Psychology Commons^™

The Case Of The Dream Maker: Perec, Pontalis, And Dream Writing, Aubrey Gabel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article considers Georges Perec’s La Boutique obscure as a literary experiment in dream writing, by putting it in dialogue with French Freudianism, notably the clinical papers of J.-B. Pontalis, Perec’s long-time psychoanalyst. Pontalis describes a patient type, the "dream maker,” who provokes an extreme case of counter-transference and requires new methods in dream therapy. Pontalis, like many of Perec’s literary critics, was suspicious of the authenticity of Perec's dream journal and denied it both therapeutic and literary status. This article reinserts La Boutique obscure into Perec’s literary program. Through a discussion of the text's formal attributes and its sociological …

Immortal Melancholia: A Psychoanalytical Study Of Byronic Heroes, Kathryn Frazell

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This culminating project examines Byronic heroes using psychoanalytic theory across four case studies in media, including classic literature, theater, film, and television. The Byronic hero is a literary archetype inspired by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Typical characteristics include angst, arrogance, cunning intelligence, criminality, desire, passion, dominance, and otherness. The characters I have chosen to study include Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre (1847), the Phantom from the 2004 film The Phantom of the Opera, James Bond from the 2012 film Skyfall, and Damon Salvatore from the hit television series The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017). Through examining the …

Mothers And Their Children: Harry Potter And Melanie Klein, Kristina Mur

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the mother-child relationship in the Harry Potter novels by using Melanie Klein’s object-relation based theory. I argue the mothers and their relationship with their offspring represent fragments of a whole complicated psyche. The characters are not analyzed as individuals, but instead as pieces, sometimes multiple pieces, of a whole psyche. When these characters and novels are taken together, a whole, multi-faceted person comes into view. Rowling depicts both good and bad mothers, and children who characterize different positions according to Klein. These positions are the paranoid-schizoid position with Harry Potter and the depressive position with Sirius Black …

A Psychoanalytic Exploration Into The Memory And Aesthetics Of Everyday Life: Photographs, Recollections, And Encounters With Loss, Dimitrios Mellos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project at hand explores some of the psychological functions of photography as both an everyday and an artistic cultural practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is proposed that, contrary to commonsensical opinion, photographs are not accurate depositories of memory, but rather function as a functional equivalent of screen memories, thus channeling the subject's memory in ways that are objectively distorted and distorting, but psychologically meaningful and important; moreover, they are a special kind of screen memory in that they are often created pre-emptively and are physically instantiated.

Additionally, it is suggested that, by dint of their materiality, photographs achieve …