Psychoanalysis and Literature

The Stories We Live

By (author) Marilyn Charles

Not available to order

Publication date:

25 March 2015

Length of book:

294 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442231849

Psychoanalysis and Literature:The Stories We Live, Marilyn Charles pairs case vignettes with examples from literature to highlight the essential human struggles that play out in the consulting room. This pairing depathologizes those struggles and offers a conceptual framework that can help the clinician facilitate these journeys of discovery. Describing first how literature affords an opportunity for vicarious engagement with struggles endemic to the human condition, she then focuses on trauma, dreams, and ‘cultural collisions’ turning more explicitly to the developmental challenges of identity, relatedness, aging, and generativity. Psychoanalysis and Literature is accessible, relevant, and timely.

Part I: LITERATURE, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND SENSORY EXPERIENCE
Introduction

Epiphany: The Poet’s Art, The Analyst’s Instrument: Formal Structure as a Vehicle for the Expression of Primary Experience: To the Lighthouse
The Waves: Tensions between Creativity and Containment in the Life and Writings of Virginia Woolf

Part II: TRAUMA

Falling Man: Encounters with Catastrophic Change
Telling Trauma: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Part III: DREAMS

The Book of Intimate Grammar: Transgenerational Trauma
Dreamscapes: Rectangular Spaces in Memoirs of a Survivor and in Dreams
Pictures at an Exhibition: Reparation and Redemption, Nightmare and Memory

Part IV: CULTURAL COLLISIONS

Collisions Between Conscious and Unconscious; East and West; Enigma and Transparency: Kafka on the Shore
Cultural Chasms: Catastrophic Change and the Excluded Other: Mulberry and Peach

Part V: THE HERO’S QUEST: IDENTITY AND RELATEDNESS

The Labyrinth, Part I: The Magus
Journeys into the Labyrinth, Part II: Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate: The Glass Bead Game
Standing Outside the Gates: Pierre, or the Ambiguities
Identity Derailed: The Echo Maker

Part VI: RELATEDNESS, AGING, AND GENERATIVITY

Identity, Community, and Object Choice, Part I: Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
Identity, Community, and Object Choice, Part II: Possession

16. Aging and Death: The Map and the Territory, The Sense of an Ending, and All Passion

One of my graduate school professors was fond of telling us that our role as therapists was to be the keepers of others’ stories. Psychoanalysis is a perspective keenly centered on the stories we tell ourselves, both about our own lives and in the realm of fictions. Charles’ Psychoanalysis and Literature is a great contribution to this ever-fruitful conversation.