Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1977"

Écrits: A Selection

Abstract: Brilliant and Innovative, Jacques Lacan's work has had a tremendous influence on contemporary discourse. Lacan lies at the epicenter of contemporary discourses about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. Yet his seemingly impenetrable writing style has kept many readers from venturing beyond page one. This new translation of selected writings from his most famous work offers welcome access to nine of his most significant contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique, spanning thirty years of his inimitable intellectual career. Beginning with the formation of the ego in the mirror stage, these texts study the varied roles of meaning, speech, writing, aggression, transference, and desire in our lives.

On the dialogic of field work

Abstract: Dante, in The Inferno, encoutered Muham? mad, the Prophet of Islam, in the Eighth Circle, among the Sowers of Discord. Muhammad's body was split open from the chin to tho anus, and "Between his legs all of his red guts hung/ with the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder/ and the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung" [ 1 ]. This was cultural mediation of a sort, a communication about "self" through use of the "other", and was spoken in an historical context which witnessed a direct challenge to Christian dominance in Europe from Muslim Spain. Dante's polemic against Islam was the other face of his defense of Christianity. It was not uncommon, however, throughout the Renais? sance and the Enlightenment, for the other to serve as a weapon in the critique of self. The exemplary use of an Islamic other to this end is probably Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), in which fictional Turkish visitors to Western Europe, and to Paris in particular, correspond with their countrymen at home and abroad, exposing what are seen as irra? tional and extravagant aspects of European life. This discourse, whether prompted by a defensive impulse similar to Dante's or by a critical one like Montesquieu's, whether the other was purportedly historical or explicitly imaginary, objectified the other as part of a strategy to objectify the self. Anthropology is today a major vehicle for this discourse. It too creates otherness and objectifies it. Although such objectification is probably a necessary moment in any con? scious attempt to transcend the self, it is not, of course, a sufficient one. As we acknow? ledge this moment, we must now begin to move beyond it, to ask further questions con? cerning the kind of objectification of others, and of ourselves, that we as anthropologists create. These questions are particularly vital when we phrase them with reference to con? texts where our social action is most imme? diate and most suspect, in our interaction with people. This is not the place to embark upon an extended critique of anthropological practice, especially since excellent ones already exist. Let me simply outline what I take to be central to such a critique, in order to situate these remarks within the latter, and as an effort to extend it. The emergence of anthropology as a dis? cipline was intimately connected to "a histor? ical process which has made the larger part of mankind subservient to the other" [2]. Corre? ctively, anthropologists conceptually and practically apportioned their human contem? poraries into two corresponding classes: "informants" and "public". Furthermore, since anthropology evolved in a social system, whenever relationships between people tended to be viewed as relationships between things, the connections between anthropolo? gists and informants, and between anthro? pologists and public, were transmuted in a similar way. Kevin Dwyer was most recently Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

Imaginary companions in young children: relationships with intelligence, creativity and waiting ability.

Abstract: SUMMARY Previous investigators have identified several intellective and personality variables thought to be related to imaginary companion phenomena in young children. In the current study, the presence or absence of imaginary companions was assessed and related to intelligence, several creativity measures, and waiting ability in 84 preschool children comprised equally of boys and girls. No significant differences were found for these major variables between those children who had imaginary companions and those who did not. The findings arc compared with previous descriptive, and empirical literature on imaginary companions. Directions for future research on imaginary companion phenomena are briefly discussed.

Erotic Imagery in Women

Abstract: Sexuality may appear to be an entity among those most deeply rooted in the notion of the REAL. Sexuality refers to the physical forms which precisely characterize the differences between the sexes; it is based on elaborate physiological mechanisms and it must feed upon a relational reality outlining its own sociological dimension. Yet, it is the world of sexuality that the imaginary finds one of its most consistent sources and wherein it plays an indispensable supporting role.

Psychoanalysis and cinema: The imaginary discourse

Abstract: Christian Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, and Raymond Bellour, eds. Communications 23. Paris: Centre d'Etudes Transdisciplinaires, 1975.

Murder will out.

Abstract: A 1974 showing of more than 200 oils and water colors at the Tate Gallery, London, has led to a revival of interest in the 19th century English painter, Richard Dadd (1817 to 1886). In 1843, Dadd killed his father, cutting his throat, because he believed him to be the devil in human form. On a trip to the Near East, Dadd became deluded that the Egyptian god Osiris was directing him to eliminate the devil's influence. Four months after he returned to London he murdered his father, and was institutionalized for the last 43 years of his life. We advance the hypothesis that one particular painting. 'The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke,' symbolically re-enacts the murder and makes talion restitution. The painting shows minute attention to detail and altogether occupied the artist for 9 years. He also made a water color copy of it entirely from memory, and wrote a 22-page poem explaining the picture with the title, 'An Elimination.' We suggest that this hints at the same theme of undoing. Some art critics have seen in Dadd's other art works a projection of his inner feelings, especially a series of more than 30 water colors entitled 'Sketches to Illustrate the Passions,' amongthem 'Murder,' 'Anger,' 'Hatred,' 'Grief,' and 'Melancholy.' We construe these to support the thesis of redoing and undoing following the trauma of murder. We also mention Dadd's reminiscing, visible in his art, and its usefulness in reaffirming his self-identity. In the art work of Dadd's last 25 years, violent scenes are remarkably absent. Instead, imaginary landscapes and seascenes--the subject matter of his earliest adolescent art--reflect an inward absorption in and continuity of lifelong interests. We suggest that the long process of painting 'The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke' recapitulated and made restitution for the murder, encapsulating it so that compulsive expression of violent ideation was largely reduced, allowing other memories and activities to be engaged and expressed.

Imaginary and Symbolic in La Rabouilleuse

Abstract: 1. Psychoanalysis and Marxism are both materialisms, so that their theoretical coordination is less a question of basic philosophical presuppositions than of finding the appropriate mediations between them. In literary study, such mediations may be found in the similarity of the problems they raise: so, for instance, by making it impossible for us to ignore the fundamental role of wish-fulfillment in the production of any kind of story line, psychoanalysis has forced us to come to terms with the apparent incompatibility, in the literary work, between the poet’s own private wish-fulfilling production of it and its reception by readers who surely all cannot be supposed to share his

Real and Imaginary History in Borges and Cavafy

Abstract: ORGE LUIS BORGES and Constantine Cavafy are from major cities on the periphery of western letters-Buenos Aires and Alexandria. It is the periphery for us in Europe and America, and they, aware of their outsiders' vantage, waken us-for they are writing for the world and not only their own nationals-to the life of the Argentine and of Alexandria. But in addressing the world, they also sweep back through history, and through intrahistori as Unamuno terms it,' to the everyday weaknesses and glittering moral exempla of smaller monarchs, to Rio de la Plata outlaws, to deviates in taverns on the Nile. They follow adventurers into Byzantium and travel in the Greek satellite kingdoms of Hellenistic and Roman Greece, to the cities of India, to the terror and virile beauty of the frontier pampas, to Arabian Africa of the thousand tales. Though they manipulate their personages with constant sleight-of-hand, with irony, humor, and the most intricately balanced paradoxes, their historical figures have the same verisimilitude as the characters they place in modern suburbs of Buenos Aires or Alexandria. As solitary outsiders they use widespread historical and imaginary geographies to obliterate the dividing lines of past time and national boundaries. Borges (1899-) and Cavafy (1863-1933) are poets, and Borges is also a short-story writer (though he is the first to dispute the difference