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.     

What Will Become of Epiphanies? A Psychoanalytic Reading of James Joyce's “The Dead”

James Joyce's story, The Dead, is read in the tension between sameness, circularity, restraint, deadness as against possibilities for change, vitality, passion, and loving intimacy. The author plays two different readings of The Dead against each other to generate such tension in life and death struggles. Epiphanies are seen as beckoning us with the possibilities for radical transformation—an impossible illusion—but sufficient to tempt us to struggle against detachment, isolation, and restraint toward moments, of variable length, of intimate connectedness with ourselves and with others.     

西方童话与中国神话中人物的人格特征研究

童话和神话中人物的人格特征影响着个体早期的社会化。本文选择了24篇著名的西方童话和中国神话,采用人格形容词评定法,对其中人物的人格特征进行对比研究发现,这些人物既具有人类追求真善美的共性,也表现出不同民族所特有的民族精神和价值观的差异性。分析了这些共性和差异性的表现及其产生原因,阐述了这些人物的人格特征对儿童形成其个性品质、行为模式、道德品质、社会角色等方面的作用和意义。     

Belief System Disintegration: Evolutionary Insights from Bergman’s Det sjunde inseglet

Paradigm transitions come with tremendous risk, as societies can come undone when people stop believing in the imaginary constructs that unite us. The Black Plague’s devastation resulted not only from its lethality, but from how its ensuing crisis in faith triggered evolved cognitive systems that lead to tribalism, self-destructive despair, and attacks on authorities and minorities. This article examines Bergman’s film through the lens of evolutionary theory to illustrate the mechanisms that cause people to wreck havoc when we no longer share a vision for the future. The crisis of the 1300s has been compared to challenges we face today.     

Foetal trauma,body memory and early infant communication: a case illustration

This paper presents the complex case of a male patient who started life as an unwanted pregnancy and adoptee in an era of socio‐cultural shame and blame. When able to contact his birth mother later in life, he experienced a number of confronting synchronicities as well as visions which he felt were related to failed abortion attempts and to other pre‐ and post‐natal events. The case material lends weight not only to Freud's, Ehrenwald's and FitzHerbert's assertions that the earliest form of mother‐infant communications is telepathic in nature but that this mode of communication can be retained if emotional trauma inhibits normal developmental processes. Contemporary neuroscience research is presented supporting the hypothesis that emotional memory can become imbedded in the psyche/soma of the foetus. Such memory traces can later emerge into imagery and/or words if the traumatic impingement has been substantial enough and if other defensive strategies are in place. Clinical implications are then suggested regarding analysts’ attention to the emotional conditions underpinning their patients’ conceptions and foetal development; the connection to projective identification components of the countertransference as being aspects of the earliest telepathic mother/infant communication channel and the need for reductive analyses in analyst training programmes.     

Inspiration in the Act of Reading: A Discussion of Ulrich H. J. Körtner's Hermeneutics

In German‐language theology, Professor Ulrich H. J. Körtner's theory of inspiration, as it relates to the Bible reader's perspective, is well known. His attempt to gain fruitful insights from contemporary literary hermeneutics while linking them to theological concerns makes his approach a valued yet not uncontroversial example of a reception‐aesthetics twist on the Lutheran sola Scriptura. This article presents Körtner's hermeneutical considerations with special regard to inspiration related to the Bible reader's perspective and shows how this approach may be related to some aspects of the crisis that the Lutheran churches and theology suffer today.     

Persian tales on the couch: Notes on folktales as the mirror of the contemporary cultural struggles with gender and sexuality

Abstract

This paper presents a report on our psychoanalytic investigation of cultural folktales, myths, and fables, in which we study, primarily, the extent to which such narratives lurk behind contemporary representations of men and women. Our aim is to identify the multiple narrative structures that form the core plots and storylines of these tales. Following Roland Barthes’ work on mythologies, we want to decode the tales’ ideological components by deciphering the axiomatic assumptions these tales make about the nature of perceived social reality. This represents an attempt to study a mind that is derived from the text. More specifically, we study narratives whose storylines revolve around the struggle between men and women in order to identify the culture’s core concerns about and preoccupations with the relationship between the sexes. We believe that cultural myths or folktales are a royal road to a nation’s collective conscience, and include gendered patterns of defenses, obsessions, fears, and paranoia.     

The Oedipus myth and its analogues,especially its characteristic manifestation in Finnish folk tales

ABSTRACT

The play of the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles is the most famous story of Oedipus. However, similar stories have been told before and thereafter throughout history as legends and folk tales in different parts of the world. There is a specific folk tale type classified according to its narrative components and named the Oedipus tale. There are somewhat conflicting opinions about the universality of the Oedipus tales and Oedipus complex. This review deals with the nature of the Oedipus legend and its folk tale analogs. There are 25 examples of Oedipus folk tales that are known to be from Finland – a high prevalence compared to other regions of the world. From Scandinavia, for instance, they are virtually absent. The most of Finnish Oedipus stories have a special feature that is unique in the world.: a peculiar prophecy of a sheep that will be born at the same time and eaten by a wolf. An example of these Finnish folk tales is told. Possible interpretations of this tale are offered and discussed. The specific feature of the Finnish Oedipus tales stimulates a discussion on the different opinions regarding the timing of the Oedipus complex, especially considering its oral precursors.