Catch 22- A psychoanalytic review

In producing this essay, I have enjoyed exploring twenty four volumes of The Complete Psychological Works of the founder of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). His essays that I read for the first time in the duration of the Exploring Creativity psychoanalytic psychology course are, A Dream is the Fulfilment of a Wish (1900), Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1907), Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), The Moses of Michaelangelo (1914), On Transience (1915), and Dostoevsky and Parricide(1927). I also discovered several other essays of Freud’s that deal specifically with creativity, but unfortunately due to limits of space and time, I could not study them all. However in the bibliography, you will find many of Freud’s essays listed that I have read in previous years, so have contributed towards my current level of understanding of psychoanalysis. To help structure this essay, I found it necessary to use paragraph headings relevant to a Classical Freudian understanding of the nature of creativity. I hope the text is sufficiently integrated, flows and makes some sense.........

2009

Surrealism is a movement that derives from psychology and embraces widely disparate genres such as art and literature. It has been defined as pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express either verbally, in writing or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. In other words it is dictation of thoughts in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation; for example, as seen in dreams. According to Freud, dreams can be analysed through free association to bring to surface desires and longings suppressed in the subconscious and unconscious. The suppression of desires leads to neurosis. Surrealist painters absorbed the notion of idiosyncrasy in Freudian psychoanalysis while rejecting the underlying madness or darkness of the mind. Painters, such as Salvador Dali, are described as surreal because of the juxtaposition of the abstract and concrete in the form of disturbing and incongruous images in their paintings. This kind of depiction has come to be accepted as a characteristic style of surrealism. In literature, surreal writers have expressed a disdain for literal meanings given to objects and focused on the undertones, the poetic undercurrent that infuses their writing with an uncanny, eerie spirit. Surreal writers seldom organise the thoughts and images that they present and most people find it difficult to understand or analyse their writings. One of the most significant works of protest literature written in the 20 th century is Joseph Heller's Catch 22 which has given an expression to the world cutting across all climes and culture. Catch 22 has been described variously as a war novel, a protest novel and most importantly, a surreal novel. While several attempts have been made to analyse the novel in Marxist terms and from the psychological point of view, up until today the surreal elements in the novel have not been explicated. This paper is an attempt to explore the real and surreal elements in the novel through a stylistic framework with a particular focus on the representation of time.

Manchester University Press

This chapters examines the attempts by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to popularise their research by choosing to analyse cases—and thus the phenomenon of—creative genius. It shows how psychoanalysis and its proponents co-opted and adapted the medical case study as an extant and authoritative rhetorical form through which to forge a new mode of enquiry. The ways in which psychoanalysts such as Isidor Sadger sought to incorporate and adapt sexological pathographies into psychoanalytic thought, shaped the responses within the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (WPV) and fuelled a debate that directly contributed to Freud’s development of psychoanalytic case writing. The decisive sophistication of this discourse can be appreciated in Sigmund Freud’s dialogic-psychoanalytic case studies, which show his keen appreciation of the bond that tied middle-class readers to revered creative artists. Yet Freud hesitated (or perhaps thought it fruitless) to challenge this reverence and left the compl...

2018

Through a series of radical and innovative chapters, Beyond Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Between Literature and Mind challenges the tradition of applied psychoanalysis that has long dominated psychoanalytic literary criticism. Benjamin H. Ogden, a literary scholar, proposes that a new form of analytic literary criticism take its place, one that begins from a place of respect for the mystery of literature and the complexity of its inner workings. In this book, through readings of authors such as J.M. Coetzee, Flannery O'Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov, the mysteries upon which literary works rely for their enduring power are enumerated and studied. Such mysteries are thereafter interwoven into a series of pioneering studies of how the conceptions of thinking, dreaming, and losing become meaningful within the unique aesthetic conditions of individual novels and poems. Each chapter is a provisional solution to the difficult "bridging problems" that arise when literary figures work in the psychoanalytic space, and when psychoanalysts attempt to make use of literature for analytic purposes. At every turn, Beyond Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Between Literature and Mind acts as a living example of the territory it explores: the space between two disciplines, wherein the writer brings into being a form of psychoanalytic literary criticism of his own making. Forgoing traditional applied psychoanalysis and technical jargon, this highly accessible, interdisciplinary work will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as literary critics and scholars.

What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one’s immortality becomes the locus of one’s absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself.

JOURNAL OF GENIUS AND EMINENCE, 2018

Creativity is one of the areas which continuously attracts attention. In an interdisciplinary spirit, this article focuses on the dynamics of creativity with respect to Freudian psychoanalytical thought processes and Jaspers’ conception of a boundary situation. This effort is correlated with the newest research findings in cognitive neuroscience and neurocognitive psychology of creativity. Philosophical research is also brought in to explain the activity of creative thought and a new conception of creativity is offered, with a third thought process used, along with a miniature boundary situation. This represents a development and extension of the original ideas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers. The current article thus constitutes an examination of the intersection of creativity research, the metapsychology of Sigmund Freud, and the existential philosophy of Karl Jaspers. It makes it a neuro-philosophical discussion par excellence and represents both a theoretical project and translation. Subsequently, a novel conception is offered, namely that creativity as unique human experience is illuminated in the miniature of boundary situation as controlled disinhibition of the intellect or regression in the name of the ego and as controlled spiral movement via dialectical “jumps” or “leaps.”

Having discussed two of the basic approaches to literary understanding, the traditional and the formalistic, we now examine a third interpretive perspective, the psychological. Of all the critical approaches to literature, this has been one of the most controversial, the most abused, and-for many readers-the least appreciated. Yet, for all the difficulties involved in its proper application to interpretive analysis, the psychological approach can be fascinating and rewarding. Our purpose in this chapter is threefold: (1) to account briefly for the misunderstanding of psychological criticism; (2) to outline the psychological theory most commonly used as an interpretive tool by modern critics; and (3) to show by examples how readers may apply this mode of interpretation to enhance their understanding and appreciation of literature.

The Example of Charles Mauron, 1984

Psychoanalysis has had a long gestation, during the course of which it has experienced multiple rebirths, leading some current authors to complain that there has been such a proliferation of theories of psychoanalysis over the past 115 years that the field has become theoretically fragmented and is in disarray (Fonagy & Target, 2003; Rangell, 2006). In this paper, I survey the past and present landscapes of psychoanalytic theorizing and clinical practice to trace the evolution of Freud's original insights and psychoanalytic techniques to current theory and practice. First, I sketch the evolutionary chronology of psychoanalytic theory; second, I discuss the key psychoanalytic techniques derived from clinical practice, with which psychoanalysis is most strongly identified; third, I interrogate whether Freud's original theoretical conceptualizations and clinical practices are still recognizable in current psychoanalytic theory and practice, using four key exemplars – object relations theory, attachment-informed psychotherapy, existential/phenomenological and intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy; and fourth, I discuss recent unhelpful, disintegrative developments in psychoanalytic scholarship. To this end, I critique the cul-de-sacs into which some psychoanalytic scholars have directed us, and conclude with the hope that the current state of affairs can be remedied. Psychoanalysis is simultaneously a form treatment, a theory, and an " investigative tool " (Lothane, 2006, p. 711). Freud used each of these three facets of psychoanalysis iteratively to progress our understanding of human mental functioning. Among Freud's unique theoretical insights into the human condition was the historically new idea that humans are primarily animals driven by instincts (Freud, 1915a, 1920) who undergo growth via universal developmental (psychosexual) stages that are influenced by family and social life. This was in opposition to the prevailing view of his time that humanity was God's highest creation. Freud (1908) challenged the cherished belief that humankind is rational and primarily governed by reason, replacing it with the disturbing notion that we are in fact driven by unacceptable and hence repressed aggressive and sexual impulses that are constantly at war with the " civilized " self. Freud himself and Freud scholars (Jones, 1953; Strachey, 1955) consider that the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer & Freud, 1893) mark the beginning of psychoanalysis as a theory and a treatment. These early papers place the causes of the symptoms of hysteria firmly in the psychological, not the neurological domain (although such a distinction is no longer sustainable), thus moving thinking about the cause of hysterical and other psychological symptoms from the brain to the mind. This insight underpinned a paradigm shift in thinking about the mental functioning of human beings, for which there was a scant vocabulary and embryonic conceptualizations. The theory that organized early clinical observations gradually unfolded, many precepts of which have entered the psychological lexicon as givens, concepts that are now taken for granted. Three of these bedrock concepts are the existence of the Unconscious, the notion of hidden meaning and the idea of repression.