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Joel
Faflak, "Introduction."
Aside from outlining the historical and
critical context within which the volume's paper's situate
themselves, Faflak's introduction explores more
specifically how Romantic psychoanalysis emerges alongside
Romantic psychiatry. The latter emerges with greater
socio-historical force, specificity, and effect than the
former. Yet this clear difference also points to how
Romantic psychiatry and psychoanalysis become uncanny
reflections of the same cognitive maneuver to find and
understand the hiding places of the mind's power, a psyche
that remains radically unassimilable and indeterminate. It
is perhaps one of Romanticism's most powerful and
disturbing legacies to modernity that it signifies the
absolute ambivalence between marking the psyche's
resistance to symbolization and making its darkness visible
to a public sphere increasingly concerned to seek out and
neutralize the mind's sepulchral recesses.
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Ildiko Csengei, "'She Fell Senseless on
His Corpse': The Woman of Feeling and the Sentimental Swoon
in Eighteenth-Century Fiction."
This essay deals with typical signs of
female sentimental emotional response in eighteenth-century
novels, including Sarah Fieldings The History of
Ophelia (1760), Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, or
the New Heloise (1761), and Elizabeth Inchbald's A
Simple Story (1791). The female sentimental repertoire
of psychosomatic fainting, silences, sighs, palpitations
and states of mental distraction is frequently taken for
granted, but rarely thoroughly explored by scholarship
dealing with the culture of sensibility. This article reads
these typically feminine manifestations of sensibility in
terms of the discontents of eighteenth-century female
psycho-sexual existence and self-expression. It argues that
these often pathological manifestations—sometimes
called the vocabulary of sensibility—figure
limitations on the possibilities of feminine utterance, as
these psychosomatic symptoms are rooted in a complex
network of affective, social and sexual factors. The essay
mainly, but not exclusively, focuses on moments of loss of
consciousness, speech and sensation—perhaps the least
understood and most neglected symptoms of sensibility. Many
eighteenth-century novels use this repertoire to reflect
covertly on the pathology of social repression by exposing
sensibility itself, in the form of the woman of feeling as
its symptom. The essay analyses literary depictions of the
female psyche in moments of excitement and usually of
sexual intensity, and it approaches psychologically induced
states of consciousness and unconsciousness by means of a
theoretical framework that connects eighteenth-century
medical explanations with psychoanalytic ideas of
negativity.
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Matt
ffytche , "Psychology in Search of Psyches: Friedrich
Schelling, Gotthilf Schubert and the Obscurities of the
Romantic Soul."
ffytche explores the intellectual dialogue
between the philosopher Friedrich Schelling and the
psychologist and anthropologist G.H. Schubert in the early
part of the nineteenth century as they search for an
appropriate description of the psyche. In this German
context, he argues that the psyche is a forum not just for
constructing new languages of mind, but also new
justifications of individuality: the psyche is considered
to be the inner seat of selfhood. Schelling and Schubert
move between various different paradigms in their desire to
give the psyche an appropriate descriptive and theoretical
articulation. These include models of will, inner fire,
archetypes and polar conflict, all of which aim to supplant
the language of determinism and formulate a more
inscrutable inner law of the self. This need to surround
the principle of the self with obscurity will ultimately
root itself in the structural possibilities offered by a
theory of the unconscious. The article concludes by
suggesting a distinction might be made between empirical
psychology and an idealised philosophy of the psyche, which
have here become tacitly entangled. However, ffytche also
argues that the desire to use the psyche as a domain within
which to formulate an idealised view of the self, has been
a persistent one in modernity.
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Mary
Jacobus, "The Ordinary Sky: Wordsworth, Blanchot, and
the Writing of Disaster"
Taking as its point of departure
Wollheim’s autobiographical observation about a
particular sight—the glinting of sun on a wet
road—that stirred him to melancholy, this essay
explores a series of passages in Wordsworth’s poetry
that attest to his fixation on the sight of a road, or
piece of glass, glinting in the moonlight. These passages
represent work towards The Ruined Cottage known as
‘The Baker’s Cart Lines’ and
’Incipient Madness’. The everyday
psychopathology of displaced affect links the pangs of
hunger to more obscure pangs of (psychic) suffering. The
pathologies of seeing also form the subject of
Lacan’s interest in the glint of sun on a reflective
surface, in a famous episode in his seminars on the Gaze
involving a sardine can. Other poems by
Wordsworth—‘A Night Piece’ and ‘The
Discharged Soldier’—interrogate road-side
sights that open transcendental or deathly vistas. Apropos
of what he calls ‘autothanatography’ (the
writing of death), Derrida takes as his example of the
inseparability of fiction and autobiography
Blanchot’s brief record of a near-death experience.
In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot testifies
to his childhood experience of a premature
‘death’ that emptied the sky of significance.
Drawing on Winnicott, the essay suggests the unrecognized
trauma attached to ‘ordinary’ sights,
and—by extension—the problem of autobiography;
‘screen memory’ means that affect will always
be in the wrong place.
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Julie
Carlson, "Attached to Reading: Mary Shelley's Psychical
Reality."
This essay considers the writings of Mary
Shelley as important precursors to Sigmund Freud's concept
of psychical reality. Given her unique position as romantic
insider and outsider, Shelley's writings live on the border
of the literary world and accentuate the prominence of
literature in structuring both phantasy and reality. That
is, literature is often employed in her fiction as a
substitute for unconscious knowledge at the same time that
her and her characters' experiences of reality are informed
and evaluated by the world of books. Shelley's perception
of this world, and the extimacy inherent to it, is
hardly the space of consolation or possibility that
idealizations of literature by many of her contemporaries
posit. Nor is it as useful as Freud deems it for resolving
the conflicts that stem from childhood phantasies. Reading
Shelley's psychical reality against Freud's underscores the
extent to which her creative writings appeal to a less
coherent ego and explore the dark side of fiction's effects
on the ego. Such a view is epitomised in Shelley's 1831
reissue of her hideous progeny that is itself an
exploration and mobilization of psychical reality.
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Tilottama
Rajan, "'The Abyss of the Past': Psychoanalysis in
Schelling's Ages of the World (1815)."
Focusing on the differences between the
three versions of Schelling's Ages of the World,
this paper takes up the invention of psychoanalysis in the
third (1815) version. The third version, unlike the more
idealistic first and second vesions, intoroduces terms such
as the unconscious, inhibition, and crisis, contains a
crucial section on mesmerism, and is structured around the
trauma of onto- and phylogenesis. The paper also explores
the larger epistemic consequences of looking for a return
and retreat of the origin of psychoanalysis before
its institutional emergence.
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Ross
Woodman , "Romanticism, Alchemy, and Psychology."
Ross Woodman reads the emergence of
Romantic psychoanlaysis forward to Jung's interest in
alchemy as an analogy for how consciousness gives birth to
itself and to the world. Whereas Freud treated
psychoanalysis as a natural science, Jung entertains its
rather more occult side, its ambivalent or alchemical
position between the literal and the metaphorical.
Understanding the importance of alchemy to Jung's
analytical psychology allows us more clearly to understand
Romanticism's own early interest in neuroscience,
imagination, and the work of what Keats calls soul-making,
a crucial element of contemporary analytical
psychology.
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