HANSEL AND GRETEL: A TALE OF TERROR

In the analysis of a woman with multiple childhood traumas, the fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel” figured prominently. The author discusses the use of the fairy tale in this case at various levels. He suggests an interplay between a national myth, the fairy tale, and a personal myth—the patient's psychodynamics. The fairy tale can be used to illuminate personal meanings derived from it. In the experience of childhood trauma, the repeated reading of a fairy tale can help organize and defend against terrifying anxiety.     

Mythological Underpinnings of Feminine Development

In the manner of Oedipus Rex, the myth of Myrrha—a story about a daughter's initiation of sex with her father—promises to divulge insights about feminine development. Given parallels between these two myths, the author asks why Jung identified Electra rather than Myrrha as the feminine counterpart to Oedipus, and revisits Freud's and Jung's differing interpretations of the incest theme in personality development. To break open the metaphor of Myrrha's incest, the author analyzes a similar account of incest in the Old Testament story of Lot and his wife and finds that they share a theme of female bitterness related to wounding of the mother and its arresting effect on the daughter's maturation. The article then considers the Demeter-Persephone myth, a tale not of incest but rape in Persephone's initiation into womanhood. In contrast to Myrrha, Persephone's development unfolds with strong maternal support tempered by the opposing claims on her by the masculine. The article draws these stories together to illuminate the archetypal forces that drive feminine development as well as the human affairs that resist and complicate them. The article concludes with a case study of a client whose developmental “stuckness” follows the contours of the Myrrha myth.     

The Little Mermaid: Hans Christian Andersen's Feminine Identification

While verbally transmitted fairy tales express universal human concerns, the literary fairy tale, the written creation of an individual author, permits a psychodynamic understanding of the writer. The little mermaid's willingness to undergo the pain and mutilation involved in the loss of both her tail and was voice in order to become a mortal and marry a prince has been regarded as illustrating problems in female sexual development. However, a review of Hans Christian Andersen's biographical data indicates that the story also represents his unconscious homosexual conflicts and supports Freud's concept of the role of castration anxiety in the negative Oedipus complex.     

Women's Writing and the Early Modern Genre Wars

This paper explores two phases of the early modern genre wars. The first was fought by Marie de Gournay, in her “Preface” to Montaigne's Essays, on behalf of her adoptive father and in defense of his naked and masculine prose. The second was fought half a century later by Nicholas Boileau in opposition to Gournay's feminizing successor, Madeleine de Scudéry. In this debate Gournay's position is egalitarian, whereas Scudéry's approximates to a feminism of difference. It is claimed that both female protagonists in this early debate occlude the female body. The far more sexually explicit prose of Mary Delarivier Manley is then used to raise the question: is it genre, or is it, rather, the very nature of erotic sexuality, that makes it so difficult for women to masterfully expose themselves as authoritative subjects?     

‘Sleeping beauties’: succession problems of adolescence

The author explores the succession problems of adolescence. She uses the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tale Sleeping Beauty to consider various characters and narratives possible in the analytic field during the succession process. Use of the characters in a fairy tale allows an analyst to play with the different roles the patient unconsciously assigns her. The author conceives of the avoidance of adolescent turbulence as a common reaction to adolescence, but one that can also become entrenched, and result in a restriction of emotional growth. The paper explores the psychic isolation of adolescence and the splitting required to manage the conflicting desires of the phase. The persistent absence of passion, including in the analytic process, constitutes a psychic retreat from developmental turbulence. The analyst of such an adolescent may need to allow them to be ‘somnolent’ for some time, but may eventually need to wake them (metaphorically) or even pierce the somnolent, avoidant state. The author uses clinical vignettes of late adolescents to demonstrate such transitions, exploring her countertransference experience as well as the reaction of adults to the succession process of adolescence.     

The Piano, the Animus, and the Colonial Experience

Focused principally on an analysis of Ada, the mute heroine of Jane Campion's The Piano , this article shows how post–Jungian animus theory illuminates that character's mysterious personality. In particular, Ann Ulanov's thoughts about animus development are connected with Demaris Wehr's observations concerning the internalization of social oppression in an argument that shows how, notwithstanding she is a woman, Ada is a product of colonial oppression. Her mythological antecedents are also considered, and are particularly marked in that she resembles the handless maiden in Marie–Louise von Franz's analysis of that fairy tale. In this context Ada's ultimate renunciation of her husband is symbolically reinforced by the developing personality of her daughter Flora. The changes in both characters can be seen as implying not only the rebirth of Ada's psyche but also the emergence of a new psychological readiness to throw off the colonial mantle.     

Dancing Contact Improvisation with Luce Irigaray: Intra‐Action and Elemental Passions

This article takes as its point of departure Luce Irigaray's Elemental Passions, in which a woman‐speaker tries to make her lover and the discipline of philosophy understand that she is not how they have imagined her to be; that she is not at all but that she keeps becoming through perpetual movement. The article investigates Irigaray's investment in a form of materialist difference feminism that offers conceptual links to the posthumanist work of Karen Barad's agential realism, especially her theorization of intra‐action. The link between Irigaray and Barad is established via a diffractive reading that incorporates the dance/movement research practice of Contact Improvisation. Although expressed through written language, Elemental Passions creates the impression of the woman‐speaker dancing, of encountering herself, her environment, and her lover through moved and moving contact, searching for a practice of moving‐together, feeling‐with, and feeling‐between that can be experienced in an improvised dance duet. Exploring how touch and the sharing of weight in Contact Improvisation challenges boundaries and establishes ever‐changing configurations and entanglements between dancers, the article proposes that Irigaray's woman‐speaker envisions herself as a posthuman/ist woman and that improvised dancing offers a practice of intra‐action through which she can encounter the world in her becoming.     

Religious Variability in the Relationship Between Masculinity and Father Involvement

While traditional masculinity and fathering behaviors are seemingly associated, few studies have considered the conditions under which masculine norms may influence fathers’ behavior. Religiosity is an important factor to consider, given its association with both the endorsement of traditional gender attitudes and father involvement. This paper addresses the independent effects of traditional masculine norms and religiosity on fathering behaviors and considers whether religiosity moderates the relationship between masculinity and men's parenting behaviors. Using a national sample of fathers with children aged 2–17 in the United States, the results suggest that masculinity is negatively associated with father involvement, while religiosity is positively associated with father involvement. Yet, both highly masculine and highly religious fathers are more likely to engage in harsh discipline. Moreover, results suggest that religiosity attenuates the negative relationship between masculinity and active father involvement, while exacerbating the positive relationship between masculinity and harsh punishment.     

The Restitution of Primary Identification Psychoanalysis

The paper discusses different well-known imagined monsters. Starting with the fairy tale and the films on The Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête), hidden meanings from several psychodynamically valid perspectives are proposed with the aim of finding out what makes this story so popular and everlasting. Projected demons or impulses in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are are discussed as well as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and his monster who are presented and connected to facts in this author’s life. In the summary links to psychoanalytic thinking are proposed.     

Evolutionary Theory in the Social Philosophy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This paper examines Charlotte Perkins Gilman's connection with the evolutionist ideas of late nineteenth century Reform Darwinism. It focuses on the assumptions that her language and use of metaphor reveal, and upon her vision of human social evolution as a meUoristic process through which the equality of the sexes must finally emerge.     

Object Relations Perspectives on “Phantom of the Opera” and Its Demon Lover Theme: The Modern Film

This study of the modern film version of “Phantom of the Opera” employs a mythic theme to illustrate how women can involve themselves with charismatic and eroticized narcissistic men, who are unavailable for true relationship within the conscious world of societal connection. How can the healthy-heroic woman extricate herself from the seductive web of such men, men who seek to own the women—not through sexual relations—but through ownership and control of the women's creative talents? What are the developmental, internal world, dynamics that spell out the muse turned demon/lover theme in British and American Object Relations terms? Similar to the mythic vampire who entrances women to suck their blood, the male muse haunts the female artist to possess her talents. The “demon lover” creates himself to woo the unsuspecting female with potential but yet unrealized creative talents. He woos through entrancement, like so many psychologically wounded narcissistic characters who require mirroring to have any sense of existence!     

Mourning and the symbolic process

Abstract: This paper describes the analysis of a patient whose difficulty symbolizing absence had prevented her from being able to mourn the loss of her father in her adolescence. Through a series of symbolic enactments and synchronistic events, she was eventually able to carry out a mourning ritual that enabled her to lay her father to rest. Some implications for symbolization are discussed, developing Segal's view of symbol formation as reparation: symbols are embedded in a context of communication and can only develop in the context of a relationship; they represent relationships as well as objects; and they are emergent in the sense that they exist within a complex web of interactive, multiple meaning and cannot be reduced back to any one object that they represent.     

Naughty Girls Commentary on Paper by Jackie L. Cohen

In response to Cohen's rich and evocative presentation of her case of Lisa, I offer some additional perspectives on the material. Labeling Lisa a “naughty girl,” I explore the relevance of Winnicott's notions of the antisocial tendency and of the pathology of self-sufficiency, something Corrigan and I have called the mind object. I have looked at the treatment in terms of the facilitation of regression to dependence and a child's reconnection to her body. Herzog's concept of father hunger leads me to an exploration of Lisa's finding the father in her therapist, which helps her separate from omnipotent internal objects and accept the individuality of the other. Finally, inspired by Cohen's characterization of her treatment of Lisa as “relational and action oriented,” I attempt to review what I believe is essential to child treatment and what is beautifully illustrated in Cohen's work.     

The Anne Sexton complex

Abstract

From Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf and Anne Sexton, artists have identified with the downward pull of the creative unconscious toward death. Death appears in images of a sexual, mystical, or ecstatic union with the ghostly lover or mother. This paper explores an alternative creative model for women which does not lead to death, by documenting the case history of a woman artist who attempted suicide, but who lived to tell her story. The case history is written as a narrative both in the words of the author and in the words of the client.     

Oedipus again: a critical study of Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter

In this paper the Oedipus complex is reexamined through a film, The Night of the Hunter. Study reveals a concealed fairy tale structure, a structure that, when presented against a mythic backdrop, is ideal for presenting a certain kind of oedipal situation, that of a vulnerable damaged father and couple (indeed, couples), revealing a skewed oedipal situation. The film, produced in 1954 and looked at forty years later in the context of psychoanalytic writings of the last decade (Bergmann, Feldman, Herman, Simon), provides a matrix with which to reexamine a fundamental psychoanalytic concept, the Oedipus complex. It is the mutual enrichment of art and psychoanalysis that this paper addresses.     

The Three Princesses

This article introduces three princesses: Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680); her sister, Princess Sophie who became the Electress of Hanover (1630–1714); and Sophie's daughter, Sophie Charlotte, who became the first Queen of Prussia (1668–1705). After summarizing their common family background, the article presents, for each in turn, her biography and a discussion of her relation to philosophy. In each case their philosophical involvement stems from their friendships with the leading philosophers of their day; Princess Elizabeth was a friend of Descartes while the Electress Sophie and Sophie Charlotte were friends of Leibniz. The article concludes that anyone who has made the acquaintance of the three princesses and has studied their interaction with their philosopher-friends will always see them as part of the history of modem philosophy.     

The Orphan Archetype

This article explores the archetype of the orphan and traces it through myth, story, fairy tale, literature, and perhaps most importantly, through the author's personal experience. This is a treatment of the theme of abandonment that details the “inner orphan's” predicament. Rothenberg, a Jungian analyst, speaks from the depths when she says: “It is only when one is truly alone that the creative potential that is carried deep inside has the space and room to emerge into the light of day.”     

MY FATHER,MYSELF

This essay presents material from the second analysis of an offspring of two Holocaust survivors, each of whom lost a child during the war. The first analysis (Kogan 2003 ) focused primarily on the patient's relationship with her mother. This second analysis revolves around the elaboration of the complex and painful father–daughter relationship, centering on the events surrounding the death of the patient's father. The discussion includes an exploration of the father's deferred action on account of his Holocaust trauma, which he passed on to the next generation; the break in the idealized paternal representation; and the daughter's identification with her father's disavowed aggressive aspects. It also examines some of the unique transference and countertransference problems that arose, mainly because patient and analyst belonged to the same traumatized large group.     

Patterns of Culturally Defined Sex-Role Preference and Parental Imitation

Summary

The theory that males tend to identify with a culturally defined, masculine role and that females tend to imitate their mothers was assessed by administering the It Scale (culturally defined role preference) and the Imitation Schedule (parental imitation) to 36 white, middle-class, third-grade boys and girls. Boys' masculine role preference was higher than the girls' feminine preference (t = 4.62, p < .0005), and there was no difference in same-sexed imitation scores (t = .24, p > .05). Boys' masculine preference was higher than their father imitation (t = 1.85, p < .05), and the girls had higher mother imitation than feminine preference (t = 1.85, p < .05). The interpretations were complicated by the fact that the girls' preference was in the masculine range. The results suggested that boys identify with a culturally defined, masculine role, that girls show a similar tendency, and that neither sex imitates the same-sexed parent consistently.     

The role of a parent's illness in the emotional experience of a child evidence from Klein's Narrative of a child analysis

Abstract

The analysis of Richard, described by Melanie Klein in Narrative of a Child Analysis, gives us some insight into the effect on a child of threats to the health of his parents. His mother was involved in a road accident when Richard was 2; his father collapsed during the time of the analysis when he was 10. This paper links these events with disturbances in Richard's relation to his father and to his mother, as well as with threats to his own integrity, as demonstrated in the analysis. Richard's reversal of roles with his father and mother is discussed, as are Klein's reaction to Richard's report of finding his father ‘ill and nearly fainting’ and Richard's response to her behaviour. The paper draws attention to the way in which a child's reaction to the ill health of one parent can affect relations with both parents, as well as disturbing his sense of himself.