher
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2013-12-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0823254623

This book argues that Freud’s mapping of trauma as a scene is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients’ symptoms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients’ lives. This attention to the scenic form of trauma and its power in determining symptoms leads to Freud’s break from the neurological model of trauma he inherited from Charcot. It also helps to explain the affinity that Freud and many since him have felt between psychoanalysis and literature (and artistic production more generally), and the privileged role of literature at certain turning points in the development of his thought. It is Freud’s scenography of trauma and fantasy that speaks to the student of literature and painting. Overall, the book develops the thesis of Jean Laplanche that in Freud’s shift from a traumatic to a developmental model, along with the undoubted gains embodied in the theory of infantile sexuality, there were crucial losses: specifically, the recognition of the role of the adult other and the traumatic encounter with adult sexuality that is entailed in the ordinary nurture and formation of the infantile subject.

Topography of Trauma: Fissures, Disruptions and Transfigurations

Topography of Trauma: Fissures, Disruptions and Transfigurations
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2019-08-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9004407944

This volume addresses trauma not only from a theoretical, descriptive and therapeutic perspective, but also through the survivor as narrator, meaning maker, and presenter. By conceptualising different outlooks on trauma, exploring transfigurations in writing and art, and engaging trauma through scriptotherapy, dharma art, autoethnography, photovoice and choreography, the interdisciplinary dialogue highlights the need for rethinking and re-examining trauma, as classical treatments geared towards healing do not recognise the potential for transfiguration inherent in the trauma itself. The investigation of the fissures, disruptions and shifts after punctual traumatic events or prolonged exposure to verbal and physical abuse, illness, war, captivity, incarceration, and chemical exposure, amongst others, leads to a new understanding of the transformed self and empowering post-traumatic developments. Contributors are Peter Bray, Francesca Brencio, Mark Callaghan, M. Candace Christensen, Diedra L. Clay, Leanne Dodd, Marie France Forcier, Gen’ichiro Itakura, Jacqueline Linder, Elwin Susan John, Kori D. Novak, Cassie Pedersen, Danielle Schaub, Nicholas Quin Serenati, Aslı Tekinay, Tony M. Vinci and Claudio Zanini.

From Guilt to Shame

From Guilt to Shame
Author: Ruth Leys
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2009-01-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400827981

Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the "survivor syndrome." Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms.

Unclaimed Experience

Unclaimed Experience
Author: Cathy Caruth
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2016-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421421658

Her afterword serves as a decisive intervention in the ongoing discussions in and about the field.

Literature in the Ashes of History

Literature in the Ashes of History
Author: Cathy Caruth
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2013-12-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1421411555

These stories of trauma cannot be limited to the catastrophes they name, and the theory of catastrophic history may ultimately be written in a language that already lingers in a time that comes to us from the other side of the disaster.

Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel

Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel
Author: Madeleine Wood
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2020-10-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 303045469X

This book produces an original argument about the emergence of ‘trauma’ in the nineteenth-century through new readings of Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Collins, Gaskell and Elliot. Madeleine Wood argues that the mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family: the cross-generational relationship is presented as formative and traumatising. By presenting family relationships as decisive for our psychological state as well as our social identity, the Victorian authors pushed beyond the contemporary scientific models available to them. Madeleine Wood analyses the literary and historical conditions of the mid-century period that led to this new literary emphasis, and which paved the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis in Vienna at the fin de siècle. Analysing a series of theoretical texts, Madeleine Wood shows that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, focusing her reading through Freud’s early writings and Jean Laplanche’s ‘general theory of seduction’.

The Freudian Reading

The Freudian Reading
Author: Lis Møller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1991
Genre: Hermeneutics
ISBN: 9780812213812

In The Freudian Reading, Lis Moller examines the premises, procedures, and objectives of psychoanalytic reading in order to question the kind of knowledge such readings produce. But above all she questions the role of Freud as master explicator.

Primitive Agony and Symbolization

Primitive Agony and Symbolization
Author: Rene Roussillon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2018-03-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429903294

The fundamental outlook of this book is clinical. It attempts to establish a unitary model of the processes at work in different forms of narcissistic pathology, and to offer a model that is both an alternative to, and complementary to, Freud's model of what are usually considered to be neurotic problems. The aim is to extract a sequence of mental processes that could be seen as typical of narcissistic disturbances of the sense of identity, with their several forms and clinical variations. The book describes how these are structured, together with their intrapsychic and intersubjective functions, based on the hypothesis of a defensive pattern that is set up to counter the effect of a split-off primary trauma and the threat that hangs over the mind and subjectivity.