Title: Freudian passions : psychoanalysis, form, and literature /
Authors: Campbell, Jan, 1958-
Year: 2013
Subjects: Affect (Psychology); Psychoanalysis; Freudian Theory; Affect; Psychoanalytic Interpretation
Abstract: Unconscious sexuality is made up of passions that can only travel and move if there is form attached. And these first forms come initially from another. What gives living form to the child's first affectual ties is the maternal response. A return and mimesis of the baby's passions which is the same but different: passions with maternal form added. Time and rhythm is arguably the initial form which enters into unconscious passionate life, and without necessary rhythm or time our unconscious experience is too immediate: the trauma that results when repetition cannot yield to time and difference. In re-reading the lost book of affects in Freud's work, this study utilizes various contemporary thinkers on psychoanalysis, affect and literary form to argue for psychoanalysis as a theory and practice of the living forms that can carry our passions. Psychoanalysis is like Literature in that it is a living form that exists between people; producing the readings, travels, translations and re-inventions of our sexual and romantic passions. As lived form, psychoanalysis is a genre that moves constantly between our past, present and future, enabling repetitions of sameness and difference. When we are depressed or stuck within dead genres, dead passions or dead mothers, then the issue of lived form becomes something that psychoanalysis as a clinical practice becomes concerned with. Literature is another cultural means through which we can bring our passions back into a world of lived form and therefore being.
Contents: Passions in search of form -- Unconscious reading of mothers and flowers -- Rhythms of the unconscious -- Symptoms, "sense and sensibility" -- All about our mothers : melodrama's maternal form -- Sympathies beyond the self in Daniel Deronda -- Rhythm of affects and styles of the ego, in To the lighthouse -- Dreaming lilies.