Marrying Mr. Rochester: Redeeming the Negative Father Complex

Injurious childhood experiences with one's personal father form the psychic bedrock of a negative father complex: never good enough. This complex has a part that is exciting and uses hope as its hook, and a part that disappoints and persecutes. The negative father complex can be imaged as the ghostly lover, as depicted in the fairy tale “The Singing, Springing Lark” and in Charlotte Brontë's life and famous novel, Jane Eyre. The ghostly lover holds a woman's creative energies hostage to the tantalizing possibility of being the special one who can redeem the negative masculine and win his love.

To heal a complex, its contents must be personified, or imaged, so that an individual can come into conscious relationship with it. The tale of the “Singing, Springing Lark” illustrates collective roots and images of healing a wounded relationship with the masculine. Charlotte Brontë transformed her relationship with the ghostly lover through her novel Jane Eyre, with Mr. Rochester as the image of her own wounded, bewitching masculine energy. Brontë herself was subsequently able to marry, despite her father's objection, overcoming her negative father complex. The fairy tale, novel, and Brontë's life show that several attempts are usually necessary to bring the complex to light. Although consciousness seeks redemption through its pursuit of the masculine, the complex also—mysteriously—seeks its own transformation. Ego alone cannot fulfill the mission of individuation; the Self must aid the process.     

DIFFERENT ARCHITECTURES OF CREATIVITY: LOUIS AND NATHANIEL KAHN

The author analyzes Nathaniel Kahn's documentary film My Architect: A Son's Journey, a tribute to the writer‐director's father Louis, the famous architect, who died suddenly when Nathaniel was eleven years old. The film's poetic, evocative images form a testimony to the silent working through that Nathaniel did in searching for his lost father and to the complex intertwining of mourning and creativity. Creativity is seen as both the cause and the effect of working through, as it gives life to a new meaning and allows replacement of the lost object by an object found again. Bereavement, symbolization, and the birth of representation appear to be connected with one another, both when the most elementary representations are involved and when the more complex and artistic ones are. Where and when it is possible to recover a representation that can survive the absence of the lost object, there is a potentially creative psychic space that can be made fertile again.     

Love—A Higher Form of Human Energy in the Work of Teilhard de Chardin and Sorokin

Contemporary debates concerning a universal theory about the praxis of love in human society and culture can benefit greatly from the works of two twentieth‐century thinkers, the French paleontologist and religious writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Russian‐American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin. Although from very different personal and disciplinary backgrounds, they share amazingly similar views on the power of love as transformative energy for transcending the individual self and for creating radically new, collaborative, and cooperative ways of acting that will transform whole societies, indeed the planet. Traditionally, ideas of love have been associated with religion, but these two thinkers advocate systematic scientific research on the production and application of “love‐energy” for the change of culture, social institutions, and human beings. The article is organized in five parts: (1) altruism, science and love: what is love energy? (2) Teilhard's understanding of the phenomenon of love; (3) Sorokin's approach to creative, altruistic love; (4) comparison of Teilhard's and Sorokin's ideas; and (5) performing works of love. As far as I am aware, this is the first article comparing the remarkable parallels as well as distinctive differences between Sorokin's and Teilhard's ideas on love as the highest form of human energy.     

‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency

Abstract: In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of love to neo‐Aristotelian or neo‐Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory.     

The Orsino complex: Men who love themselves as love objects

Abstract

The Duke Orsino, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, is cited as the archetypal embodiment of a psychological complex which, it is argued, may affect many men in modern patriarchal societies. This condition named the ‘Orsino complex’ is characterized by the subject's experience of being in love with himself as a love object. It is the consequence of the subject's very early experience of his mother's dual psychological reactions to him as a male child. The first of these, and the more significant, I have called maternal phallic projection, while the second I term maternal withdrawal. I also consider the influence of the father upon this complex.

While this paper remains speculative in its present form—that is, its central thesis is based on fictional and not on clinical material—it might, I hope, assist all of us working psychodynamically in understanding further some of the severe problems that male clients present in their relationships with women, as well as directing further research into the complexities of gender identity in contemporary society.     

Father and daughter: Identification with difference—a contribution to gender heterodoxy

This paper reinterprets the historical problem of penis envy, that is, the girl's wish to be masculine, in terms of a developmental need to identify with father. Many of the problems posed by earlier analyses of femininity can be clarified by recognizing that before the girl “turns”; to the oedipal father as love object, she looks to the rapprochement father for identification. Identification is not merely an internal structure, it is a relationship in which the subject recognizes herself or himself in the other. In rapprochement, love of the father, who symbolically represents the outside world, takes the place of the practicing toddler's “love affair with the world.”; This identificatory love of the father, initially noticed in boys by Freud and later authors, is often frustrated by the father's absence or inability to recognize the daughter. This frustrated longing takes the penis as its symbol of likeness. The pre‐oedipal over‐inclusive phase of identification with the other sex parent is not superceded by the oedipal constellation, but is integrated with it. Thus identification becomes an important basis of the love of the other: it is not so much the opposite of object love as an important precursor and ongoing constituent of it. Case material illustrates the multiple possibilities of identificatory love and use of phallic symbolism to represent them.     

The Boy Who Dreamed

In this article the author recounts a Chinese folktale from the viewpoint of the traveling dream soul, which, according to ancient Chinese understanding, may enter all forms of life. This narrative aims to restore and honor the folktale's ancient roots in the Han dynasty classical Chinese medical model, which included storytelling. Accordingly, the story transmits the psychological and spiritual facets of Chinese medical practice that Chairman Mao had censored. Reconnected with these roots, as shown by the commentary that follows the retelling, this story of a pure-hearted boy's dream offers a physiological and psychological treatment of addiction and accompanying oppressions through a detailed creative movement of compassion that follows the life force.     

AQUINAS'S ARGUMENT AGAINST SELF-HATRED

Aquinas's argument against the possibility of genuine self‐hatred runs counter to modern intuitions about self‐hatred as an explanatorily central notion in psychology, and as an effect of alienation. Aquinas's argument does not deny that persons experience hatred for themselves. It can be read either as the claim that the self‐hater mistakes what she feels toward herself as hatred, or that, though she hates what she believes is her “self,” she actually hates only traits of herself. I argue that the argument fails on both readings. The first reading entails that all passions are really self‐love, and so is incompatible with Aquinas's own “cognitivist” view of what it is that distinguishes specific passions in experience. The second reading entails that persons have no phenomenal access to “self,” rendering self‐reference—how it is that the self can be an intentional object of conscious mental states—a mystery. Augustine's claim, which Aquinas accepts on authority, that all sin originates in inordinate self‐love seems to entail the impossibility of genuine self‐hatred because both thinkers fail to distinguish between two distinct forms of self‐love: amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae.     

Augustine's On the Good of Marriage and Infused Virtue in the Twelfth Century

In the history of ethics, it remains remains unclear how Christians of the Middle Ages came to see God‐given virtues as dispositions (habitus) created in the human soul. Patristic works could surely support other conceptions of the virtues given by grace. For example, one might argue that all such virtues are forms of charity, so that they must be affections of the soul, or that they consist in what the soul does, not anything the soul has. Scholars usually assume that the explanation lies in the impact of Aristotle's philosophy on medieval theology. This essay argues that the dispositional account of God‐given virtues was already entrenched by the end of the twelfth century and probably owes more to the influence of Augustine's treatise On the Good of Marriage.     

Love,Desire, Jouissance: Two out of Three Ain't Bad

The author demonstrates in this paper the different dynamics of love, desire, and jouissance. This impossible affair of loving whom one does not desire and desiring whom one does not love is analyzed through the writings of Jacques Lacan and Stephen Mitchell. The author illustrates Lacan's use of the “objeta” as the fragment in the Other that gives the desiring individual the illusion of completeness whereas the desired Other has no notion for whom or what she or he is desired. Desire is unmasked as this hide-and-seek game of narcissistic illusions where one is wanted for what one does not have and one desires what one cannot have. Both Lacan and Mitchell suggest that love is a far more risky encounter because all narcissistic illusions risk to be jettisoned. Although Mitchell suggests that it is only through the Other that one can discover the otherness in oneself, Lacan states that to love is to give nothing of oneself and to accept the emptinessin the Other. Texts from popular culture are used to illustrate the dynamics of live and desire and the limits of jouissance.     

LOVE,JUSTICE, AND SOCIAL ESCHATOLOGY

In this paper, we explore the ontological and theological ground of political institutions in order to then reflect upon the eschatological calling of society. The paper builds on Tillich's ontological insight that love does not simply transcend justice, but that it permeates and drives justice, that justice gives form to love's reunion of the separated. This relation between love and justice is at play in political institutions: these unite human beings under forms of justice that must be transformed ever anew if they are not to lose touch with the dynamic power of love and freeze into increasingly unjust juridicalism. The modern history of Western civilisation bears witness to this ontological tension, and the phenomenon of globalisation is yet another instance of human society's mystical calling. Thus, love heads the dynamic movement that transforms political institutions ever anew. Yet society as a whole must become conscious of its ontology for humanity to truly reach its eschatological potential, and this will require both that theology recovers its ground and that political theory thinks theologically.     

In Defense of Trait‐Based Love

It is widely believed that a person's 1 traits can function as reasons for loving her. (Many a metropolitan rag, for instance, carries lonely hearts ads that attest to this belief with their laundry lists of coveted characteristics.) Notable contemporary work in the philosophy of love has taken the rejection of this premise as its point of departure. As far as I can tell, none of that work has engaged with a careful philosophical exposition of the view under discussion. In the following pages, I will defend the idea of trait‐based love against three of its critics and one of its advocates. I will discuss work on this topic by Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny and David Velleman, arguing that their criticisms fail and that the alternatives they offer to trait‐based love create more difficulties than they solve. What these authors have in common is a deflationary approach to love that reduces it to a beneficent disposition, a valuing relationship and a visceral form of moral regard, respectively. I will compare these to the multiplex, nuanced depiction of trait‐based love in Plato's Symposium. While it is plausible that love can motivate a beneficent disposition, develop in relationships and entails moral regard, I will argue that the attempt to reduce it to any of the foregoing fails. Frankfurt, Kolodny and Velleman reject trait‐based love in part because they think it would differ in unacceptable ways from the love most of us practice. Plato advocates the cultivation of a love that in some respects resembles the picture of trait‐based love the contemporary authors balk at. However, unlike those critics, he appreciates that trait‐based love need not resemble the ideal he proposes. His richer view of love accounts for elements such as need and feeling that the contemporary thinkers are driven to implausibly bracket as distractions. As I will try to show, the most compelling criticisms of Platonic love do not tell against its responsiveness to the loved one's traits. I will argue that trait‐based love is consistent with an intuitive picture of love and that this commonsense approach is more defensible than competing views in these texts. These authors' disagreements about what can count as reasons for love are bound up with the differences in what each takes love to be. Thus, in the course of arguing for trait‐based love, I will critically assess their various proposals as to the nature of love.     

Aristotle's De Anima: On Why the Soul is Not a Set of Capacities

Although it is common for interpreters of Aristotle's De Anima to treat the soul as a specially related set of powers of capacities, I argue against this view on the grounds that the plausible options for reconciling the claim that the soul is a set of powers with Aristotle's repeated claim that the soul is an actuality cannot be unsuccessful. Moreover, I argue that there are good reasons to be wary of attributing to Aristotle the view that the soul is a set of powers because this claim conflicts with several of his metaphysical commitments, most importantly his claims about form and substance. I argue that although there are passages in the De Anima in which Aristotle discusses the soul in terms of its powers or capacities, these discussions do not establish that the soul is a set of capacities.     

Love,Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts (Velleman and Bagnoli) to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un‐Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals.     

Foucault,Velázquez and the place of sacramentality

In Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, the protagonist Bess McNeill is often viewed as a Christ-figure, in particular, as an image of Christ's love. In this essay, I address the feminist critique that taking Bess in this way represents a serious distortion of Christ's love, arguing that Bess need not be seen as endorsing a self-destructive and victimizing form of love that feminist critics rightly reject. Instead, I suggest that we can view her love as an indictment of the institutions structuring its expression. Finally, I argue that Bess’ love for Jan combines aspects of love that have typically been segregated into eros and agape in a way that enriches our understanding of agape and prompts us in turn to re-evaluate our understanding of Christ's love and death.     

Why drive? Psychoanalytic reflections on the film Never let me go

The author presents a psychoanalytic interpretation of Mark Romanek's film Never Let Me Go, which concerns a society in which young adult clones have their internal organs ‘harvested’ for transplantation. Following some general remarks on the method of psychoanalytic film interpretation, strongly emphasising the aesthetics of form and artistic elements specific to film, the author develops the notion that through its cinematic perspectives and shots, Never Let Me Go dramatizes a specific relationship between the sublime and solitude. The film therefore deals with a particular intrinsic difference between expanse and constraint, as well as the limited and the eternal. This leads the viewer to participate directly in a film‐specific way in the inner conflicts at work both in the film's theme and in its protagonists. In terms of aesthetic content, these conflicts are revealed as those of an inescapable thanatological theme that is essentially intertwined with an erotic one. The film shows how love, sexuality, and internal and external images arise from thanatological forces, and it simultaneously provides a way of sublating them (Hegel's Aufhebung) – that is, the film itself represents a benign drive fusion. The film's protagonists, however, struggle with a lack of early parenting and thus with the helplessness of facing individual drive development and the longing for a holding object. Hence, in formal terms, the film deals with the sublime, and, as I will show, it also deals with sublimation at the level of its content.     

Self-concern From Priestley To Hazlitt

This article argues that the Fourth and Fifth of John Toland's Letters to Serena are best understood as a creative confrontation of Spinoza and Leibniz – one in which crucial aspects of Leibniz's thought are extracted from their original context and made to serve a purpose that is ultimately Spinozistic. Accordingly, it suggests that the critique of Spinoza that takes up so much of the fourth Letter, in particular, should be read as a means of `perfecting' Spinoza (via Leibniz), rather than as the outright dismissal it might appear to be. In order to make its case, the article outlines: the supposed problems that Toland finds in Spinoza; what Toland takes from Leibniz, and what he discards, in order to solve these `problems'; and the imprint of Spinoza's naturalism on the eventual `solution' that Toland offers. The article concludes that, whatever the success of this `solution', Toland's speculative labours should still be treated as creative, perspicuous and intrinsically significant.     

DIONYSIUS AND SOME LATE MEDIEVAL MYSTICAL THEOLOGIANS OF NORTHERN EUROPE

Though the authority of Dionysius as a virtually apostolic theological source remains unchallenged in the late Middle Ages, ownership of his inheritance is much disputed, in connection with two issues of “mystical theology” principally. The first controversy (broadly between “Intellectualist” and “affectivist” readings of Dionysius' Mystical Theology) concerns whether the soul, united to God by grace, is made one with God principally by knowledge or by love. The second controversy is well exemplified by the disagreement between Jean Gerson and Denys the Carthusian as to whether Ruusbroec's account of the nature of that union of the soul with God amounts to a heretical extinction of the identity of the created soul. But both Gerson's critique of Ruusbroec and Denys the Carthusian's rebuttal of it are equally superficial, and the theologies of Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa show why: Eckhart and Cusa retained, while Gerson and Denys had lost, their grip on the “dialectics” of “sameness” and “difference” expounded in Mystical Theology.     

TWO FORMS OF LOVE: The Problem of Preferential Love in Kierkegaard's Works of Love

The duty to love one's neighbor as oneself is at the core of Kierkegaard's Works of Love. In this book, Kierkegaard unfolds the meaning of neighborly love and claims that it is the only valid form of true love. He contrasts between neighborly love and preferential love (which includes romantic love and friendship) and criticizes the latter for being nothing but a form of selfishness. However, in some contexts, Kierkegaard seems to acknowledge the significance of preferential love relationships, and does not disallow them. Therefore, his understanding of preferential love appears to be confused and inconsistent. My essay discusses the tension in Kierkegaard's position regarding preferential love, and by presenting recent readings of Works of Love, it asks whether this tension is resolvable and offers a suggestion for a possible solution.