"George Hagman looks anew at psychoanalytic ideas about art and beauty through the lens of current developmental psychology that recognizes the importance of attachment and affiliative motivational systems. In dialogue with theorists such as Freud, Ehrenzweig, Kris, Rank, Winnicott, Kohut, and many others, Hagman brings the psychoanalytic understanding of aesthetic experience into the 21st century. He amends and extends old concepts and offers a wealth of stimulating new ideas regarding the creative process, the ideal, beauty, ugliness, and -perhaps his most original contribution-the sublime....

The "madder stain" imprinted on Tess d'Urberville's arm is part of a motif which runs through Hardy's fiction. Similar to Barthes's punctum shooting out of the studium, the stain is a place where the Real erupts, a blind spot that eludes interpretation. In the diegesis of the tragic novels, it is a surplus object whose intrusion disrupts reality and spells disaster. This book attempts to approach that unknowable kernel of jouissance by using Lacan's concepts of object-gaze and object-voice--sometimes revisited by Zizek. The stain has a vocal quality: it is silence...

In Truth Matters: Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis, Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot offers an original construal of subjectivity as evolving from dynamic tensions between conflicting truths that inhabit and structure the psyche. The clinical endeavour is articulated in terms of unveiling these truths and allowing the multi-faceted nature of human experience to emerge. Yadlin-Gadot's notion of truth axes combines philosophical investigation with an in-depth inquiry of psychoanalytic theory as it relates these truths to basic human needs and developmental challenges, alternating...

This work attempts a psychoanalytic listening to the 'oral' Homeric epics in an effort to extract, as it were, from the ancient text certain elements of psychoanalytic understanding that are of relevance to contemporary psychoanalysis. There is, in addition, a consideration of related philosophical and linguistic issues that are linked to the basic psychoanalytic concepts that emerge from such a listening. The main themes treated rotate around the central axis of time as it is expressed in the Homeric epics. Thus, questions of transition, loss, mourning, tolerance, identity, metaphor and...

Departing from the dominant contextual approach to literary criticism, the book takes a Lacanian view of several popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century, including Bram Stoker's Dracula. This paradigm reveals the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern urban democratic society in place of a traditional agrarian one. It is in the wake of the demise of traditional authority; father, aristocracy and church that such atavistic horrors as vampires emerge. Sharoni demonstrates how these texts bring to light the crucial function of apparently obsolete...