Imaginary existences : a psychoanalytic exploration of phantasy, fiction, dreams and daydreams / Ignes Sodre ; edited and with an introduction by Priscilla Roth.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sodré, Ignês, author.

Contributor:

Roth, Priscilla.

Series:

New library of psychoanalysis (Unnumbered)

New Library of Psychoanalysis

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (293 pages).

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, 2015.

Summary:

"Imaginary Existences: Dream Daydream Phantasy Fiction interweaves scholarly psychoanalytic knowledge and extensive clinical experience with insights derived from close readings of great literature in a uniquely imaginative and creative manner, convincingly demonstrating how these two ways of thinking - psychoanalysis and literary criticism - organically relate to each other. This is simultaneously a psychoanalytic book and a book about literature, illuminating the imaginative possibilities present within both the psychoanalytic encounter and the act of reading fiction. Scholarly and well researched, the psychoanalytic ideas presented have their basis in the work of Freud and Klein and some of their followers; the extensive and innovative writing about the great authors in Western literature is equally scholarly and lucent. Here, Ignes Sodre eplores creativity itself and, specifically, the impediments to creative thinking: defences, mostly narcissistic, against dependency, guilt and loss, and the mis-use of imagination to deny reality. In her studies of the characters created by authors such as George Eliot, Cervantes, Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Proust and Shakespeare, Sodre examines the way great writers create characters who mis-use their imagination, twisting reality into romantic daydreams or sado-masochistic enactments, which petrify experience and freeze the fluidity of thought. Her clinical studies continue and expand this theme, broadening the field and lending verification and weight to the arguments"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

1. Maggie and Dorothea : reparation and working through in George Eliot's novels

2. Non vixit : a ghost story

3. Who's who? Notes on pathological identifications

4. Death by daydreaming : Madame Bovary

5. Psychoanalysis and literature

6. Imparadised in hell : idealisation, erotisation and the return of the split-off

7. 'For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!' : on quixotism and the golden age of pre-genital sexuality

8. Introduction to Iris Murdoch's Henry and Cato

9. Certainty and doubt : transparency and opacity of the object

10. Florence and Sigmund's excellent adventure : on Oedipus and us

11. The wound, the bow and the shadow of the object : notes on Freud's 'Mourning and Melancholia'

12. Where the lights and shadows fall : on not being able to remember and not being able to forget

13. 'Even now, now, very now.' : on envy and the hatred of love

14. The 'perpetual orgy' : hysterical phantasies, bisexuality and the question of bad faith

15. Addiction to near-life : on pathological daydreaming and the disturbing ambiguity of faking true-love.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-317-64468-9

1-315-76127-0

0-415-74944-1

1-317-64469-7

9781315761275

OCLC:

897456379