Literature & Psychology

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

The clients that come to Counselling Psychology do not live in a vacuum. They are located in time and space and are faced with the particular challenges presented by their contexts and their interactions with these contexts. This essay tries to show that an awareness of life-span development is essential for Counselling Psychologists in order to contextualize their clients’ experiences and use this understanding as a resource for therapeutic work. It argues in particular that the existential theme of finitude needs to be considered as impacting on life-span development. It starts by introducing the life-span perspective and its implications for practice and goes on to exemplify this view by focusing on the subject of death – particularly on death awareness and death anxiety – and its influence on people’s lives, especially during what has been called ‘the mid-life crisis’, before applying some of the ideas to the fictional character of Ivanov from Chekhov’s eponymous play. It tries to show that death assumes special significance in mid life and that this is not merely a challenge in Counselling Psychology practice but also an opportunity for growth.

The possessed child made a spectacular impact in the 1970s with The Exorcist, which was a literary, cinematic, cultural and social phenomenon. The book and film helped spawn an entire generation of possessed youngsters throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the first full-length study of this image, Adrian Schober argues that the possessed child is first and foremost an American phenomenon that may be traced to certain religious and cultural factors in the United States.

In this thought-provoking analysis of the shifting cultural perceptions of the 'good' and 'evil' child, Schober revisits such American classics as The Scarlet Letter and The Turn of the Screw, while examining its more contemporary face in books and films such as The Exorcist and E.T.. He compares these American representations with those from other national contexts, as well as its treatment in the field of children's literature. The book adopts a unique interdisciplinary approach, which offers new insights by examining the possessed child trope within a broad historical and cultural perspective.

REVIEW:

In 1689, the Reverend Cotton Mather watched four children of a Boston family exhibit “strange fits” such that, at times, “their Heads would be twisted almost round; and … they would roar exceedingly”.  (pp. 38-39)  In 1971, William Peter Blatty wrote his novel The Exorcist, an instant best-seller and the basis of his screenplay for the blockbusting William Friedkin movie two years later.

Adrian Schober treats all of these events with seriousness and scholarly insight, befitting his book‘s origin in a doctoral thesis for Monash University, Australia.  One advantage for writers who employ “the possession motif”, he notes, is that “it casts the child as both good and evil, innocent and corrupt, victim and villain” (p. 16) - thereby raising timeless questions about whether any of us can really “know ourselves”.  Henry James seems to have deliberately incorporated that ambiguity into his groundbreaking tale of possession and pre-pubescent sexuality The Turn of the Screw (1898), going so far as to tease the reader with the possibility that the “ghosts” reported by the two children actually emanate from the hysterical mind of their repressed governess.  James called his tale an “irresponsible little fiction” (p. 61) but in fact it pioneered techniques later used by audience-implicating filmmakers like Friedkin and Robert Wise and Alfred Hitchcock, not to mention an entire concept of how society regards (or disregards) childhood sexuality, as set out in James Kincaid’s book Erotic Innocence (1998), cited several times by Schober. 

Underpinning Schober’s study is his concern to trace religious and Romantic attitudes to the child (both in life and in fiction), which historically have tended to be opposed.  In particular, Roman Catholicism and Puritanism regarded the child with suspicion, as inheriting Original Sin and being like a “little devil” in need of taming (and baptism).  The Romantics, post-Rousseau, on the other hand, almost deified the child - whose potential to be “father of the man” in thought and deed became their special study and concern.  To the notion of original sin, the Romantics opposed “original innocence” (p. 5), although poet William Blake wisely saw that in practice both such “contrary states” (the subtitle of Schober’s book) might be allowed.  “Without contraries is no progression,” he wrote.  He meant that, in the growing child, and healthy adult, rationality and energy need each other if the soul or psyche is not to be flabby and undernourished.  Here were pre-echoes of Freud and James, and of most of the texts that Schober examines so revealingly.

This remarkable and shrewd book covers territory that is both basic and thought-provoking.  Its chapters range across sophisticated literary works like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and James’s The Turn of the Screw, to Hollywood films like The Exorcist and Wise’s Audrey Rose (1977) - the latter adapted by Frank De Felitta from his earnest 1975 “shocker” about reincarnation - to Englishman James Herbert’s 1983 novel Shrine (which in effect transposes Lourdes to South East England, but which Schober finds “pretentious” and “melodramatic“ - pp. 118-19), to children’s tales like William Mayne’s IT (1977) and Australian author Victor Kelleher’s Del-Del (1991).  I commend Schober both for his capacity to contextualise these works in their Zeitgeist (for example, the New Age thinking of the late 1960s onwards, coinciding with the Vietnam war, student revolt, changing sexual mores, and Women’s Liberation - chapter on The Exorcist, p. 67) and to spot non sequiturs, as when he shows how Audrey Rose’s pretence at reconciling Christian understanding of resurrection with Eastern philosophy’s concept of reincarnation is “tantamount to doublethink”.  (p. 93)

A formidable yet readable book, highly recommended.

Reviewed by Ken Mogg, scholar, author of The Alfred Hitchcock Story (1999; 2008), and editor of the 'MacGuffin' website.

Novels from the 18th and 19th century have powerfully shaped modern conceptions of marriage and family life.  With the development of the British realist novel, the courtship and marriage plot took on a new cultural prominence that “naturalized” a deeply cultural institution and normalized a particular set of heterosexual gender roles.  The cultural significance of these novels can be measured by their reverberations in contemporary popular culture and their impact on modern life stories.  [The complete article is available at the link below.]

The first part of the title of this paper refers to a comment Lord Mark makes to Milly Theale, the heroine of Henry James’ novel, The Wings of the Dove. Lord Mark’s remark aptly summarizes one of the central themes of the story: exchange. Rather than purely economic transactions, exchanges occur within the context of (personal) relationships. Nobody performs a good deed without the expectation of receiving a benefit. The characters act out of self-interest instead of mutual friendship. The notable exception is Milly, who willingly shares her fortune and herself. Although Milly knows that exchange predominates among her acquaintances as a method of establishing and of maintaining relationships—indeed, as relationships—she refuses to behave similarly. Her refusal to join in this tactic becomes a powerful form of resistance. Ultimately, the mercenary tendencies of Merton Densher yield to the unselfishness he sees in Milly. This lesson prevents the pairing of Kate and Densher from succeeding.

The phrase "stream of consciousness" to indicate the flow of inner experience was first used by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) yet writers throughout the ages have described the altered states of consciousness which arise when this stream is diverted from its normal courses: from the visions and dreams described by mystics in the earliest religious texts, to the modern accounts written by neuroscientists. This chapter highlights the importance of literature for the study of consciousness and describes how the development of writing affected a shift in human experience second only to the development of language itself by extending our capacity to think beyond the here and now. It then goes on to explore how authors throughout the ages have explored altered states of consciousness in their personal lives and in their literary work with particular emphasis on religious experience, drug use, hypnosis and dissociative states.

This brief interdisciplinary paper explores the psychological function of religion demonstrated in Yann Martel's Life of Pi.  Drawing on research into Terror Management Theory, this essay describes how Pi's unique religious orientation helps him to survive his ordeal at sea.

The American Short Story: New Horizons, Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Symposium in cooperation with the Society for the Study of the American Short Story, the American Literature Association, and the Obama Institute, Mainz, October 5–7, 2017.

Pier Vittorio Tondelli, one of the most significant writers of the European Eighties, was arguably the first interpreter within the Italian literary milieu of Morrissey’s lyrics and imaginary. The artist from Manchester – first with his band, The Smiths, and then as a solo artist – established himself as the most “literary” songwriter in contemporary English culture, becoming a cult author thanks to works which span from the records Meat Is Murder (1985), The Queen Is Dead (1986) and Viva Hate (1988) to the book consecration of his Autobiography (2013), published in the Penguin Classics collection. Tondelli deeply engaged with the melancholy poetics that characterized Morrissey’s lyrics (spleen, Wildean decadentism, a desperate sentimentalism and a distinctive sexual ambiguity), going as far as to insert precise mentions and references from Morrissey’s works in his most famous novels. From Rimini (1985) to the spiritual testament Camere separate (1989), along with the miscellaneous nonfiction anthology Un weekend postmoderno (1990), Tondelli never ceased to dialogue with the British singer as a poetic coeval soulmate within an aesthetic paradigm of both the “artist as a young man” and the homosexual as a “forbidden hero”. Due to his early death, Tondelli never had a chance to meet Morrissey personally and Morrissey probably never read Tondelli’s works. This article seeks to investigate in detail the almost unexplored relationship between two crucial authors of the European Eighties, whose apparently separate rooms become connecting through literature, the search for a homeland, lost and found time.

de genere. Journal of Literary, Postcolonial and Gender Studies
No 6 (2020)

"Kids Don’t Just Wanna Have Fun. Material Girls, Wild Boys, and the Melancholic Eighties"
Editors for this issue: Maria Giovanna Fusco (University of L’Aquila) and Fiorenzo Iuliano (University of Cagliari

Drafted while Paul Bowles was traveling across the arid inland area of North Africa, The Sheltering Sky explores the potential consequences of a physical immersion in a world of difference previously only imagined from a safe distance.  Bowles' disturbing tale about postcolonial alienation and existential despair is a product and at the same time also a representation of the multiple ways in which beliefs and emotions color human perceptions of specific environments and how those environments in turn affect human emotions, beliefs, and perceptions. Reading the novel through a cognitive ecocritical lens, the article argues that readings that champion the psychoanalytical or existential interiorization of the Sahara desert neglect the transformative presence of the material North African environment in the narrative. In Bowles’s novel the Sahara is in fact both a symbolic landscape—and thus a socially constructed realm—and a physically and geographically present agent that acts directly on the bodies, emotions, and cognitions of the protagonists.

""Often the mourning poet devotes part of his poetry to the recollection of memories
related to his dead partner, memories that rely on physical objects which become
memory bearers by virtue of their contact with the beloved body: objects touched or
used by that person in his/her everyday life, or objects which have some kind of real
or imaginary relation with  that person. Taking into account three works – Eugenio
Montale’s Xenia (collected in Satura, 1971), Douglas Dunn’s Elegies (1985) and Ted
Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) – my paper will focus on how a lyrical subject (and
the real poet just behind him) constructs an archive of memories in his verse. In the
verse, a mental literary space is created, a place crowded by memories where the I-you relation can be prolonged or where the dead lover can find a place for him/herself
and finally rest. Writing becomes an important part of the mourning process for the
poetical subject in sorrow. Freudian and Lacanian theories of mourning do not seem
to consider the relevance of the lost physical contact in the mourning process, so this
analysis will also rely on some recent theories that help us to understand how a
medium apparently as abstract as lyric poetry roots itself in the concreteness of human
daily life and comes to terms with the reality of loss.""

Abstract 1. Analyzes the works of W. Whitman in terms of the symbolic representations of the male body. It is argued that Whitman's (1973) book, Leaves of Grass, is grounded in the rhetoric of the male body. Whitmanian democracy is also discussed in the context of his ...

Western culture is now wrestling with the mind-bending problematic of two realities and their relationship:

1. Physics has its quantum theory and cosmological theories—two different realities…
2. Philosophy has its appearances and reality, consciousness and world…
3. Medicine has its mind and body, mental and physical…
4. Linguistics has its signifier and signified, text and reference…
5. Art has its form and content, medium and message…
6. Depth Psychology has its consciousness and the unconscious, inner and outer…

There are so many ways modern disciplines are saying this duality of realities today. Our current knowledge and all our cultural practices are rooted in an a priori understanding that the two realities are now separated by an abyss, even as we are bedevilled by an urgency to unite them, both in theory and practice. This separateness of realities is reflected in the contradiction between the syntax of our language, and the rhetoric we use within given syntactical parameters. … We simply cannot reflect any other possible relationship between the two realities within in our current linguistic structure.

What can we do when the two realities “insist” on another configuration other than the current split? How can literature reflect this new configuration?

Kurs dotyczy problematyki zmiany religijności (konwersji), szoku kulturowego, akulturacji oraz innych procesów psychicznych – ich struktury i dynamiki – które zachodzą, kiedy spotykają się różne kultury i religie, tradycje i systemy wartości. Niniejszy kurs poświęcamy różnym przedstawieniom tego typu problematyki w literaturze współczesnej. Konwersatorium składa się z dwóch poziomów: teoretycznego, dotyczącej psychologicznych aspekty kontaktu z „innym” i związków pomiędzy psychologią i literaturą; oraz praktycznego – literackiego, całkowicie poświęconego analizie wybranych powieści współczesnych z różnych gatunków (literatura imigrancka, powieść obyczajowa, powieść historyczna,
powieść graficzna, fantasy etc.), w których takowe wątki można odnaleźć. Kurs wymaga czytania dużej ilości beletrystyki, stąd też zalecane jest wcześniejsze zapoznanie się z listą lektur. Będziemy dyskutować m. in. nad książkami autorstwa Zadie Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Jamesa Clavella, Terrego Pratchetta,
Amy Chua, Joanny Bator, Georga R. R. Martina, jak również wybranych wedle zainteresowań literackich uczestników.

... This part of Else is evident in the sarcastic apostrophe, Now, Madmoiselle Else, what are you making such a fuss about? After all, what Dorsday is asking is but a small thing when com-pared with the lascivious fantasies of a moment earlier. ...