ABSTRACT
This paper explores how the film The Babadook illuminates psychoanalytic understandings of melancholia and mourning. The author attempts to unwind the complicated character of melancholia, using Freud as an initial point of orientation, then relying on a few ideas from Klein and later writers. The paper attempts to refine our understanding of the difference between absence and emptiness, especially the difference between being captured in the nothing or deadness of melancholic emptiness, on the one hand, and being alive enough to suffer the absence of a lost object, which bears a potential for mourning, on the other. The possibility of psychic tension between these states is explored. Some implications of the relationship between absence and emptiness for the mourning process are considered. The author uses the film as a resource throughout.
Subject(s)
Depressive Disorder , Grief , Motion Pictures , Humans , Depressive Disorder/psychology , Depressive Disorder/therapy , Psychoanalytic Theory , Psychoanalytic Interpretation , Freudian Theory , Psychoanalytic Therapy/methodsABSTRACT
The author endeavors to reassess how metaphor functions psychoanalytically by distinguishing it from more inclusive conceptualizations of symbolism and metaphor, and from the idea of metaphor as a primary cognitive structure. The author adapts aspects of Ricoeur's metaphor theory, and explores metaphor as organized around tensions of similarity and difference, and of something "being and not-being" simultaneously. Such a model anchors metaphoric meaning in the subject's capacity for metaphoric experience and its relation to unrealized unconscious meaning. The author suggests that this perspective on metaphor-which connects it experientially to mature transitional experience, sublimation, play, and mourning-helps us understand how metaphoric experience functions as our most potent agent of intrapsychic change.
Subject(s)
Psychoanalysis , Grief , Humans , Metaphor , PsychotherapyABSTRACT
As a conspicuously hybrid entity, neuropsychoanalysis enjoins one to look critically at its assumptions about knowledge and subjectivity as one tries to understand how its un-hyphenated halves relate to one another. The author looks at the differences between mind (which is grounded in subjective experience) and brain (which is an objectively described neurobiological entity), and suggests that neuropsychoanalytic writers are inclined to acknowledge but then disregard the unique, irreducible nature of lived experience, and the fundamental differences between the psychoanalytic mind (which requires an experiencing subject) and the brain (which is a neuronal aggregate). The author offers a philosophical basis for contending that there are potential dangers for psychoanalysis when neuroscience is misrecognized in its fundamental differences and injudiciously employed as a psychoanalytic partner in order to answer questions that properly belong to the language and conceptual architecture of psychoanalysis.
ABSTRACT
This essay is concerned with the epistemological complications of the interface between psychoanalysis and "scientific" disciplines and methodologies-in particular, with respect to theories of knowledge and conceptualizations of subjectivity appropriate to psychoanalysis. The author suggests that there is in such interface the potential for an untheorized scientism in empiricist prescriptions for the reform and rescue of psychoanalysis, and revisits the notion that subjectivity as conceived psychoanalytically, grounded in lived experience, is irreducible in ways that are unique and existentially abiding. The author explores the problem through the lens of philosophical hermeneutics and cautions against merging psychoanalysis, under the guise of a salutary pluralism, with disciplines guided by a systematized empiricism and its attendant epistemological commitments.
