Similarly to closely reading image/texts, psychoanalysis, or the talking cure, depends on paying attention to what a patient utters, to the embodied shape of the utterance and, potentially, to the silences that may accompany it. For this reason, it is thought to have given rise to narrative medicine. Graphic illness narratives invite readers to read and look at, and into the bodies and the stories they present in order to gain insightful perspectives on personal experiences of disease. They show how writing and drawing the embodied impact of illness can have a healing effect on the person who shares their story and on the one who witnesses it. In this article, I examine Becoming Unbecoming (2015), a graphic memoir of childhood sexual abuse, trauma, and PTSD written by the British cartoonist, Una. My goal is to illustrate how the book undoes the docility of the sexually abused and mentally ill girl and woman through its autobiographical subject's testimony, and the cartoonist's intertextual allusions to William Shakespeare's Ophelia and Jean-Martin Charcot's star patient, Augustine-two icons of female hysteria-that complicate and enrich the articulation of Una's trauma.
Abstract: This article examines how Katie Green’s graphic memoir Lighter Than My Shadow (2013) visualizes the invisible and the unconscious at the intersection of mental health and coming of age. Contextualizing Green’s work within the studies of graphic medicine and psychoanalysis, it investigates the black nonsensical scribbles in different shapes and sizes throughout the book. It discusses how their recurrence externalizes the narrator’s struggles with low self-esteem, body image, bullying, abuse, and perfectionism, all of which are entangled with her eating disorders. In addition, this article explores the artist’s choice of minimalist gutter space and varied panel layouts that break away from comics’ formal conventions to represent the psychological process of experiencing, remembering, and making sense of her illness. It addresses the artist’s deliberate strategies to create and connect seemingly disjointed moments in her life to provide insights into her eating disorders beyond medical diagnoses and interventions. Presenting multiple self-portraits throughout the book, and sometimes on the same page, the narrative weaves together different moments in time and visualizes the nonlinear process of living with and managing the disorders. It portrays recovery as a complex, continuous, and personalized process filled with progress and setbacks, rather than a closure.
This article offers a historical and cultural analysis of Condorito, one of the most influential Latin American comic magazines, focusing on its representations of mental illness and psychological treatment- particularly psychoanalysis-from 1949 to 2023. Drawing on approaches from cultural history and the history of knowledge, the study examines how psychiatric and psychoanalytic ideas circulated beyond professional and institutional settings and became embedded in popular culture. Through a qualitative and longitudinal analysis of more than 160 comic strips, the article reconstructs recurring visual and narrative motifs related to madness, psychiatric institutions, and therapeutic figures. It argues that Condorito functioned as a privileged platform for the popular appropriation, satire, and critique of "psi" culture in Latin America. Rather than presenting psychoanalysis as a coherent or authoritative system, the comic depicts a hybrid therapeutic landscape in which psychoanalysis coexists with older psychiatric paradigms, magical-religious practices, and common-sense explanations of suffering. By examining humor, inversion, and caricature, the article shows how Condorito reflects both the deep cultural penetration of psychoanalytic discourse and its perceived limits regarding accessibility, efficacy, and social inequality. Ultimately, the study contributes to a history of psychoanalysis "from below," highlighting the role of popular media in shaping collective understandings of mental health in Latin America.
In the fall semester of 2023, Jiyun Kim, a PhD candidate from Korea, was a student in a seminar titled Memoir/Illness/Graphic/Grief that I taught at the CUNY Graduate Center. This was the first time I had met Jiyun. At the second seminar meeting, Jiyun stunned the class with a slide presentation on Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor in which she analyzed Sontag's argument through Lacanian diagrams. Her remarks in class were always sharp and often surprising, but it was only with her final project, did I realize how Jiyun's intense psychoanalytic training in Korea and her understanding of the graphic medium would combine to produce the remarkable essay we have here, "The Wounded Sleepwalker." (The title riffs on the Arthur Frank's classic book on illness and narrative, The Wounded Storyteller.) I immediately urged Jiyun to submit her paper to this special issue of American Imago. Tragically, Jiyun Kim became a wounded storyteller herself at the end of the spring semester 2024 when she died at thirty-three from a recurrence of breast cancer. In fact, she had been ill the entire fall semester and unbeknownst to most of us, writing through extreme pain. Not long after her death that shocked our community, Jiyun's friends, Ju Ly Ban and Ellen Siyuan Pan, her former advisor in Korea, Seok won Yang; and I, Nancy K. Miller, had the privilege of making minor revisions to the essay, which we are happy to share with you here. We hope you will enjoy this highly original and thought-provoking analysis of what dreaming can tell us about the shape and meaning of four powerful graphic narratives: David B.'s Epileptic, James [End Page 131] Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook's visualization of David Wojnarowicz's 7 Miles A Second, David Smalls's Stitches, and Nicola Streeten's Billy, Me & You.
Abstract: The protagonist of Conrad’s Lord Jim is a troubled and troubling figure. A sympathetic person, idealistic in his goals, the handsome sailor seems “one of us.” Yet he is profoundly disappointing in his cowardly jump from a ship at a moment of crisis. Like Marlow, the novel’s perplexed narrator, we are oddly haunted by this disillusioning tale. Language may help us here. Conrad learned French before he knew English, but one hardly needs to be fluent to see that “Jim” is an interesting combination of “Je (I)” and “him.” Je’im contracts to J’im , creating a word that says : “I’m him.” I, the reader, can identify with this state of coming so near to beauty and fulfillment that I am together on the edge of an ontological precipice, looking down, vertiginous, at uncertainty in knowing who we are. When the one we would want to be eludes us, we are turned into spectres of ourselves, a double-ghost when we feel derealized within ourselves as the phantom of unreached idealization looms over us .
The protagonist of Conrad's Lord Jim is a troubled and troubling figure. A sympathetic person, idealistic in his goals, the handsome sailor seems "one of us." Yet he is profoundly disappointing in his cowardly jump from a ship at a moment of crisis. Like Marlow, the novel's perplexed narrator, we are oddly haunted by this disillusioning tale. Language may help us here. Conrad learned French before he knew English, but one hardly needs to be fluent to see that "Jim" is an interesting combination of "Je (I)" and "him." Je'im contracts to J'im, creating a word that says: "I'm him." I, the reader, can identify with this state of coming so near to beauty and fulfillment that I am together on the edge of an ontological precipice, looking down, vertiginous, at uncertainty in knowing who we are. When the one we would want to be eludes us, we are turned into spectres of ourselves, a double-ghost when we feel derealized within ourselves as the phantom of unreached idealization looms over us.
This paper offers a close reading of two distinctive autobiographical texts by psychoanalysts Helene Deutsch and Margaret S. Mahler, situating them within the broader context of women's self-writing in the history of psychoanalytic literature. It argues that revisiting their memoirs can shed new light on psychoanalytic understandings of autobiography and allows for a deeper reflection on the dynamics of psychoanalytic work during the early years of the Freudian movement. Both Deutsch and Mahler witnessed the establishment of psychoanalytic hierarchies and training standards that diverged significantly from contemporary models. By bringing their memoirs into conversation, this paper invites a deeper inquiry into the varied ways analytic dyads were historically formed and subjectively experienced within Freudianism.
According to Freud, striving to retrieve "the happiness that has been lost" (Freud, 1905, p. 222), i.e. the hypothetical first time of need satisfaction, is a primordial motor of psychic activity. It is also an issue in all music since all music is already gone the moment it happens and can never be retrieved in its full actuality. But there is also music that has loss and the impossibility of retrieval as its specific content and develops specific signatures to express this as part of the constitution of the musical subject. This arises in a specific historical moment when the promise of universal happiness for all mankind meets with disillusionment and modern forlornness for the first time finds expression in art.
The author re-examines Freud's essay, The Uncanny ( Das Unheimliche), ), placing it in dialogue with other authors who wrote on the same subject, such as M. Heidegger, J. Lacan , T. Todorov. He also shows how Freud's theory hovers between an interpretation of the uncanny as a "return of the repressed" or as a "return of surmounted beliefs"-the latter making the uncanny the product of a specific historic moment in civilization (the hegemony of modern rationalism)- , opens up the unresolved question of the history of the unconscious. The author dwells particularly on the uncanny in literature and cinema, with special attention to Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. . He highlights the mostly "demonic" character of the supernatural that emerges in uncanny works, and hence questions the deeper origins of belief, both in the divine and in the diabolical. His basic thesis is that the uncanny marks an uncertainty, a source of both anxiety and pleasure, between the world of things and the dimension of the signifier.
The article explores the unifying nature of music-listening. Building on the work of Loewald, Kohut, Anzieu, and Ogden, this discussion explores music in terms of a "bath of sound" that concretely envelops the immersed listener and arguably promotes their spatiotemporal sense of wholeness. Complementing the more well-known "modifying function" and the "mirroring function" of music-listening, the article introduces and articulates a "unifying function," arguing for its fundamentality and independence vis-& agrave;-vis the two other functions. Given that all human interaction-from everyday commerce to clinical encounters-has its "musical" dimension, the argument presented here can be expected to have a broad range of applicability and prove of interest to theoreticians and clinicians alike.
This study investigates the interrelation of isolation, psychological trauma, and Freud's notion of the "uncanny" within Satyajit Ray's short story, "Ratan Babu and That Man," with particular attention to the motif of the doppelg & auml;nger as a framework for examining fractured identity and unresolved trauma. By exploring Ratanlal's self-imposed seclusion, my paper demonstrates how extended solitude becomes a precursor to psychological turmoil, ultimately culminating in the uncanny emergence of Manilal, the doppelg & auml;nger. This figure is presented not merely as an embodiment of Ratanlal's suppressed fears and desires but also as a destabilising force that disrupts his sense of individuality, emphasising the relational dimensions of identity. In anchoring the discussion in Freudian theory, the doppelg & auml;nger is interpreted as both a representation of narcissistic unity and an omen of mortality, thereby intensifying Ratanlal's existential crisis. This paper's detailed examination of Ratanlal's violent encounter with Manilal affirms the cyclical and paradoxical nature of trauma, wherein the desire for connection exists alongside a simultaneous rejection of the other. The study ultimately posits that the doppelg & auml;nger acts as a destabilising element, magnifying Ratanlal's isolation and psychological disintegration. Furthermore, it illustrates how the uncanny operates as a powerful narrative mechanism which reveals the persistence of repressed desires and the precariousness of selfhood.
This paper offers a reinterpretation of Freud's Wolf Man case through the lens of Persian Sufi cosmology. Rather than treating the dream of the six white wolves as a disguised memory of the primal scene, it is read here as a rendering of psychic structure, six closed directions representing blocked pathways of movement, memory, connection, authority, imagination, and bodily rest. Drawing on Sufi conceptions of spatial and spiritual orientation, the paper argues that the dream embodies a saturated, paralyzed psychic world in which no direction is safe. The seventh direction, understood in Sufi thought as the inward path of mourning and transformation, never opens in the patient's life or analysis. The dream, far from concealing meaning, reveals a soul's impasse, and a path that could not yet be taken.
Even when students of psychoanalysis are prepared to learn provocative and even controversial analytic discoveries, their teachers can hinder them. If they encounter institutional anxiety, trainees will become "good" while suppressing curiosity and the ability for depth, reflecting the psychic split of the child confronted with sexual mysteries.
