The enormously popular contemporary genre of televised police procedurals that feature a brilliant female detective reflects and reifies enduring misogynistic beliefs and attitudes that pervade the cultural fantasies and social mores of our time. In her current form, the prototypical female protagonist of these series adheres to a rigid, stereotypical formulation that limits her capacity for mature, healthy object relations. In particular, her singular devotion to her work badly compromises her maternal function: thus, she is either barren or a bad mother, as well as a bad partner, sister, or daughter. Moreover, her professional excellence is itself pathologized, as the very qualities that make her extraordinary are typically attributable to the quintessential misogynistic trope of mental illness or emotional instability. The Greek myth of the birth of Athena explicates the threat embodied by the brilliant female detective, who, as a revival of the infantile fantasy of the all-powerful, all-knowing mother, infringes on the generative capacity of the mind: territory that men have since antiquity claimed in order to guard against envy of female procreative power. In return, she must be divested of her uniquely female powers, "the curse of the thinking woman."

The oeuvre of the Dutch artist and Holocaust victim Sieg Maandag constitutes an important addition to the psychoanalytic discourse around the art of trauma. The author enumerates and underlines the cumulative traumatic losses that mark Maandag's experience as a child in the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp, including the loss of much of his family, and argues that these losses factor significantly among those traumas that could not sustain articulation, but pressed for figurative and symbolic expression and representation in visual art. The author identifies art-historical references that Maandag adapted, including works of his prominent aesthetic influences, Giorgio De Chirico, Jean Dubuffet, Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon. The subsequent revision and synthesis of these references marks them as part of a transformative attempt at mastery over trauma, including shattering loss.

A close reading of Bruce Chatwin's novel, Utz, illuminates the tangled relationships between man and his material things in his physical environment, thereby illustrating the rich reciprocity of psychoanalytic approaches to literature. The eponymous protagonist of Utz is obsessed with his valuable collection of Meissen figurines, shutting himself off from the external world and retreating to a world populated by material things – objects he can buy, sell, and manipulate. Utz is interpreted as a fictional proxy for its author, a former director at Sotheby’s, who had an intense relationship to the antiquities and artifacts that he collected, yet would periodically leave his home, loved ones, and collections to travel abroad. Chatwin’s Utz affords a model for the conflicts inherent in man’s relationships to things, which variously operate as symbols and trophies; as dehumanized substitutes for human relationships; as markers of domination and control; and as agents of self-creation. (148)

The intertextual analysis of Dora illuminates an aspect of the cultural matrix that informed Freud's theory-building. Specifically, the trope of the suggestive text, a literal and symbolic agent of transgressive influence, signals an intertextual relationship between the case history and a vein of literary fiction that includes novels by some of Freud's favourite authors: Cervantes (Don Quijote), Flaubert (Madame Bovary) and Zola (Page d'amour). It is posited that the suggestive text in Dora acts both as an literal agent of dangerous suggestion, and as a figurative symbol of the occult literary influence that intrudes upon the text, impacting Freud's formulation of his subject; his documentation of her case; and his ensuing conceptualization of the transference. The author ventures that literary fiction and other cultural products function as important objects, shaping our fantasy life, object representations, and transferences.

All publications in Freud's fin de siècle society were subject to strict governmental censorship specifically tasked with distinguishing "real" academic scholarship from subversive "fictions" masquerading as such. Cures that relied on suggestion also became a target of mistrust. This contextualization, alongside the examination of Freud's literary references and a variety of other literary texts, encourages the conjecture that realistic concerns over the risks of censorship and obscenity charges informed a proto-model of the topographical model, in which Freud conceptualized the mind as a subversive "manuscript" that must undergo "censorship" before it can be "published": a "typographical" model of the mind.

With thanks to: Lucy La Farge, Heinz Weiss, Margot Waddell and Francis Grier And to Ewan O Neill (Archivist for the British Psychoanalytical Society) Saven Morris (Head Librarian for the British Ps...

An erotics of knowing is posited that comprises embodied aspects of psychological and emotional closeness, and derives not from transference dynamics but from psychological and emotional intimacy-both component and consequence of the analytic process. The experience of knowing and being known is invested with erotism via its interpenetrative and interreceptive aspects; regardless of gender, to know the other is to enter a hidden interior "space" that represents that person's embodied inner world. Yet the interrogation of the intrinsic relationship between knowing and loving is stunningly absent from the psychoanalytic literature. This historical neglect is traced to a split in the discourse presaged by Freud's essay on transference love, which distinguishes between the qualified reality of the erotic transference and the de-erotized but "real" construct of the "analytic love" relationship. A more recent split relocates erotism to the maternal transference, divesting it of aggression and oedipal sexuality. These splits constitute a vigorous collective defense against engaging with the erotics of knowing: from Oedipus to Genesis, our forbidden fruit.

Extending the traditional view of the giant of ancient myth as the personification of the father, the giant also affords the metaphorical elaboration of infantile fantasies of grandiosity derived from identification with the omnipotent parent. Conversely, the fallen and typically blinded giant embodies disillusionment: with the idealised parental imago, and also with one's own illusions of omnipotence. Nicolas Poussin's successive aesthetic interpretations of the giants of Greek legend highlight the symbolic dialectics of size, and offer a window onto the illusions and disillusionments that are intrinsic to generational succession, and accompany the confrontation of various realities-of dependency, vulnerability, maturation, achievement, aging, loss and death.

A close reading of Émile Zola's L'Œuvre, whose protagonist is modeled on his childhood friend, Paul Cézanne, reveals that the novel, long held responsible for the acute demise of their relationship, is rather an unwitting chronicle of its slow decline. Considered alongside the Cézanne-Zola correspondence and set in the context of historical and biographical data, L'Œuvre Illuminates a complex and important relationship, bringing into sharp focus the tension between the idealizing mirroring that promotes creativity and the competitive aggression that threatens it.

I n his 1896 short story “Disillusionment” (Enttäuschung: disillusionment, disappointment, disenchantment), Thomas Mann creatively interrogates the developmental process of disillusionment. Only a few pages long, the work consists of a story-within-a-story: the narrator, a young tourist in Venice not yet disenchanted with life (the exotic city fails to disappoint) tells of a curious encounter with a stranger of indeterminate age who volunteers the story of his life. The man explains that since his youth he has suffered from the malady of “great and general disappointment with which everything, all of life, has in store.” His life began in “a clergyman’s family, in quite a small town.” There, he says,

The controversial canvas, Nicolas Poussin's Birth of Bacchus, is fundamentally reconstrued as representing not only Ovid's serial narration of the myths of Bacchus and of Narcissus and Echo in The Metamorphoses, but also the history of this text. In particular, Poussin alludes to the intertextual relationship between Ovid's Narcissus and Sophocles' Oedipus. Poussin's interpretation of classical myth points to a more complex interrelationship between dyadic and triadic dynamics in development. An interdisciplinary approach to the aesthetic interpretation of myth underscores the reciprocal value of the arts to psychoanalytic theory.

The essay provides a detailed reading and analysis of Leoš Janáček’s letters to his late-life muse, Kamila Stösslová. By placing the letters alongside the literary texts on which Janáček based his important late works, it provides insight into the tangle of emotions and conflicts that he organized within the rubric of fantasy. Janáček’s muse was also “composed”: the contours of the person he loved and his relationship to her were not only rooted in fantasy but also mapped onto the characterizations and narratives specified in the works of literature he chose to set to music. The author proposes that cultural fantasy exists in continual dynamic interaction with individual unconscious fantasy, within which it is absorbed, incorporated, and re-expressed in new works of art.

The essay examines how the commandeered dollhouse of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice is both allegorical stage and symbolic container of the inner life of the child—in particular, the oscillatory play between the real and the fantastic. These dialectics are masterfully dramatized in the narrative and woven into the fabric of the prose. Enjoining them to “play” along, Potter reassures the young reader that in spite of their “bad” impulses, feelings and fantasies, they are not “so very very naughty after all.”

Alluring and fertile, the flower connotes a locus of desire. The floral metamorphic myths narrated in Ovid's Metamorphoses (AD 8a) thematize the price of desire--the shame, grief, and rage of rejection and rivalrous defeat--and symbolize the generative transformation that frustrated desire and competitive loss can promote. In the deceptively beautiful painting Realm of Flora of 1631, Nicolas Poussin enlists these myths as allegories of his own great creative leap, an aesthetic metamorphosis that followed shattering defeats. Extending the association between creativity and object loss to competitive loss, Poussin holds a mirror to our powerful drive to prevail and create anew from the ashes of loss.