Psychoanalysis

Dilip Chitre creates a stark impression of the isolation of old age in his poem ‘Father Returning Home’ by showing his fathers’ estrangement from society and his own family. Chitre conveys this isolation by using literary devices such as similes and repetition, and addressing themes such as modernity vs tradition. The poem begins when a father is waiting outside for a train which will take him home. We know this as it says ‘My father travels on the late evening train’. Already by labelling the…

Mental life or psyche is understood as a bodily organ (the brain) plus the acts of consciousness. In The Dissection of the Psychical Personality, Freud discusses the psychic nature of the human mind. He begins by that One thing we know about ourselves is the never-ending conflict between our instinctual desires and our endeavor to resist them. In other words, personality, what makes the “I” is a product of how mental forces interact. Later he terms the region where instincts lie the id and the…

‘The Wasteland’ has been psycho-analytically studied to understand the poet’s psyche, the metaphor of images, symbols, etc. for new untouched and unexplored findings in the genre of practical criticism. The poem has been deciphered on the basis of three psychoanalytic models (a) Lacan’s ‘Language and Unconscious’ (b) C.G. Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’ and (c) Northrop Frye’s ‘Archetypal Criticism’. Lacan’s ‘Language and Unconscious’, attempts to read ‘The Wasteland’ in the likeness of…

Considering the descriptions of personality and character organization by McWilliams (2011) and exploring my view of self, others, and the world, along with core beliefs, I believe that my character style is Masochistic. According to McWilliams core experiences of the masochistic self is that of being “unworthy, guilty, rejectable, deserving of punishment” (p. 277). Meanwhile, these fears are not always at the conscious level, as I am making the assumption that I am at the character style end…

A loss of mental control can cause the inability to ground oneself into a single identity, leading to the development of split personality disorder. This article will explore reflections relating to split personality disorder and the “self”. With Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and works created by Dan Graham, the ideas about split personalities and the “self” intertwine with each other as well as ties to the electronic image. To examine connections between these notions, an analysis serves…

In general, both Maslow and Rogers have strongly contributed to what we know today as the world of psychology. Their theories, although with little differences have provided us with necessary knowledge and different of understanding human beings and their potentials. In addition, their contribution in the field of psychology has allowed us in one way or the other to successfully assess our clients in therapy. In terms of the critiques given to each theories based on their ability to generate…

Sigmund Freud’s intra-psychic theory on trauma was developed, from inspiration on his clinical case studies in the late nineteenth century. Freud took on the direction that the repression process is a defence against emotional trauma. The term repression was used to describe painful and emotional events, that are able to be blocked out from an individual’s conscious awareness. This is so that the painful effects of the event would not be experienced and intentionally forgotten (Cohen, 1985). The…

How do we avoid the uncanny becoming just another clichéd trope on the methodological menu? How might we revise ideas concerning the uncanny and explore what it means to us as Fine Art practitioners, keeping in mind ontological ambiguity? Freud described the uncanny as the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar (Freud, 1919). Previously Jentsch concluded that the uncanny was a fear of the familiar based on intellectual uncertainty (Jentsch, 1906). The…

In his analysis of dreams and the dream-work, Freud theorized that there were two distinct kinds of content in relation to dreams. The first kind of dream content is manifest content and refers to the material experienced in the surface of the dream. Manifest content includes all of the elements of images, thoughts, and content in the dream that is retained in an individual’s memory upon awakening. The second kind of dream content is latent dream-thoughts and refers to the relevant material of…

The world of psychology has been greatly affected by the theories and work of Sigmund Freud. Since his death in the late 1930s, Freud has become a household name when questions of human behavior arise. By applying his ideas to literature it is possible to understand the true motives that propel characters in a work. The exertion of Freudian theories over Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain produces a new understanding of the characters. Freud’s theories provide a way to decipher the minds of…